With his Ukraine Express card un-frozen, Biden prepares to hit the munitions mall

(Originally published April 26 in “What in the World“) U.S. President Joe Biden is about to go shopping for $6 billion in new weapons for Ukraine.

Biden’s shopping trip follows his signing new legislation providing new military aid to Israel, Taiwan and reviving $61 billion in weapons for Kyiv. According to Politico, tops on his shopping list are more desperately needed artillery shells, missiles for Ukraine’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (Himars), National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (Nasams), and Patriot air defense batteries, air-to-air missiles, as well as drones and weapons to shoot down Russia’s Iranian and Chinese-made drones.

Biden promised beleaguered Ukraine the U.S. will rush fresh weapons to Kyiv as soon as possible. Most of those weapons are part of a $1 billion tranche earmarked for immediate help to Ukraine by giving it weapons already in the Pentagon’s arsenal. That means the Pentagon hands Ukraine “previously owned” weapons worth a depreciated value of $1 billion, but then gets to replace them with new weapons at their full list price. The rest of Biden’s $6 billion shopping spree is money to order up new weapons earmarked for Ukraine, but which will take years for defense contractors to build and deliver.

Some weapons, it turns out, were rushed so quickly they arrived before the bill was passed: Biden secretly approved shipping longer range Army Tactical Missile Systems, or Atacms, back in February. Biden first relented on providing Ukraine with the Atacms last October, but only a version with a range of roughly 150 kilometers.

In February, he secretly approved shipping even longer range Atacms that could hit targets as far as 300 kilometers away. It was reportedly those missiles that Ukrainian forces used last week to destroy Russian positions in Crimea.

The U.S., of course, isn’t the only country supplying Ukraine with military aid. When Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, announced this week that he would boost U.K. defense spending to 2.5% of GDP, he also pledged to send Ukraine 500 million pounds ($625 million) worth of weapons. The U.K. is also sending some of its Typhoon fighters to Poland to help defend its airspace against Russian incursions.

Tensions out on the eastern front could be heating up. Russian ally Belarus claimed Thursday that it had blocked an attempted drone strike by neighboring Lithuania. Lithuania denied it had launched an attack.