West Ramps Up Ukraine Weapons Aid as Expectations About War’s Outcome Shift
Ukraine’s military successes against Russia have transformed calculations in Washington and other Western capitals, leading to a sharp increase in military help for Kyiv as a war that started with Western efforts at damage control has become one that offers a strategic opportunity to constrain Russia’s expansionist ambitions.
The U.S. and its allies are now shipping large volumes of heavy weaponry to Ukraine, including more advanced Western systems to supplement the light weapons and Soviet-era arms that were funneled into Ukraine since before the invasion started.
Those shipments are aimed at supporting Kyiv in the next decisive phase of the war in coming weeks—but also to arm the country in a conflict that could last for months or years.
The war’s outcome is still uncertain but initial Western fears of a rapid Ukrainian military collapse that would leave a successful Russian military in control of the entire country have receded.
After planning for supporting an insurgency, Western governments now see a realistic prospect of Ukrainian success that pushes Russia farther out of Ukrainian territory and deters Moscow from future landgrabs, an outcome that would be a strategic win for the West.
In late March, President Biden said in Poland that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.” In late April, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
The weapons supplies and aid for Ukraine are combined with a sanctions regime on Russia aimed in part at thwarting the rebuilding of Russian equipment destroyed in the war. The toughening policy also reflects outrage over alleged Russian atrocities and the growing desire to deter Mr. Putin and other authoritarian leaders from future aggression, according to current and former Western officials and lawmakers.
In a major signal of the shift, Mr. Biden has more than doubled the size of the latest funding request to Congress. On Thursday, he asked for $33 billion to fund more weapons and provide longer-term assistance to Kyiv, after an initial $13.6 billion in funding for Ukraine to help cover the first two months of the war was nearly depleted.
There are risks in the policy as Mr. Putin repeatedly reminds the West of Russia’s nuclear capabilities. But, while acknowledging that the war effort has intensified, administration officials say they haven’t changed course or escalated the level of the conflict. Support for Ukraine, pressure on Russia and a goal of avoiding the direct involvement of the U.S. military aren’t new.
“It’s a continuation, not an escalation,” a senior U.S. defense official said Thursday. “There is no change to the president’s policy of no U.S. forces fighting in Ukraine and no change to our policy with respect to a no-fly zone.”
Moscow depicts Ukraine as a puppet of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said recently that the West was increasing the risk of a bigger conflict by providing arms to Ukraine: “NATO is, in essence, going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy.”
The Ukrainians deny they are being manipulated to fight the Russians. In early April, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, described the deal between the West and Ukraine as, “You give us weapons, we sacrifice our lives, and the war is contained in Ukraine.”
Western governments say weapons supplies are being made by individual governments, not NATO itself. Western officials also say that it is for the Ukrainians to decide how they want to end the conflict—not outside powers.
The new Western mobilization came after the Biden administration and other governments realized that Kyiv wasn’t going to be defeated by a rapid Russian invasion and that the Ukrainian military could repel Russian forces around the capital.
“It took a while for the administration to realize that the outcome of the war is not knowable, that the Ukrainians could win,” said Daniel Fried, a former senior U.S. diplomat overseeing Europe who consults with current officials. “That realization began to sink into the administration’s thinking, and as it did you saw them begin to shift.”
During the first weeks of the invasion, Western governments assumed Russia would prevail and that any conflict would quickly mutate into an insurgency.
For countries like the U.S. and U.K. supplying lethal weapons, that dictated supplies of light antitank and antiaircraft weaponry that could be used to harass the Russian military. For those like Germany that were reluctant to antagonize Moscow, they held back from weapons supplies, assuming anything they sent would quickly end up in Russian hands.
But as the Ukrainians fought on, successfully pushing the Russians back in their attempted advance on Kyiv, the shape of the conflict began to change. With the war’s decisive battles now likely to be fought in the east and southeast of the country involving exchanges of fire between tanks and heavy artillery, the West has shifted to provide more heavy weaponry, as the Ukrainians had requested. That includes an increasing proportion of Western-made arms, such as M777 155 mm howitzers, that will require Western training.
Ukraine’s successes also prompted a shift in what Western governments saw as possible war outcomes. Instead of aiming to bog the Russians down in guerrilla warfare, Western capitals started to believe the Russians could be pushed back further, and perhaps even out of the country altogether. If that happened, they calculated that Russian landgrab attempts would likely be delayed, perhaps indefinitely.
Much will depend on the emerging battle in the Donbas, since the Russian and Ukrainian sides are hoping to come out of that fight in a better position to shape the end of the war or at least its next phase, said Dimitri Simes, head of the Center for the National Interest, a Washington think tank.
“It is not very useful to discuss any fundamental strategic issue before this battle is over,” Mr. Simes said. “Both sides, while avoiding reckless escalation, will do whatever they can to get this battle to turn in their favor.”
While NATO countries aren’t directly engaged on the battlefield, they are supplying weapons and reinforcing the alliance’s eastern flank, as well as supporting a mutual effort to wean NATO countries off Russian oil and natural gas. A senior State Department official said Mr. Putin should “think twice” before putting more forces into Ukraine, which could leave Russia with gaps elsewhere as NATO is strengthening its eastern flank—and potentially adding new members in Finland and Sweden.
Pressure from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and equipment transfers by European nations, including the U.K. and former Soviet-bloc countries, have encouraged the Biden administration to put aside concerns about provoking Russia and send more powerful weapons, analysts and lawmakers say.
After initially saying that the U.K. would only help Ukraine defend itself from Russia, government ministers are now talking about a yearslong campaign to push Russia out of Ukraine entirely, all while hobbling the Russian economy and its spy network in the West and bolstering NATO’s military presence in Eastern Europe.
Overall, U.K. officials say the war is an opportunity to degrade Russia to the point that it can’t launch an attack on another Western nation. U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said this week that Britain wants to push “Russia out of the whole of Ukraine.”
The change in narrative is “partly just because they have more confidence that the Russians are in trouble,” says Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. However, he notes it isn’t without risk: Russia can use the West’s more belligerent rhetoric to reframe the war against Ukraine into a war against NATO.
Britain started supplying antitank missiles to Ukraine in January, before the invasion, but those weapons were designed to help Ukraine defend itself in a counterinsurgency-style war.
As the conflict morphed, the U.K. is seeking to provide more long-range weapons to neutralize Russian artillery. One government minister said this week that Ukraine was free to use those weapons to strike military targets inside Russian territory.
The U.K. government says weapons suppliers to belligerents in a conflict haven’t historically been regarded as participants in the conflict.
In Western Europe, especially France and Germany, leaders have remained much more focused on a negotiated end to the conflict, although officials in Berlin and Paris recognize that Moscow has effectively turned its back on the peace process for now and appears determined to drag out its military campaign.
Yet the emphasis in both capitals has frequently been on avoiding further escalation of the situation and a direct Russian military confrontation with NATO, even as France, and more incrementally Germany, have both scaled up the amount and quality of military assistance they are giving Ukraine.
After weeks of delay, Germany said Tuesday it would approve a delivery of about 50 “Gepard” antiaircraft cannon tanks to Ukraine.
Other European leaders, especially in Central and Eastern Europe have been much bolder on what the West should be aiming for.
“To put it very simply, our aim must be peace through victory. Ukrainian victory in the war,” Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins said in an interview Wednesday. “A rather simplistic way of viewing a victory would be a territory liberated of the Russian military completely.”
Latvia, like its Baltic neighbors and Poland, has provided Ukraine with large amounts of military aid, including Stinger and antitank missiles.
Mr. Karins said that ultimately, a return to a peaceful Europe will require a reinforced eastern flank of NATO that can deter Russia from future military adventurism.
“The idea of going back to how things were, say in January, is unimaginable at this time,” he said. “And the only way to coexist is by being extremely strong and able and willing to repel any military incursion anywhere in Europe.”
Write to William Mauldin at william.mauldin@wsj.com, Max Colchester at max.colchester@wsj.com and Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com
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