US expected to announce major Ukraine weapons package but delay shipments due to concerns over Pentagon stockpiles
By Oren Liebermann, Natasha Bertrand and Alex Marquardt, CNN
(CNN) — The US is expected to announce a major weapons package to Ukraine as soon as next week, but it will likely delay the shipping of the equipment due to inventory shortages, according to two US officials.
The US currently has $5.9 billion left in Presidential Drawdown Authority for Ukraine, the Pentagon said this week, which is set to expire at the end of the fiscal year in less than two weeks. That authority allows the Pentagon to pull inventories directly from American stockpiles to send to Ukraine, and it is how the US has supplied much of the arms and equipment it has provided to Kyiv.
The weapons package, which will likely include artillery, air defenses and other munitions critical to the fight, is expected to be significantly larger than recent announcements, which have hovered around $200 million for the last several months.
CNN reported earlier this week that the US was providing Ukraine with smaller military aid packages as the stockpiles of weapons and equipment that the Pentagon is willing to send Kyiv from its own inventory have dwindled. But faced with the possibility of the funds expiring, the US may now take a different approach, announcing large military aid packages that will take months to deliver.
The Defense Department has urged Congress to grant an extension on the use of the funds. But those prospects rapidly faded when the House of Representatives failed to pass a continuing resolution on Wednesday.
“There is every intention that we want to use every dollar and cent of that authority,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said at a press briefing Thursday.
Presidential drawdown packages were initially intended as a way of supplying Ukraine with arms and equipment in the short-term since the start of the war with Russia. Some packages began arriving in Ukraine within days of their announcement, allowing the US to quickly flow weapons and ammunition to the Ukrainian military in the middle of war.
More sophisticated equipment with long production times was sent through another mechanism – the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative – that purchased weapons directly from arms manufacturers for future delivery.
Facing the prospect of billions in available drawdown authority expiring, the Biden administration has changed it from a short-term supply of weapons to a longer-term commitment, permitting the US to continue supplying weapons to Ukraine well into the next year at the current pace of deliveries.
The US believes Ukraine will need at least $500 million worth of presidential drawdown authority per month through fiscal year 2025, according to a senior administration official.
The US is also considering allocating $10 billion worth of revenues from seized Russian sovereign assets to Ukraine, which the G7 agreed to use toward Ukraine security assistance over the summer, according to the senior administration official. Western nations froze almost $300 billion of Russian assets in bank accounts in Europe and the US as part of a massive wave of sanctions enacted after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
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