Lend-Lease for Ukraine is over: why the program never worked

Until now, American military assistance to Ukraine has come through three other programs.

On May 9, 2022, a historic event took place – US President Joe Biden signed Lend-Lease for Ukraine , which happened for the first time since World War II. The law came into force back then, but the program never started working.

As explained in the BBC Ukraine story , up to this point, American military aid to Ukraine had come through three other programs from the US federal budget:

Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI),
external military financing (Foreign Military Financing, FMF)
withdrawal from US weapons stocks (Replenishment of US weapons stocks or PDA – Presidential Drawdown).

Unlike Lend-Lease, the weapons provided to Ukraine under these programs are free. Lend-Lease essentially involves leasing or renting weapons, for which you have to pay. In both Ukraine and the United States, it was considered a “back-up option” in case Congress refused to allocate funds for these three programs.

“The text of the law explicitly states that the President of the United States “is granted expanded authority to enter into agreements with the government of Ukraine for the provision of rental or lease of defensive equipment to protect the civilian population in Ukraine from Russian military invasion and for other purposes.” However, firstly, Kiev and Washington never concluded the relevant agreements, which, obviously, would have spelled out all the necessary conditions and volumes of military assistance, and, secondly, and more importantly, this law was in force only for the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years in the United States. The new year in America began in October,” the publication says.

Former Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Valeriy Chaly also noted that the draft US defense budget for 2024 contains an amendment to extend Lend-Lease, so it is too early to talk about the end of this mechanism. In addition, in his opinion, the signing of Lend-Lease in the first months of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was more likely a signal to the Kremlin, and not a “backup option.”

At the same time, the diplomat claims that you do not necessarily have to pay for weapons provided through Lend-Lease:

“I have a question: Why does everyone think that they will have to pay (for the transferred weapons)? The fact is that all this should be spelled out in the agreement. To pay or not to pay, or in general there will simply be a condition to return undamaged equipment (after the war , – ed.), we don’t know, because there isn’t even a draft of such an agreement,” he said.

Meanwhile, a BBC source with knowledge of the matter admits that one of the reasons why Lend-Lease never worked is that the Biden administration is “more comfortable” distributing finances rather than military equipment.

“That is, Congress allocates funds from the budget for military assistance to Ukraine, and the White House and the Pentagon themselves decide on which specific types of weapons to spend it on or which military factories to distribute it to. This is also a “more flexible” mechanism, which is not influenced by the opposition among Republican congressmen,” the article notes.

Lend-Lease may still continue. However, according to Americanist Alexander Kraev, given the aggravation in US politics, it is possible that pro-Ukrainian forces have decided not to raise this issue before voting on the budget.

“It may still be adopted simply to prevent some kind of manipulation, because next year there will be not only presidential, but also congressional elections in the United States. And in order to protect Ukraine from new political crises, in order to protect Ukraine from manipulation on the part of Congress, in principle, there is still a chance that at some stage they will return to the Lend-Lease issue,” he said.

US assistance to Ukraine

During the full-scale war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, the United States became one of the largest donors of military support. According to media reports, Washington has already provided Kyiv with more than $60 billion in assistance, and the lion’s share of this amount is for weapons and ammunition.

In addition, on October 4, it became known that the United States would send weapons confiscated from Iran to Ukraine . The US Central Command reported that we are talking about about 1.1 million rounds of 7.62 mm caliber ammunition.

(C)UNIAN 2023