On Thursday, Defense Department press secretary John Kirby said that a Russian invasion of Ukraine “could be imminent,” but denied that U.S. military aid was taking too long to be given to Ukraine.
According to The New York Post, Kirby was asked by Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin why the United States had not filed Ukraine’s request for “what they’ve really asked for, which is air defense systems, anti-aircraft missiles, the kind of thing that could take on the Russian air force, not just tanks and ammunition on the ground.”
Kirby responded by noting that the United States has already sent three shipments of military aid to Ukraine and that “there are more coming.”
“I think you can understand why we would want to be careful about advertising publicly the kinds of capabilities that were given to Ukraine, given the size and the scale and the capabilities that are arrayed against them on the other side of their border,” Kirby said.
“It just seems like this is the 11th hour,” Griffin responded. “What is taking so long?”
“There’s no 11th hour here, Jen,” Kirby said. “We’ve been providing, in the last year alone, we have provided many millions of dollars of worth of capabilities to Ukraine, $60 million just over the course of the spring. And then in December, President Biden authorized another $200 million. And that’s on top of work that two previous administrations had been doing to help bolster the self-defense capabilities of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. So there’s no 11th hour here at all.”
“I take issue with the idea that this is sort of an 11th hour, Hail Mary pass,” he added.
“I don’t know how you can take issue with ‘the 11th hour’ when senior leaders here and the president have called a Russian invasion ‘imminent,’” Griffin said.
“That fact that it is possible that it’s imminent doesn’t mean that we just woke up to the fact that they had been building forces,” Kirby responded. “We’ve been talking about this now for a couple of months, what we’ve been seeing on the ground. And there have been lots of conversations with us and our NATO allies as well as our Ukrainian counterparts … it’s not like any of this came as some sort of shock.”
Kirby added that the United States thinks there is still “time and space for diplomacy, but thus far it has not achieved the kind of results that the international community would like to see. All of that, combined, has led us to want to contribute more capabilities to Ukrainian armed forces and be ready to contribute more capabilities to our NATO allies.”
