During 2024, the most significant American geopolitical move in response to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine was negative: For five months Washington enforced a near-absolute embargo on sending made-in-USA arms and ammunition to Ukraine’s hard-pressed fighting forces.
That firepower gap gutted veteran Ukrainian fighting units and helped facilitate Russia’s biggest victories of the war since the Kremlin invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
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From Dec. 31, 2023 through April 21, 2024 the United States halted practically all arms deliveries to Ukraine because of Congressional in-fighting.
A bipartisan $60 billion arms and military support bill whose passage had dragged on for months in the US legislature in the latter half of 2023 remained unpassed on Jan. 1, 2024. That left further deliveries of anything from bullets to guided missiles to tanks to HMMWVs to battle-critical 155mm artillery shells unfunded.
For Ukraine’s army, battling a massive Russian offensive in the eastern Donbas sector at the time, the US arms cut-off was a precursor to a slow-moving catastrophe.
The US Senate on Feb. 7 made a final, unsuccessful attempt to approve the Ukraine arms assistance bill. Ten days later, on Feb. 17, the heavily fortified Ukrainian city of Avdiivka – which Ukrainian forces had defended successfully since 2014 – fell to Russian forces. The fighting gutted one of the very best brigades in the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), the 79th Air Assault, killing or wounding most of the unit’s veteran officers and sergeants.
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Prior to the arms embargo, American manufacturers and military stores had been supplying a bit more than half of all military materiel Ukraine was receiving from its allies. Missiles for the powerful Patriot anti-aircraft system and precision-guided artillery rockets for the HIMARS and M270 long-range strike systems are sourced only from the US.
At least as important for Ukrainian defensive firepower was a massive stream of American-made NATO-standard 155mm howitzer ammunition, which would have given powerful range and accuracy advantages over opposing Russian artillery if Kyiv’s gunners had had it in quantity.
Ironically, in US political terms, arms funding for Ukraine (as well that for Israel and Taiwan folded into the now-dead legislation) was secondary. The big debate in Washington DC at the time was possible changes to domestic border and migration law which was the really controversial part of the bill.
With national elections less than a year away, border policy legislation was politically toxic for many lawmakers hoping to be re-elected, no matter their stand on Ukraine.
US political media widely reported the Republican about-face that killed the bill was ordered by then-Republican Party leader and US-Presidential candidate Donald Trump. According to those reports, Trump ordered the bipartisan-approved bill to be shot down so his then-opponent in the race, incumbent President Joe Biden, might not later campaign on a platform of having successfully passed border reform legislation into law.
American support to Ukraine for its defense against the Russian invasion – and now the absence of that support – was collateral damage, a case of US domestic politics dictating US foreign policy, those reports said.
After three months of negotiations between the Biden administration and the House of Representatives majority, a legislation package was passed on April 23 over minority Republican objections. Support to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan was now split into separate bills. There was no vote on the border law at all. The House vote for Ukraine aid was 311 to 112 in favor.
By that time Russian forces had advanced dozens of kilometers on a wide front in the Donbas region, and were pressing on towns formerly deep behind Ukrainian lines like Chasiv Yar, Toretsk, Kurakhove, and Pokrovsk. In breakthrough sectors Russian commanders were preceding attacks with glider bombs launched by strike aircraft dozens of kilometers outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses.
Ukrainian media and battlefield accounts reported that because of heavy casualties suffered in the first half of the year, and now catastrophic shortages of artillery ammunition, frontline units increasingly were unable to field sufficient troops to man new defenses. Russia’s air force, unworried by Ukrainian air defense because of gross shortages of American long-range anti-aircraft missiles, was pounding Ukrainian defense lines with near impunity, those reports said.
On Oct. 1 the fortified Donbas city of Vuhledar, whose fortifications Ukraine’s 72nd Air Assault Brigade had held like a rock since the early days of the war, fell to Russian assaults. The story was the same as before: Plenty of Russian troops to shoot at but not enough ammunition. The 72nd fell back with heavy losses.
By the end of October, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had become sufficiently concerned about increasingly frayed and undergunned Ukrainian defenses to point out to reporters at a Reykjavik press conference that of the military hardware and ammunition the US had promised Ukraine for 2024, about 10 percent of it had actually reached frontline troops.
Asked about Zelensky’s criticisms the next day at a Washington DC press conference, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller dodged answering directly and told the Turkish Turan news agency that US arms deliveries to Ukraine were on track and significant, and that Pentagon records proved it.
Kyiv Post research into published Pentagon statements on actual military assistance sent to Ukraine found that of the $60 billion allocated by Congress for arms for Ukraine in late April, six months later, only $14.6 billion had actually been sent to Ukraine in Pentagon arms packages.
Thanks to superior firepower and thinning Ukrainian ranks, the pace of Russian advances in Ukraine accelerated over 2024. In October, Kremlin forces scored their biggest ground gains since summer 2022, capturing about 420 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, mostly in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. In November, Russian attacks set a new record, grabbing about 725 kilometers of Ukrainian sovereign territory.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, in early December, told the major US broadcaster ABC that by the time the new White House administration led by Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20 the US will have sent Ukraine the full value of all arms assistance promised for 2024. Over the next two months Kyiv would see “a massive surge in the military assistance we are delivering to Ukraine so that we have spent every dollar that Congress has appropriated to us,” he said.
The Wall Street Journal, among other US publications, have called that intent into question because of limitations in US physical capacity to move a mass of materiel, including potentially hundreds of armored vehicles and hundreds of thousands of artillery shells and missiles. Pentagon concerns about reducing US weapons stocks to dangerously low levels also will likely prevent the US from meeting its congressionally approved commitments to Ukraine, those reports said.
Asked in a Dec. 8 interview with NBC News whether Ukraine should expect less US aid once he takes office, incoming US President Trump said: “Probably. Sure.”
The Atlantic Ocean separates the US from other NATO states, so commitment of military resources to contain Russian aggression “is a bigger problem for them than it is for us,” he said.
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