Ukraine Is Getting Its Abrams—but Not What It Really Wants

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, GERMANY—The United States will begin delivering M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks to Ukraine in the next several days, part of a long-awaited flood of heavy military assistance to a country whose counteroffensive has stalled on ditches and dragon’s teeth.

The United States has already doubled artillery production, even sending cluster munitions despite opposition from many Democrats, and is asking allies to “dig deep” and scrounge for Soviet-era bullets and air defenses. It has agreed to train Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets, and has even sent warm clothes and breaching equipment to allow Kyiv to continue fighting through another winter.

More than 18 months since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration has, after much deliberation, broken almost every apparent taboo that could trigger Kremlin escalation. First came artillery, then multiple rocket launch systems, and now the fanciest tanks that the United States has to offer. Just don’t ask the Biden administration when it plans to approve sending really long-range weapons to Ukraine.

The imminent U.S. decision about whether to finally dispatch the long-range U.S. Army Tactical Missile System, which Kyiv has been asking about for over a year, including this week ahead of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s White House visit, is the one big remaining question mark. The United Kingdom and France have sent long-range weapons—considered potentially problematic, since they can strike beyond the battlefront and into Russia proper—with deployments of the Storm Shadow and SCALP missiles. But U.S. officials are still mum.

“I won’t endeavor to evaluate Ukraine’s request—if they requested it, they believe that they need it,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at the end of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at Ramstein Air Base on Tuesday, before pivoting to what the United States has termed Ukraine’s most urgent military needs. That tally includes air defenses, artillery, and mechanized units, but not, at least not explicitly, the long-range missile system. Other U.S. officials were equally tight-lipped.

A congressional aide, who spoke to Foreign Policy on the condition of anonymity, said that all U.S. agencies had agreed to send the U.S. Army Tactical Missile System. “If it doesn’t happen, it’s because [President Joe] Biden himself said no,” the person said. 

Concerns about triggering Russian escalation still temper the U.S. approach to arms deliveries, even though Ukraine has taken the fight to Russian-occupied areas, such as Crimea, thanks to long-range weapons, with no major escalation in response. U.S. officials believe that Ukraine’s long-range strikes on Crimea with Soviet-era drones and British long-range missiles “bring the war home,” but the Kremlin so controls the Russian media that it’s not clear to the U.S. administration how much the average Russian understands about the war. 

The administration’s deliberative approach has frustrated Ukraine. Zelensky said on CBS’s 60 Minutes this week that Western weapons have been arriving six months too late. In Kyiv, there is grumbling in official circles that Ukrainian troops weren’t set up to win. “We were aided just not to lose,” said Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, based in Ukraine’s capital.

But aside from the looming shadow of the 200-mile range U.S. rockets, a piñata for congressional Republicans and Democrats calling on the U.S. administration to send more military aid, there was plenty of business for the 50 countries at the Ramstein meeting to talk about. There was a new Ukrainian defense minister there, who got a handshake instead of a bear hug from Austin. And there was another looming shadow: the changing weather.

Ukraine has about six weeks left in the fighting season before fall rains will begin to impact the country in earnest, turning the dry ground into mud and making forward advances in U.S.-provided Abrams tanks and Bradley and Stryker fighting vehicles more difficult, though U.S. officials believe that Kyiv can continue to make progress with light mobile attacks.

Before that point, the United States will wrap up a 10-week tank training at Grafenwohr Army Base in southeastern Germany. A battalion of 31 vehicles is set to be delivered within weeks, a senior U.S. military official said on Tuesday. Denmark is also providing more advanced Leopard tanks and Soviet-era T-72s.

“The fight right now still has plenty of fighting weather left,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters after the contact group meeting. Ukraine, he said, “has no intention to stop fighting during winter,” even if the counteroffensive, ongoing since June, has been moving more slowly than Ukrainian officials mapped out on paper. 

Ukraine has reclaimed about 54 percent of its territory occupied by Russia since February 2022, Milley said in a press briefing, leaving about 200,000 Russian troops on Kremlin-controlled turf. While Ukraine has penetrated multiple layers of Russian defenses that span the length of Kremlin-occupied territory, Milley added that it would be “impossible to predict” how long the fighting would take.

Austin and Milley are set to brief U.S. senators on the Biden administration’s proposed $24 billion aid package to Ukraine for next year in a classified session on Capitol Hill tomorrow, a U.S. official said. “I fully expect and hope that we’ll continue to enjoy bipartisan support from Congress,” Austin said. “We don’t take anything for granted.”

The United States is also trying to keep up a big production and training effort during the winter. The nation has already doubled its production of 155mm artillery shells, aiming to produce about 100,000 shells per month by 2025. If the fighting keeps up at this rate, that still won’t be enough: Ukraine needs to fire about 1.5 million shells per year. Austin said that he also used Tuesday’s meeting, the 15th gathering of the U.S.-led Ukraine Defense Contact Group since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to push U.S. allies to gather stocks of 155mm artillery ammo and air defense systems and interceptors, as the winter pause in fighting is expected to bring more Russian artillery attacks and strikes against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.

Meanwhile, training continues apace. More than 30 countries have trained 84,000 Ukrainian soldiers at 40 training grounds around the world, according to Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Charlie Dietz. The U.S. training has produced about 15 battalions that can operate Strykers, Bradleys, and motorized infantry vehicles. Ukrainian troops are even versed in how to load tanks onto trains to send back into the country, and on coping with flooded trench lines, simulating the conditions they will see on the winter battlefield. But it hasn’t produced all the tactical changes the United States wants to see away from the static, Soviet style of brawling with artillery. 

“The Ukrainians are maneuvering—but not as much as everyone would like,” the U.S. official said.

But both the geography and geometry of Ukrainian operations have changed from when Kyiv first repelled the full-scale invasion in 2022. In Kherson in the south and Kharkiv in the east last fall, Ukrainian forces exploited overextended Russian forces to make big local gains, but didn’t have enough to really keep going. Now they have the troops, Bielieskov said, but are facing an enemy that is much more dug-in.

“Imagine two corps at Ukraine’s disposal in September 2022,” he said. “Who knows how it might have ended for Russia.”