The Trump administration has announced that it approved an $825 million weapons deal that will arm Ukraine with thousands of Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) air-launched missiles, which can hit targets up to 280 miles away, a significantly further range than other missiles that the US has sent into the proxy war.
The Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) said the deal will provide Ukraine with 3,350 ERAM missiles, 3,350 Embedded Global Positioning System (GPS)/Inertial Navigation Systems, and other related equipment.
The arms sale will be funded in part by Foreign Military Financing (FMF), a State Department program that provides foreign governments with money to buy US-made weapons. Other funding for the deal will come from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on Saturday that the Trump administration had approved the deal and that the missiles would start arriving in Ukraine within six weeks. The report also said that the administration had been quietly blocking Ukraine from using US-provided missiles in attacks on Russian territory, but the provision of the ERAMs suggests that might change.
Up to this point, the longest-range weapon the US has provided to Ukraine is the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), which is a munition that can be fired by the HIMARS rocket systems and can hit targets up to 190 miles away. Last year, the Biden administration gave Ukraine the green light to use ATACMS on Russian territory, which marked a significant escalation of the proxy war.
In response to the US-backed ATACMS strikes on its territory, Russia altered its nuclear doctrine to lower the threshold for nuclear weapons, underscoring how seriously Moscow viewed the escalation.
