Republican lawmakers urge Biden to further arm Ukraine

The ranking members of two House committees sent a
letter to President Joe Biden on Nov. 5 urging him to take action in response
to the build up of Russian forces along the Ukrainian border. Representatives
Mike Rogers (R AL) and Mike Turner (R OH), who head the Republican Party’s
presence in the House Armed Services committee and its Strategic Forces
subcommittee, sent the letters, defensenews.com reported on the same day.

The representatives urged Biden to support Ukraine by
means of intelligence and weapons, and also deploy a U.S. presence to the Black
Sea as a deterrent to further Russian moves into Ukraine.

The letter came after the European Union released its
most comprehensive analysis of the actual hardware its observers have acquired
over the course of the war, nytimes.com reported on Nov. 3. The analysis, paid
for by the EU and the German government, found that all of the hardware was
from Russian Federation sources that Ukraine did not have in its arsenals.
Moreover, unlike most militia or separatist gear, which is a mix-and-match of
items with different serial numbers, the weapons examined were as a whole
intact individual items, with matching serial numbers, which the researchers
say indicates a relatively short path from manufacturer to end user.

James Hydzik: In Spring 2021, the U.S. maintained a daily airborne
intelligence-gathering presence over the Russian border along the Black Sea and
around Crimea to Donbas as well as over the Baltic countries. This is likely to
return. However, the U.S. Air Force sent B-1 bombers on anti-naval missile
launch training missions to the Baltic and Black seas last week, sometimes
accompanied by NATO-member jet fighters. This is something that did not happen
in Spring. If the reconnaissance resumes, but the bombers don’t, it’s an
indication that the situation is at a certain, but familiar, level of
seriousness.