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JANUARY 2022
Inside Biden’s secretive weapons shipment to Ukraine
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With help from Betsy Woodruff Swan, Paul McLeary, Lee Hudson and Daniel Lippman
"CNN successfully raised NatSec Daily’s collective eyebrow with this tidbit buried deep in a Monday evening story: The United States secretly greenlit weapons transfers to Ukraine in the middle of a tense standoff with Russia.
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“In late December, the Biden administration quietly authorized an additional $200 million in security assistance to Ukraine,” the story’s five reporters wrote. “The security package authorized the shipment of much of the same defensive equipment the US has provided in the past, including small arms and ammunition, secure radios, medical equipment, spare parts and other equipment.”
Your friendly neighborhood newsletter team and our POLITICO colleagues worked over the last 24 hours to track down more information on this transfer, and here’s what we now know.
✓ The $200 million was approved as part of President JOE BIDEN’s drawdown authority,
which empowers him to have the secretary of State ask the secretary of
Defense to deliver items from existing Pentagon stock to a country in
peril. The president’s team is then required to tell Congress “that an
unforeseen emergency required immediate military assistance,” per the
Defense Security Cooperation Agency’s website. . .
✓ An adviser to Ukrainian President VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY, who talked to NatSec Daily, and a person familiar with the package who spoke with our own PAUL MCLEARY, said the United States will send radar systems and some maritime equipment, though it’s unclear when the first deliveries will be made.
The Zelensky adviser added that the Ukrainians were informed of the forthcoming aid last month “at the senior level.”
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“Given that U.S. intelligence consistently suggests that Russia may launch a full-blown invasion using all its military might, this aid would allow Ukraine to inflict additional damage on Russia but would not significantly alter the outcome,” the adviser said.
✓ This isn’t the first time Biden has used his drawdown authority: In August, he committed the United States to send $60 million in military aid to Kyiv shortly ahead of a meeting with Zelensky. Part of that tranche, including small arms and ammo, were delivered to Ukraine last month.
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“We have been providing defensive assistance to Ukraine, including through deliveries that have taken place in just the last few weeks. We will continue to do so in the weeks and months ahead through a range of mechanisms, including the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative,” a State Department spokesperson told us. . .
✓ Other countries may also send some of their equipment to help Ukraine. In December, news broke that Estonia was weighing transferring Javelin anti-tank missiles and 122mm howitzers to Kyiv, but was waiting on approval from the U.S. to send the Javelins, as well as Germany and Finland, from which Estonia originally sourced the howitzers.
✓ During a Sunday appearance on ABC News, Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN said: “We have been providing significant defensive assistance to Ukraine, including as recently as the last couple of weeks. Almost half a billion dollars this year alone. That’s continued, that will continue, and if there is further aggression by Russia against Ukraine, we’ll see even more of that. We are making sure, to the best of our ability — and other allies and partners are doing the same — that Ukraine has the means to defend itself.”
✓WH PROVIDING $300M IN AID TO AFGHANISTAN: National Security Council spokesperson EMILY HORNE announced today that the U.S. would provide an additional $308 million in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, whose people face a brutal winter with few provisions.
✓ “This brings total U.S. humanitarian aid in Afghanistan and for Afghan refugees in the region to nearly $782 million since October 2021,
"Secretary of State Blinken said aiding Kiev would have been “more complicated” without exit from Kabul
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted on Thursday that the much-criticized withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he called “America’s longest war,” helped Washington redirect resources to Ukraine just months later.
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Appearing at the State Department for a year-end press conference, Blinken painted a rosy picture of Washington’s diplomatic accomplishments. The exit from Afghanistan, which happened in August 2021, came up because one reporter took issue with Blinken’s claim of strong relationships with US “allies and partners,” some of whom she said were critical of how that US handled that operation.
Consultations were “sustained, they were intense, and we strongly took note of everything that we heard from allies and partners in advance of the decisions that President [Joe] Biden made and that we made,” Bliken insisted, arguing that claims otherwise are “not born out by the facts.”
Though the reporter had asked about lessons of that withdrawal in “dealing with Russia and China,” Blinken proceeded to argue that “if we were still in Afghanistan, it would have, I think, made much more complicated the support that we’ve been able to give and that others have been able to give Ukraine” against Russia.
The last US soldier departed from the Kabul airport on August 31, 2021. The US-backed Afghan government had collapsed without much of a fight two weeks earlier, leaving the Taliban in control of the country – as they had been in 2001.
While the cost of the 20-year conflict has been estimated at over $2 trillion, the US spent almost $73 billion in 2021 dollars on training, equipping, maintaining and supplying the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), most of it from the Pentagon budget. The bulk of ANDSF weaponry and equipment ended up in Taliban hands.
By comparison, the Russian Defense Ministry estimated earlier this week that total Western aid to Ukraine this year amounted to over $97 billion. The Pentagon alone has spent at least $20 billion in direct “security assistance” to Ukraine since February 2022, by its own admission. Other US government departments, NATO and EU members accounted for the rest.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky visited Washington in person on Wednesday, receiving a pledge from Biden to fund Kiev for “as long as it takes”
and a $1.85 billion packet of weapons and ammunition, including a
battery of Patriot air defense missiles. Zelensky also addressed a
special joint session of Congress, with a plea to approve another $45
billion in aid for 2023. The Senate did so the following day." All
RELATED CONTENT
"The much-criticized, hectic withdrawal from Afghanistan helped Washington redirect resources to Ukraine just months later, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted on Thursday during his year-end press conference.
Just two weeks after the US-backed Afghan government had collapsed without much of a fight, leaving the Taliban in control of the country like in 2001, the last US soldier departed from the Kabul airport on August 31, 2021.
While Blinken was trying to paint a rosy picture of Washington’s diplomatic accomplishments, one reporter took issue with his claim of strong relationships with US “allies and partners,” which has brought up the exit from Afghanistan.
Although she was actually asking about the lessons learned from that withdrawal in dealing with Russia and China, Blinken proceeded to argue that the US presence in Afghanistan would have made much more difficult the aid and support it gives Ukraine against Russia.
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Without exit from Kabul and the war in Afghanistan, which he called “America’s longest war,” Secretary of State Blinken said that aiding Kyiv would’ve been much more complicated.
Last year, the US spent almost $73 billion in 2021 dollars on training, equipping, maintaining, and supplying the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) – most of it from the Pentagon budget – while the cost of the 20-year conflict has been estimated at over $2 trillion.
The bulk of ANDSF weaponry and equipment, however, ended up in Taliban hands.
By its own admission, since February 2022 the Pentagon alone has spent at least $20 billion in direct “security assistance” to Ukraine while other US government departments, NATO, and EU members accounted for the rest of the aid. . .
– Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in Washington on Wednesday for his first known overseas trip since the Russia-Ukraine conflict began about 300 days ago.
– U.S. President Joe Biden welcomed Zelenskyy at the White House and announced that the U.S. will send Ukraine a Patriot missile defense system as part of an additional $1.8 billion assistance package.
– Kremlin said providing Ukraine with weapons would not contribute to settling the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv.
– Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited troops "on the frontline" and "talked to servicemen and thanked them," Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday.
– Russian officials and a delegation of the International Atomic Energy Agency held a new round of consultations in Moscow on Thursday on cooperation in ensuring the safety of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
– Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in Washington on Wednesday for his first known overseas trip since the Russia-Ukraine conflict began about 300 days ago.
– U.S. President Joe Biden welcomed Zelenskyy at the White House and announced that the U.S. will send Ukraine a Patriot missile defense system as part of an additional $1.8 billion assistance package.
– Kremlin said providing Ukraine with weapons would not contribute to settling the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv.
– Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited troops "on the frontline" and "talked to servicemen and thanked them," Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday.
– Russian officials and a delegation of the International Atomic Energy Agency held a new round of consultations in Moscow on Thursday on cooperation in ensuring the safety of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
(The following is a long-read sequencing)
Lessons for Leaders: What Afghanistan Taught Russian and Soviet Strategists
Introduction
Thirty years ago this month, Gen. Boris Gromov became the last serviceman of the Soviet 40th Army to cross the Friendship bridge from Afghanistan into Uzbekistan, heralding the end of a Soviet military intervention that had lasted nearly a decade. That intervention, which began in December 1979 (with 30 military advisors and some guards remaining beyond February 1989), did not only fail to firmly anchor Afghanistan to the so-called socialist camp, as the Soviet Politburo had hoped, but contributed to the demise of the USSR by imposing formidable human, financial, economic, political and reputational costs on the already declining empire; needless to say, it caused numerous casualties and widespread grievances among Afghans as well. Debates continue to this day about the full array of national-level, organizational-level and personal-level factors that led the Communist Party leadership—including General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and a handful of other Politburo members—to adopt a resolution on Dec. 12, 1979, authorizing the deployment of a “limited contingent of Soviet troops” to Afghanistan. However, even with that debate unfinished, the Soviet experience in Afghanistan offers plenty of lessons to explore—some of which can, perhaps, be applied by the U.S. and its allies as Washington leans toward ending its own military campaign in this war-plagued Central Asian country.
The following
is a selection of military-political lessons gleaned mostly from the
recollections of Soviet strategists who were involved in making and
executing the fateful decision to send troops to Afghanistan, as well as
from writings by some of post-Soviet Russia’s prominent military
analysts. Where possible, the author made an effort to relay these
strategists’ analysis of the failures and successes of the intervention
because he felt that such assessments, based on first-hand experience,
are not always given their due in English-language literature on the
subject. The lessons listed below, which are discussed in greater detail
in subsequent sections of this research paper, are lined up in the
order in which they would have come up—starting with the Soviet
leadership’s decision to consider sending a large contingent of troops
into Afghanistan, moving onto its management of the actual intervention
and, finally, onto its decision to withdraw the troops and beyond. All
of these lessons are meant for consideration by nations’
military-political leadership. . ." READ MORE
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