With Musk’s cybertrucks in Ukraine, Biden readies weekend gift for Zelensky

(Originally published Sept. 24 in “What in the World“) Israel’s air force struck 1,600 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon Monday, killing hundreds in what is being described as the deadliest daily death toll there in 18 years.

With Israel now fighting a war on two fronts, the United States is sending more troops to the region. The USS Harry Truman aircraft carrier group is on its way to the Mediterranean, where it will conceivably join the USS Abraham Lincoln now in the Persian Gulf as a deterrent to Iran’s threatened retaliation for Israel’s July assassination in Tehran of Hamas’ political chief.

There’s no matching the zeal of the converted. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s second-newest member Finland has joined NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in publicly urging U.S. President Joe Biden to lift his ban on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles against targets in Russia.

Newly elected Finnish President Alexander Stubb told The New York Times: “I call upon our allies in the global West, including the United States, to allow Ukraine to fight without one hand tied behind its back and to lift those restrictions.” Stubb is en route to New York for the United Nation’s annual general assembly, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is scheduled to make an address Wednesday.

Nordic pressure might give Biden the diplomatic cover he needs to announce the reversal of a policy that the White House decided to reverse weeks, if not months, ago. But how such an announcement might affect the looming U.S. presidential race is unclear, particularly if it prompts Russia to retaliate with an escalation of its own.

Another pretext might have emerged: a Ukrainian military website has published evidence that Russian forces in Ukraine are using China-made ZFB-05 Xinxing armored vehicles, also known as Tigers. It isn’t clear whether China supplied the vehicles to Russia, or whether they might have been bought second-hand: the Tiger’s manufacturer, Shaanxi Baoji Special Vehicles Manufacturing, has been selling them internationally for both police forces and militaries since 2012, and they are in use as far and wide as Bolivia, Somalia, and Tajikistan.

Washington has accused Beijing of supplying Russia with dual-use technology for its arms factories and dual-use components for drones used in Ukraine, and once accused it of contemplating shipping lethal weapons for the war. Beijing has denied all the accusations.

It may be difficult, however, to blame Beijing for the vehicles finding their way to Ukraine if reports are also confirmed that Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has shipped Russia’s Ukraine forces two Tesla Cybertrucks.

Whether or not the Russians are using Elon Musk’s fugly trucks as Himars fodder, they are capitalizing on Ukraine’s diversion of forces into Russia’s Kursk province to seize territory in eastern Ukraine.

At any rate, odds are that the White House will unveil its not-so-surprising reversal on long-range missiles later this week when Zelensky is due in Washington and Biden is expected to announce the latest, $375 million weapons package for Ukraine.

Japan’s air force fired flares for the first time to ward off a Russian patrol plane that had violated its air space. Japanese F-35s and F-15s were scrambled when the Russian Il-38 entered Japanese airspace three times near an island off the coast of Hokkaido, marking the first Russian violation of Japanese airspace since 2019. Russia and China are conducting joint military exercises in the nearby Sea of Japan, though it wasn’t clear whether the Il-38’s flight was part of those. The U.S. is responding to the increase in joint Sino-Russian exercises in the North Pacific and Arctic Ocean by beefing up its naval presence in Alaska.