“Four flights arrived in the region from the United States yesterday, carrying various equipment,” the official said, asking not to be identified.
A fifth flight is expected in the next 24 hours “which means five flights in a few days” since President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced a new $800 million package of military aid to Ukraine.
And American soldiers deployed in the eastern region of NATO since the beginning of the Russian attack, “in the coming days”, will begin training Ukrainian soldiers to use M777 howitzers, the new generation of artillery pieces that the United States decided to deliver for the first time to the Ukrainian army.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed the arrival of the first shipment of this aid 48 hours after President Joe Biden gave permission to do so, considering it an “unprecedented speed.”
Kirby stressed that the training of “a small number of Ukrainians” on new-generation howitzers will take place outside Ukraine, after which they “return to their countries to train their colleagues.”
Even if their use is not fundamentally different from the artillery pieces familiar to the Ukrainian army, these guns use 155mm shells used by the Allies while Ukraine has only Russian-made 152mm shells.
The senior US Defense Department official indicated that the Russian forces are beginning to feel the effects of the sanctions on their supplies of weapons, especially guided missiles.
The official said, “The sanctions had an impact on Putin’s ability to resupply and equip, especially with regard to the components of some of these systems and their precision-guided missiles.”
“This has had a tangible impact on Putin. On the other hand, we know that they are struggling to resupply their defense industry and are wondering how quickly and to what extent they can ramp up their arms production,” he added.
“The sanctions have an impact on their ability to do so,” the US official stressed.
The modern weapons use electronic chips, the main producers of which are Taiwan and South Korea, which are allies of the United States and stopped exporting these products to Russia under US sanctions imposed after Moscow’s attack on Ukraine.
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