Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces could break Ukraine’s defenses and attack Kyiv if Congress declines to provide new funding to equip the Ukrainian military, a senior Pentagon official has warned.
“The Ukrainians are fighting every day,” Dr. Celeste Wallander, the assistant defense secretary of international security affairs, said Thursday at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “If we do not supply the Ukrainians with ammunition, air defense interceptors, spare parts in order to be able to sustain those front lines, which they have done so well, we could well be back in the scenario that we were facing in 2022.”
President Joe Biden and congressional Republicans have been at loggerheads over whether and how to provide new funding to arm Ukraine in recent months. With the outcome of that debate unclear, Wallander suggested that the political choices in Washington would enable any number of possible futures, from one in which the war ends in Russian victory to another in which Ukrainian forces achieve the breakthrough that eluded them in their 2023 counteroffensive.
“There are plans for new rounds of training to help the Ukrainians take that next step towards an even higher level of capability in training,” she told the Washington Examiner during the question-and-answer session. “So, yes, we do believe that Ukraine could seize the initiative, could seize advantages. I won’t get into specifics about where they could take territory … but, yes, absolutely, we do believe that they can change the dynamics of this conflict if they are resourced properly.”
The outcome of the U.S. debate, and the wider war, has high stakes for Ukrainian society. Putin has been indicted for war crimes in connection to the forced deportation of Ukrainian children into Russia. Wallander explained those deportations as a manifestation of an “almost Nazi-like idea of ethnic purity” of the Russian people.
“To me, one of the most horrifying aspects of Russia’s conduct in the conflict in Ukraine … is the taking of Ukrainian children, either from their families or orphans and sending them to Russia in this sort of almost Nazi-like idea of ethnic purity, that they need to be educated and Russians,” she said. “It is just astonishing to think that a Europe which faced the horror of such a leadership to do that to populations in the 1940s is now confronted with another leadership that is doing that against the Ukrainian people in the 2020s.”
Ukrainian officials say that at least 20,000 children have been carried off into Russia, a policy that United Nations investigators have condemned as “a war crime” by the Russian government.
“It is our conclusion that there is evidence of forceful transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia,” Bragi Gudbrandsson, vice chairman of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, said Thursday. “We cannot identify the number of these children, but we know there are many, and we can support this with the actual measures Russia has taken to simplify procedures to acquire Russian citizenship and to place Ukrainian children with Russian families,”
Ukraine has used U.S.-made ATACMS, as well as British Storm Shadow missiles, to hammer several high-profile targets in Crimea, the strategically valuable peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. Those strikes have been constrained by the scarce number of missiles available to the Ukrainians, but Wallander noted that administration officials want to “ramp up our defense industrial base” investments.
“As the battle shifts now to thinking about the importance of Ukraine holding the Black Sea, we’re looking again at options and looking at how to ramp up our defense industrial base in producing more and better longer-range capabilities,” she said, “so that we might have the option to provide Ukraine with longer-range strike capabilities.”
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Biden ran out of the financial authority to provide weapons to Ukraine in December, two months into a debate about whether the Ukraine aid legislation would be attached to a bill intensifying U.S. border security in a manner consistent with the priorities of U.S. immigration hawks.
“This is not over. The Russians are not done. Putin hasn’t achieved his objectives,” she said. “He hasn’t quite figured out yet that he’s failed. He needs to understand that he’s failed. And so, we need to sustain the support to Ukraine through 2024, so we can build a Ukraine that can defend itself over the long-term and is able to succeed on a European path.”