More Ukraine military aid coming, White House says

John Kirby said that more weapons packages would be announced in the coming days

US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday that the Biden administration was preparing to announce more packages of military aid for Kiev’s beleaguered forces. Kirby’s statement came a week after US President Joe Biden authorized a record arms shipment worth nearly $3 billion.

“There will be announcements of future security assistance in coming days,” Kirby said at a press conference. 

The upcoming packages will likely be drawn from the $40 billion allocated to Ukraine in a military and economic aid bill passed by Congress in May. The US has doled out this aid in near-weekly installments since the bill’s passage, with last week’s package the largest yet, totaling $2.98 billion.

President Biden has promised to keep bankrolling Ukraine’s military for “as long as it takes,” although the US’ end goal in the conflict is unclear. While Biden wrote earlier this summer that the US does “not want to prolong the war just to inflict pain on Russia,” he has spoken of a desire to affect regime change in Moscow, and his own secretary of defense has stated that weakening Russia is a core US objective. 

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Furthermore, Biden’s officials said that they are willing to risk “a global recession and mounting hunger” just to oppose Russia, the Washington Post stated in June.

It is unclear to what extent the supply of American weapons has helped Ukraine hold off Russian forces. A long-awaited counter-offensive in the south of the country ended in dismal failure for Ukraine earlier this week, with Moscow claiming to have destroyed more than 130 Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles and killed more than 1,200 troops in a single day.