The United States has also facilitated Ukraine’s shipment of long-range air defense systems, including Slovakia’s shipment of Russian-made, Soviet-era S-300 launchers on which Ukrainian forces have already been trained. In return, the administration announced last week, the United States is deploying a Patriot missile system to Slovakia and consulting with Slovakia about a long-term replacement.
The shipment of the weapons, the first wave of which US officials said would arrive in Ukraine within days, follows an urgent appeal to Biden from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, as Russian forces were said to be mobilizing for a major assault on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine and along the coastal strip connecting it to Russian-occupied Crimea in the south. Russian troops have largely withdrawn from much of the north of the country, including around the capital kyiv, following humiliating defeats by the Ukrainian army and local resistance forces.
“What the Russians are telling us privately is precisely what we have been telling the world publicly: that the enormous amount of assistance we have been providing to our Ukrainian partners is proving extraordinarily effective,” said a senior administration official, who He spoke on condition of anonymity about the sensitive diplomatic document.
The State Department declined to comment on the content of the two-page diplomatic note or any response from the United States.
Russia experts suggested that Moscow, which has labeled arms convoys entering the country as legitimate military targets but has so far not attacked them, may be preparing to do so.
“They have targeted supply depots in Ukraine itself, where some of these supplies have been stored,” said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and Russia adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney. “The real question is whether they go beyond trying to target [the weapons] on Ukrainian territory, try to attack the supply convoys themselves and perhaps NATO countries on the outskirts of Ukraine” that serve as transfer points for US supplies.
If Russian forces stumble in the next phase of the war as they did in the first, “then I think the chances of Russia targeting NATO supplies on NATO territory are greatly increased,” Beebe said. “Many of us in the West have assumed that we can supply the Ukrainians really without limits and not run significant risk of retaliation from Russia,” he said. “I think the Russians want to send a message here that that’s not true.”
The diplomatic note was dated Tuesday, when the new weapons package was first leaked that raised the total amount of US military aid provided to Ukraine since the February 24 invasion to $3.2 billion, according to the Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby. In a public announcement Wednesday, Biden said it would include “new capabilities tailored to the broader attack we expect Russia to launch in eastern Ukraine.”
The document, titled “On Russia’s Concerns in the Context of Massive Supplies of Arms and Military Equipment to the kyiv Regime,” written in Russian with a translation provided, was sent to the State Department by the Russian Embassy in Washington.
The Russian embassy did not respond to requests for comment.
Among the items Russia identified as “most sensitive” were “multiple launch rocket systems,” although the United States and its NATO allies are not believed to have supplied Ukraine with such weapons. Russia accused the allies of violating “rigorous principles” governing arms transfers to conflict zones and ignoring “the threat of high-precision weapons falling into the hands of radical nationalists, extremists and bandit forces in Ukraine.” .
He accused NATO of trying to pressure Ukraine to “abandon” negotiations with Russia, so far unsuccessful, “in order to continue the bloodshed.” Washington, he said, was pressuring other countries to stop any military and technical cooperation with Russia, and those with Soviet-era weapons to transfer to Ukraine.
“We call on the United States and its allies to stop the irresponsible militarization of Ukraine, which has unpredictable consequences for regional and international security,” the note said.
Andrew Weiss, former National Security Council director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs and now vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recalled that Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a speech on the February morning that began the invasion, warned that Western nations would face “consequences greater than any they have faced in history” if they became involved in the conflict.
Attention at the time was focused on Putin’s reminder that Russia possesses a powerful nuclear arsenal, Weiss said, but it was also “a very explicit warning not to send weapons into a conflict zone.” Having drawn a red line, he asked, are the Russians “now inclined to back that?”
Such an attack would be “a very important escalation move, first and foremost because it poses a threat to the West if it cannot keep supplies flowing into Ukraine, which, by extension, could diminish Ukraine’s self-defense capabilities.” That risk “should not be downplayed,” he said, noting the additional risk that an attempt to attack a convoy inside Ukraine could go awry by crossing the border into NATO territory.
Senior US defense officials remain concerned about the possibility of such attacks. “We do not take for granted any movement of weapons and systems entering Ukraine,” Kirby said Thursday. “Not on any given day.”
Kirby said that Ukrainian troops bring the weapons to Ukraine after the United States brings them to the region, and “the less we say about it, the better.”
Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.
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