The president of the United States, Joe Biden, secretly sent to Ukraine in March a significant number of long-range ATACMS missiles, which Kyiv had been demanding for months and that Washington had resisted delivering, Jake Sullivan, the US adviser, revealed on Wednesday. White House national security. “We will send more,” he added.
In a press conference at the White House, Sullivan explained that Biden ordered his team in February to provide Ukraine with “a significant number” of ATACMS missiles, but only for them to be used “within Ukrainian territory” and not against Russia. A month later, in March, those missiles were delivered to Ukraine, Sullivan revealed.
Although it was not made public at the time, these missiles were included in a military aid package valued at 300 million dollars (about 280 million euros) that Biden approved on March 12, the president’s advisor detailed.
The missiles were first used on April 17 against a Russian airfield in Crimea that was about 165 kilometers from the Ukrainian front lines, Sullivan said.
Biden decided to approve that shipment after US intelligence concluded that Russia has used long-range missiles from other countries, particularly North Korea, on the battlefield and in the face of increasing Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.
Also a factor in US decision-making was Russia’s attack on critical infrastructure in Ukraine. “We warned Russia about those things,” Sullivan said. “And they continued to attack them.”
Sullivan avoided specifying the exact number of missiles sent to Ukrainian forces, although he assured that more will be sent, especially now that Congress has approved a foreign aid package that includes $61 billion (about 57 billion euros) of military assistance to Kyiv.
The debate over sending ATACMS missiles to Ukraine had been going on for months within the Biden administration, where some feared provoking an escalation of war with Moscow and that Ukraine would use them to attack targets inside Russia.
The Pentagon initially opposed the deployment of long-range missiles, fearing that the loss of the missiles from the US arsenal would affect US military readiness. But in late January, the US military found a way to address its concerns with its own arsenal, allowing the administration to move forward.
Sullivan was asked during the press conference if there is still this fear that Ukraine will attack Russia with ATACMS missiles, but he said that the Executive has received guarantees from the Ukrainians that these weapons will only be used within their territory. “The Ukrainian government has given us assurances that they will not use them outside the borders of Ukraine,” Sullivan said.
He recalled that the Ukrainian Executive has also made these commitments in the past, for example with the HIMARS rockets, whose range is around 50 miles (about 80 kilometers), and has demonstrated that they will not use these American weapons directly against Russia.
The first time Biden mentioned that he was considering sending ATACMS missiles to Ukraine was in July last year during the NATO summit in Vilnius (Lithuania), but at that time the United States decided to prioritize sending artillery to Ukraine, since which was what was being used the most on the battlefield.
However, the US president met with his national security team in mid-February and agreed to accept his advisers’ unanimous recommendation to send the missiles to Ukraine. The challenge at the time was how to pay for the missiles, since the United States had exhausted all its financing options and Congressional gridlock prevented more aid from being sent.
But an opportunity arose in March when several Pentagon contracts were put up for bid and Biden was able to use the difference to send $300 million in assistance to Ukraine.
