How will Ukraine spend its new US aid?

Now that a long-awaited additional bill has been passed in the House of Representatives, Ukraine’s supporters can breathe a little easier after months of increasing Russian pressure on the beleaguered country’s lagging and undermanned formations.

Yet Kiev now faces the important choice of how best to spend that money — a fraught question amid Russian gains, uncertain long-term U.S. support and Ukraine’s ultimate need to end the war.

On Saturday, the House of Representatives passed a supplemental spending bill to finance the purchase of new weapons and defense equipment for Ukraine, as well as the replacement of US weapons sent to Kiev.

The bill would add $13.7 billion to the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which purchases new weapons. It would also donate $1.6 billion to the Foreign Military Financing program, a separate arms procurement program of the State Department.

Another $13.4 billion would be set aside to replace U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine and fund training for Ukrainian troops. This amount would cover the $12 billion that Congress approved in the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which allows the president to send U.S. weapons to Ukraine. The PDA authorization includes $8 billion authorized by the new supplement and $3.9 billion previously authorized.

The first tranche of arms to reach Ukraine under the new supplement is expected to be worth $1 billion and focus on ammunition, including 155mm grenades, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, long-range missiles and armored vehicles useful for evacuate victims.

The aid package will likely be the last before the U.S. presidential election in November, said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at think tank CSIS.

“The government will certainly not want to send another package just before the elections,” he said.

The previous US aid package to Ukraine was passed in December 2022. Representatives proposed a new tranche in December 2023, but the measure was halted by Republican opposition in Congress.

It is unclear whether Ukraine can expect a new aid package, especially if Donald Trump returns to the White House. He was impeached during his presidency for withholding aid from Kiev and, as the Republican Party’s presumptive candidate for this year’s elections, has spoken out against providing more aid, only weakening his position as momentum for the new additional support package grew.

Ukraine, meanwhile, faces two competing priorities.

“The conversation is about how much of this aid will go to immediate needs, and how much will go to supporting Ukraine in 2025,” said Nick Reynolds, a land warfare research fellow at think tank RUSI.

In the short term, Ukraine must repel Russian attacks that caused the fall of Ukraine’s eastern city of Adiivka in February and have made further gains in the same area in recent weeks. The Russian advance was made possible in part by declining U.S. military assistance, which led Ukrainian units to increasingly ration grenades.

In the long term, Ukraine has said it wants to return all of its territory. However, with 18 percent of Ukrainian land under Russian control, this means a major offensive must be launched. Heavy Ukrainian losses in a failed summer offensive against southern Ukraine last year and similar losses in 2022 suggest that any future attacks will need to be well financed in terms of soldiers, equipment and ammunition.

Ukraine may want to spend its money moving forward, according to Cancian and Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies who previously served as deputy director for plans, policy and strategy.

While most of the munitions the US sends are cost-effective – such as 155mm shells – advanced aviation and anti-aircraft systems could eat up large amounts of the money earmarked for Ukraine.

For example, the US has supplied Ukraine with highly effective Patriot missile interceptors at an estimated cost of $4 million each. “That’s an expensive weapon for a limited budget,” Montgomery said.

Instead, Ukraine could get the slightly cheaper National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS), at an estimated cost of $1.37 million per missile, Cancian said.

Montgomery said another solution would be to continue a program the Defense Department has dubbed “FrankenSAMs,” in which Soviet-designed air defense systems are equipped to fire cheaper U.S. missiles like the Sidewinder.

Ukraine has also received a wide variety of counter-drone equipment that uses jamming or cheap missiles and cannon shells to take out drones at a fraction of the cost of more expensive missiles.

Future U.S. packages could include weapons that have been shown to be highly effective, such as unguided systems, Montgomery added. According to a company press release, the US has supplied Ukraine with AeroVironment loitering munitions, using “thousands” of drones in the country.

There will also be some relief from Europe. On Tuesday, the British Ministry of Defense announced plans to send $619 million worth of defense supplies to Ukraine. A Czech Republic-led effort aims to buy as many as 1.5 million artillery shells for Ukraine, and an EU effort will see one million 155mm artillery shells sent to Ukraine by the end of this year.

Western allies are also likely to get better at planning arms transfers, Reynolds said. There is “a much better appreciation of the challenges Ukraine faces,” he said, with countries recognizing that there is no “quick and easy” solution to defeating Russia.

Russia is also facing problems in supplying its troops, according to a new report from CSIS. The Russian Defense Ministry estimates that it will need 5.6 million artillery shells in 152mm and 122mm calibers by 2024 to make major gains in Ukraine. However, Russian production is expected to increase to just 1.9 million rounds in 2024.

Russia can at least partially make up for the shortages by purchasing weapons from North Korea and Iran, with North Korea potentially sending three million 152mm rounds to Russia between August 2023 and February 2024.

Whatever the case, Russia likely has sufficient industrial capacity to continue the attack at least until early 2025, the authors of the CSIS reports concluded.

“The Russian Ministry of Defense, despite facing a number of weaknesses from labor shortages to deep-seated corruption in military procurement, will be able to maintain domestic weapons production and import diversification efforts to continue its war effort (in 2024).”