Ukrainian army soldiers resupply their battalion at the gate of Debaltseve, in the Donetsk region, on February 3, 2015 -© AFP / by Charles Onians
KIEV (AFP) – The White House has signalled it may be ready to change tack and start supplying arms to Ukrainian troops battling pro-Russian separatists, but what does Kiev want — and what can Washington provide?
Kiev has said it hopes for an announcement of military aid during a visit by US Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday, after a US think-tank report called for a massive upscaling in the quality of weapons available to Ukrainian forces.
The US government in November committed $118 million in “non-lethal” equipment and training for the Ukrainian military, of which around half has been delivered, including body armour, night vision glasses, mortar radar and medical equipment.
While Ukraine is one of the world’s biggest arms producers, it lacks the hi-tech systems needed to match the separatists’ arsenal, allegedly supplied by Moscow.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said on Wednesday that “we have enough Kalashnikovs,” and what is needed is sophisticated equipment for “modern warfare” — including secure radios, jamming equipment for separatist radios, reconnaissance drones and more radar systems to locate mortar, rocket and artillery fire.
“What we need is exactly modern warfare, which we’ve been lacking all this time,” Klimkin told Western journalists in Kiev, adding that the separatists were currently able to “intercept our soldiers talking on mobile phones and then steer their fire.”
Ukraine’s needs also include training to use sophisticated equipment, Klimkin said: “It’s not about buying a couple of more tanks.”
– ‘Fire-and-forget’ –
The US report published Monday by a group of former senior civilian and US military leaders said the West must “bolster deterrence in Ukraine by raising the risks and costs to Russia of any renewed major offensive.”
Kiev and its Western allies have accused Russia of pouring columns of heavy armour over the border to bolster the rebels, but Ukraine’s stocks of light anti-armour weapons are in an “abysmal condition,” said the report by the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
The White House is reportedly considering giving Ukraine “fire-and-forget” Javelin anti-tank missiles, which use shaped charges to squirt deadly jets of molten metal through thick armour.
Shaped charges were used to deadly effect by insurgents in Iraq targeting the armour of US-led coalition forces.
The report said that Washington should provide $1 billion in military assistance “as soon as possible”, followed by another billion in 2016, and again in 2017.
In order to overcome the superiority of the separatists’ capabilities, it noted, the US should provide radar to pinpoint the locations where Grad rockets are being fired “out to a range of 30-40 kilometres (around 20-25 miles)”.
Reconnaissance drones would be essential to detect troop movements on the largely flat terrain of east Ukraine. Such drones would be non-lethal and likely human portable.
Armoured Humvees would provide “all-weather mobility, speed, reliability and a measure of protection as they move between positions on the battlefield,” the report said.
The survival rate of Ukraine’s casualties, 70 percent of which are from rocket and artillery fire, would also be greatly improved by the provision of field hospitals, the report said, calling the current military medical system “relatively underdeveloped and severely under resourced”.
Beyond the US, NATO members using former Soviet equipment compatible with Ukraine’s arms inventory could prove particularly useful with contributions to air defence systems to discourage large-scale Russian airstrikes.
“Procuring advanced US air defence weapons would be expensive, and integrating them into the existing Ukrainian air defence system would take time,” the report said.
Foreign Minister Klimkin was blunt about Ukraine’s objectives.
“We can’t win the war against Russia… what we need is not to lose the war,” he said, voicing hope that Kerry would announce some “deliverables” during a visit to Kiev on Thursday.
“There are discussions ongoing about additional military technical assistance and I very much hope that could materialise in the nearest future,” Klimkin said. -AFP