https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... ms-supply/old salt wrote: ↑Sat Feb 25, 2023 6:54 pmPutin began massing troops on the border in Apr '21. He made a big increase in Dec '21.a fan wrote: ↑Sat Feb 25, 2023 6:16 pm Trump kept his powder dry for a while. And then caved to who the heck knows, and sent arms and training to Ukraine. It's clear as day that that's what prompted Putin's invasion: he invaded before Biden's promised coming aid that would bolster what Trump already sent.....took that option away from Putin entirely.
Biden held off sending aid until the CIA told him that Putin was going to invade, not bluffing.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/16/us ... delay-aid/
White House Delays Moving Military Assistance to Ukraine
And Congress is getting impatient.
DECEMBER 16, 2021,
Frustration mounts in the U.S. Congress over President Joe Biden’s Ukraine policy...
The U.S. has been rushing to arm Ukraine, but for years it stalled on providing weapons
February 27, 2022
The current rush by the West to send weapons to Ukraine is in stark contrast to years of hesitancy that often had as much to do with domestic U.S. and allied politics, and concerns about their own relations with Moscow, than with an assessment of the Russian threat to Ukraine.
Russia’s launch last week of a full-scale invasion, with land, air and sea attacks on Ukrainian cities and military installations, has been met with what U.S. officials have described as a surprisingly robust defense.
Ukraine has pleaded for more help, including additional Javelin antitank weapons, and Stinger antiaircraft missiles.
President Biden has authorized nearly $1 billion in military assistance over the past year for Ukraine, including $350 million in weapons such as antitank and antiaircraft missiles last week, and $200 million in drawdowns from U.S. arms stocks approved in December. The new package includes more Javelins, although Stingers are likely to wait until a further tranche, defense officials said.
Meanwhile, as Ukrainians prepare to face down tanks in the streets of Kyiv with molotov cocktails assembled in their basements, and rifles being distributed to every able-bodied civilian, there has been no shortage of revisionist history and finger-pointing in Washington.
While the Biden administration has moved quickly since Russian troops began massing on the border in December, its response was sluggish to earlier Russian deployments in April. Before the Russians finally moved into Ukraine in force on Thursday, Republican lawmakers and pundits accused Biden of appeasement in trying to secure a diplomatic solution to the crisis. Russia would never have dared to invade, several charged, if Biden hadn’t shown weakness by withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Former president Donald Trump, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “genius,” has said it never would have happened under his watch.
...2014... Ukrainian forces fought a series of battles against Russian-backed separatist rebels in an effort to regain seized territory. But while the West had sanctioned Russia and refused to recognize the Crimean annexation, then-President Petro Poroshenko’s request for U.S. military assistance, ranging from F-16 jets and Javelins to helmets and blankets, gave then-President Barack Obama pause.
At the time, there was a high sensitivity in the White House to avoiding a conflict that could lead to direct confrontation with Russia. Some senior Obama aides initially advocated taking a breather before deciding to arm the Ukrainian military, which only weeks before had been fighting pro-democracy protesters in the streets and was believed to be highly corrupt.
Obama became more convinced that providing high-end armaments to a far-off conflict was folly when, barely a month after Poroshenko’s June 7 inauguration, a Malaysian airliner was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over separatist territory in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard. Western intelligence believed the weapon had been provided to the separatists by Russia.
After a year of internal debate, Obama declined to provide lethal aid, overruling most of his national security team. Still, the United States committed more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine between 2014 and 2016, including body armor, night-vision goggles, vehicles and training.
But Obama’s refusal to provide lethal weaponry had by that point become a Republican talking point, leading then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to charge in 2015 that the “Ukrainians are being slaughtered and we’re sending blankets and meals.”
Four years later, Trump would echo that charge, claiming that while his administration had sent “antitank busters” to Ukraine, Obama had provided only “pillows and sheets.”
Trump first approved the sale of $47 million worth of 210 Javelin missiles and 37 launchers to Ukraine in December 2017. Delivered in April the following year, they were not deployed to the front lines of the still-simmering separatist war. Under the terms of the sale, they were kept boxed in a military storage facility far from the front lines, where they were to serve symbolically as a “strategic deterrent” to Russia.
In the summer of 2019, Trump froze an additional $400 million in congressionally approved security assistance to Ukraine, an action that later became a centerpiece in his first impeachment.
Trump released the frozen aid when his action, along with a transcript of the call with Zelensky, became public.
Recent days have brought increasing unity on all sides of the political spectrum to help Ukraine. But that has not prevented a partisan rehash of the past eight years.
“I don’t think we left Ukraine defenseless,” said Evelyn Farkas, who served as deputy assistance secretary of defense for Russia and Ukraine from 2012 to 2015. “Could we have done more? Yes. Could everybody have done more? Yes.”
“But nobody foresaw what we see today.”