President Biden has approved the deployment of another Patriot missile system to Ukraine, senior administration and military officials said, as the country struggles to defend itself from Russian attacks on its cities, infrastructure and power grid.
Biden’s decision came last week, officials said, after a series of high-level meetings and internal debate over how to meet Ukraine’s pressing needs to bolster air defenses without jeopardizing Ukraine’s combat readiness. USA.
The new Patriot system, the second the United States has sent to Ukraine, will come from Poland, where it has been protecting a rotating force of American troops returning to the United States, officials said.
The system could be deployed to the Ukrainian front in the coming days, U.S. officials said, depending on what maintenance or modifications it needs.
Considered one of America’s best air defense weapons, the Patriot includes a powerful radar system and mobile launchers that fire missiles at incoming projectiles.
It is also one of the rarest weapons systems in the US arsenal. Pentagon officials decline to reveal how many it has, but a senior military official said the Army has deployed only 14 of them, in the United States and around the world. American allies also have Patriots, and two of those nations have sent a pair to Ukraine, but American officials say they expect European powers to send more.
Officials describe the movement of critical systems around the world’s hot spots as a sleight of hand, assessing which global crisis requires them most to defend American troops, bases and allies.
Demand for Patriots and other air defenses by the Pentagon’s Central Command, which conducts operations in the Middle East, has been especially intense over the past year, and particularly since Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel in October.
That regional threat was underscored in April when Iran fired more than 300 ballistic and cruise missiles, and self-exploding drones, at Israel. A combination of Israeli, American, and other allied air and ground defenses thwarted most of that assault with relatively few casualties. But this made moving any Patriot batteries from the region impossible, officials said.
With tensions rising on the Korean Peninsula, moving any Patriot batteries to defend against a possible North Korean attack was also considered too risky, the officials said.
Pentagon officials did not want to move any batteries from the United States. There is a Patriot battery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to train U.S. and Ukrainian troops, but moving it would take away training, officials said. Other batteries protecting bases and troops in the United States, including Hawaii, were considered too distant or necessary for national defense.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and other senior Pentagon leaders have called on European allies to transfer their systems to Ukraine. “There are countries that have patriots, and so what we’re doing is continuing to engage with those countries,” Austin told the House Armed Services Committee in April. “I have spoken to the leaders of several countries,” he added, “encouraging them to give up more capabilities.”
Two other nations have responded to Ukraine’s request for more Patriots. Germany has so far deployed one Patriot system and Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said a second would be deployed by the end of June. The Netherlands has also deployed a Dutch-US battery to Ukraine and negotiations are underway to send a second.
Administration officials hope that the deployment of another American Patriot system will prompt allies to do the same.
“Ukraine needs more, that’s a fact,” Adm. Rob Bauer, chairman of NATO’s military committee, said in an interview last week. “Nations that have those weapons systems have to make the decision to take more risks against their own readiness.”
At a news conference during Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s trip to kyiv last month, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Ukraine urgently needed “seven batteries, of which two are needed, and they were needed yesterday, so we could protect the city.” of Kharkiv and the entire Kharkiv region.”
Beyond Kharkiv, Ukraine must take urgent steps to protect Odessa in the south, military analysts said, as well as the country’s power grid.
In recent months, a barrage of Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s power plants and substations has severely disrupted energy infrastructure, forcing Ukrainian authorities to order rolling blackouts across the country. This has raised concerns about what will happen when cold weather arrives and the use of heating devices increases the load on the energy system.
U.S. officials said there was relatively little high-level debate about whether to supply Ukraine with another Patriot. But officials said Austin and Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, debated which of the American Patriots to send.
The two men assessed that the Pentagon could move a Patriot battery to Poland, which had the advantage of being next to Ukraine.
The issue will come to the fore this week when Austin and General Brown travel to Belgium to attend defense meetings with NATO and its allies.
“I think you can expect that air defense, for all the obvious reasons, will be a topic of discussion,” Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said Monday.
The Patriot is by far the most expensive single weapons system the United States has supplied to Ukraine, with a total cost of around $1.1 billion: $400 million for the system and $690 million for the missiles.