White House decided against Ukraine arms in February, still refraining

The U.S. government has yet to decide whether to provide Ukraine with lethal, defensive armaments, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken told a March 6 press briefing in Kyiv. Four days earlier, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt said the U.S. government will give Ukraine USD 120 mln this year for training and acquiring equipment. It has yet to be decided whether those funds would include lethal defensive weapons, he said, but even more important is conducting reforms in the defense sphere.

 

U.S. President Barack Obama decided against providing lethal defensive arms to Ukraine after a White House meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in February, German Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Witting said in an interview with the Associated Press published on March 9.

Obama concurred with Merkel that it was important “to give some space for those diplomatic, political efforts that were underway,” he said. “The two leaders exchanged views on that issue and there was unity by them not to impose, or not to go forward with, the delivery of lethal defensive weapons at this time,” Wittig told the AP.

 

The U.S. government has halted its project to train Ukrainian soldiers in order to observe whether the Minsk Two ceasefire accords are being upheld, said on March 6 U.S. Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges. The program was supposed to start in March involving one American battalion teaching three Ukrainian battalions how to defend themselves from attacks from Russian-backed separatists.

 

Russian MP Aleksei Pushkov, the head of the Duma foreign affairs committee, said in a March 7 tweet that in order to ensure a stable cease-fire, the EU should not be pressuring Moscow but instead pressure the U.S. to not dispatch arms to Ukraine.

 

The Russian-backed separatists spent the weekend regrouping their forces and creating three tactical offensive groups, one of which is targeted towards the strategic port city of Mariupol (pre-war population 458,500), military expert and MP Dmytro Tymchuk reported on March 9. Throughout the weekend, they directed mortar and rifle fire at the village of Shyrokyno, located 23 kilometers east of Mariupol, news reports said. Separatist gunfire injured at least one resident, the Donetsk regional police reported on March 7. The tanks and mortars used in weekend attacks on Shyrokyno “are precisely those types of arms that were supposed to be withdrawn from the separation line, in accordance with the Minsk accords,” reported the Defense of Mariupol organization on March 8.

 

Zenon Zawada: Western leaders, particularly those in Europe, are in denial of the plans of Russian-backed separatists to capture more territory in Ukraine’s easternmost Donbas region. That’s despite much evidence to the contrary – ongoing attacks on strategic population centers, repositioning of forces towards those centers, intercepted exchanges in which separatists discuss planned invasions and even open declarations of plans to attack and capture cities as big as Kharkiv.

 

Interestingly, Obama is more receptive to the concerns and advice of his European counterparts than his own hawkish Congress (which is Republican-dominated) and military advisors, who have reported on Russian-backed separatists repositioning and attacking during the latest lull, as if we they were preparing for another onslaught. Indeed rather than compromising with the legislative body that took a dramatic turn to the right after the November elections, Obama has grown more defiant on most key political issues, even beyond Ukraine. (Support for providing Ukraine with arms is quite strong even among Democrats). We didn’t expect Obama to defer to the Europeans over his own Congress or even organizations such as the United Nations, whose officials are already warning of a possible impending attack on the strategic port city of Mariupol.

 

That the Russians have become outspoken against the supply of U.S. arms to Ukraine is a revealing signal that they have the potential to undermine Russia’s expansionist plans. We view the provision of lethal, defensive weapons is only a matter of time given that there’s ample evidence of further Russian-backed military incursions being planned into Ukrainian territory. The big question is whether that will happen before or after the looming battle for Mariupol.