President Joe Biden directed additional military aid to Ukraine on Friday afternoon.
The aid "will provide additional artillery munitions, radars, and other equipment to Ukraine," Biden said in a statement from the White House. The aid will be valued at up to an additional $150 million and will provide them with 25,000 155 mm artillery rounds, three AN/TPQ-36 counterartillery radars, electronic jamming equipment, and field equipment and spare parts, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.
"The United States has provided a historic amount of security assistance to Ukraine at rapid speed," he added. "We are sending the weapons and equipment that Congress has authorized directly to the front lines of freedom in Ukraine. U.S. support, together with the contributions of our Allies and partners, has been critical in helping Ukraine win the battle of Kyiv and hinder Putin’s war aims in Ukraine."
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Prior to Friday's announcement, the U.S. had designated roughly $3.8 billion worth of military aid to Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, including this raft of aid. Biden recently urged Congress to pass a new $33 billion spending bill, which includes more than $20 billion for weapons, ammunition, and other military assistance.
Russia’s military operation is currently concentrated in the Donbas region of Ukraine, which is in the eastern part of the country that borders Russia. There has been fighting in the region since 2014 between Ukrainians and pro-Russian separatists.
The Ukrainians, however, “are putting up a very stiff resistance, and ... the Russians haven't made the progress that we believe they expected to make by this point,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Thursday.
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"That's not to say they haven't made any progress," he added. "I think we would continue to assess it as incremental and uneven, but not nonexistent. And again, we think that that's partly — a big part of it is the Ukrainian resistance but also partly through their own uneven efforts to fix the challenges that they had north around Kyiv."
Following Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's trip to Ukraine, he said the U.S. wanted Ukraine to weaken Russia's military to the point it can't conduct similar military invasions.