Trump’s Ukraine Lethal Aid Approval Is Not A Gamechanger

Nikolas K. Gvosdev

Security, Eurasia

The change is not as earth-shattering as some reports and announcements on Twitter might make it.

When the notifications started arriving, breathlessly announcing that the United States would be providing lethal assistance to Ukraine’s military, I assumed that a major shift in U.S. policy had taken place. As I began to parse the reporting more closely, it became clear that matters aren’t quite so clear.

It appears that, after months of the necessary paperwork sitting in the president’s inbox, Donald Trump signed off on a decision that will permit the State Department to issue the necessary export licenses to allow the sale of sniper rifles for use by the Ukrainian armed forces. This does represent a shift from the Obama administration’s policy of not allowing Ukraine to obtain U.S. firearms, and limiting the provision of U.S. military assistance to foodstuffs and technical equipment, but is not as earth-shattering as some reports and announcements on Twitter might make it.

For one thing, export licenses for much of the “heavier” equipment requested by Ukraine, starting with the Javelin antitank missile system, have still not been approved. More importantly, while the president has signed off on the licensing for the sniper systems, how Ukraine will pay for the weapons is still, so far, undetermined. In keeping with Trump’s passive-aggressive approach to Russia policy, he might have decided not to continue to expend political capital, especially with members of Congress, by “blocking” sales that both houses have approved—but may very well insist that Ukraine pay for any U.S. equipment. Trump may question why the U.S. taxpayer should foot the bill when Ukraine remains the world’s eleventh-largest arms exporter—and where Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko has initialed plans for Ukrainian defense firms to vault Ukraine into the “top five” of global arms providers.

So there are still gaps between approving export licenses—and actual crates of weapons arriving in Ukraine.

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