The U.S. Defense Department announced an additional $150 million security/military tranche for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) that includes, according to a press release, “training, equipment, and advisory efforts to help Ukraine’s forces preserve the country’s territorial integrity, secure its borders, and improve interoperability with NATO.”
The reference to territorial integrity is code language for assisting Ukraine to subjugate the breakaway republics in Donekst and Lugansk in the Donbass and to wrest Crimea, which the government of Ukraine and its American, NATO and European Union sponsors term temporarily-occupied territory, from Russia.
A technical itemization of the package, which definitively exceeds strictly defensive aid, includes “capabilities to enhance the lethality, command and control, and situational awareness of Ukraine’s forces through the provision of counter-artillery radars, counter-unmanned aerial systems, secure communications gear, electronic warfare and military medical evacuation equipment, and training and equipment to improve the operational safety and capacity of Ukrainian Air Force bases.”
The new package adds to the $125 million USAI package revealed on March 1 that included, again according to the Pentagon, armed Mark VI patrol boats, counter-artillery radars, tactical equipment, support for a satellite imagery and analysis capability and equipment to support military medical treatment and combat evacuation procedures.
The military assistance initiative specifies Ukraine’s responsibility to continue to meet NATO standards in both the defense and civilian sectors.
The Defense Department release on the package recalls that the U.S. has already provided over $2.5 billion in military-security assistance and will “continue to strengthen our strategic defense partnership….”
$2.5 billion to a government engaged in a seven-year war with its own people, one that tomorrow may be engaged in an armed conflict with Belarus, Russia or both.
Rick Rozoff is a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. He is the manager of Stop NATO. This originally appeared at Anti-Bellum.
In the approaching aggression, should Russia offer stiff resistance this time, given the mid-east (even after 30 yrs of massive pounding) is not a secure host, is the Ukraine-Georgia area the designated staging/killing ground to deliver the strikes and absorb the return, …and Turkey be forced to stand and deliver?
One of these days the US is going to go an Aid Package Too Far, and Russia is going to do something about it. They have no intention of allowing Ukraine to turn the border with Russian into a Syria/Iraq/Libya/Yemen hellhole.
I’m fairly sure it won’t be an invasion, for that’s what the Blinken/Biden bunch is dreaming of. No, it’ll be something else. Or a number of “something elses” which will make DC exceedingly unhappy.