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WASHINGTON: The grinding war between Ukraine and its Russian invaders has escalated ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration, with President Joe Biden rushing out billions of dollars more in military aid before US support for Kyiv’s defenses is thrown into question under the new administration.
Russia, Ukraine and their global allies are scrambling to put their side in the best possible position for any changes that Trump may bring to American policy in the nearly 3-year-old war. The president-elect insisted in recent days that Russia and Ukraine immediately reach a ceasefire and said Ukraine should likely prepare to receive less US military aid.
On the war’s front lines, Ukraine’s forces are mindful of Trump’s fast-approaching presidency and the risk of losing their biggest backer.
If that happens, “those people who are with me, my unit, we are not going to retreat,” a Ukrainian strike-drone company commander, fighting in Russia’s Kursk region with the 47th Brigade, told The Associated Press by phone.
“As long as we have ammunition, as long as we have weapons, as long as we have some means to defeat the enemy, we will fight,” said the commander, who goes by his military call sign, Hummer. He spoke on condition he not be identified by name, citing Ukrainian military rules and security concerns.
“But, when all means run out, you must understand, we will be destroyed very quickly,” he said.
The Biden administration is pushing every available dollar out the door to shore up Ukraine’s defenses before leaving office in six weeks, announcing more than $2 billion in additional support since Trump won the presidential election last month.
The US has sent a total of $62 billion in military aid since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. And more help is on the way.
The administration is on track to disperse the US portion of a $50 billion loan to Ukraine, backed by frozen Russian assets, before Biden leaves the White House, US officials said. They said the US and Ukraine are in “advanced stages” of discussing terms of the loan and close to executing the $20 billion of the larger loan that the US is backing.
Biden also has eased limits on Ukraine using American longer-range missiles against military targets deeper inside Russia, following months of refusing those appeals over fears of provoking Russia into nuclear war or attacks on the West. He’s also newly allowed Ukraine to employ antipersonnel mines, which are banned by many countries.
Biden and his senior advisers, however, are skeptical that allowing freer use of the longer-range missiles will change the broader trajectory of the war, according to two senior administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
But the administration has at least a measure of confidence that its scramble, combined with continued strong European support, means it will leave office having given Ukraine the tools it needs to sustain its fight against Russia for some time, the officials said.
Enough to hold on, but not enough to defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces, according to Ukraine and some of its allies.
Even now, “the Biden administration has been very careful not to run up against the possibility of a defeated Putin or a defeated Russia” for fear of the tumult that could bring, said retired Gen. Philip Breedlove, a former supreme allied commander of NATO. He is critical of Biden’s cautious pace of military support for Ukraine.
Events far from the front lines this past weekend demonstrated the war’s impact on Russia’s military.
In Syria, rebels seized the country’s capital and toppled Russia-allied President Bashar Assad. Russian forces in Syria had propped up Assad for years, but they moved out of the way of the rebels’ assault, unwilling to take losses to defend their ally.
Biden said it was further evidence that US support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was wearing down Russia’s military.
Trump, who has long spoken favorably of Putin and described Zelensky as a “showman” wheedling money from the US, used that moment to call for an immediate ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.
And asked in a TV interview — taped before he met with Zelensky over the weekend in Paris — if Ukraine should prepare for the possibility of reduced aid, Trump said, “Yeah. Probably. Sure.”
Trump’s supporters call that pre-negotiation maneuvering by an avowed deal-maker. His critics say they fear it shows he is in Putin’s sway.
Zelensky said Monday that Russian forces’ retrenchment from outposts worldwide demonstrates that “the entire army of this great pseudo-empire is fighting against the Ukrainian people today.”
“Forcing Putin to end the war requires Ukraine to be strong on the battlefield before it can be strong diplomatically,” Zelensky wrote on social media, repeating near-daily appeals for more longer-range missiles from the US and Europe.
In Kursk, Hummer, the Ukrainian commander, said he notices Russian artillery strikes and shelling easing up since the US and its European allies loosened limits on use of longer-range missiles.
But Moscow has been escalating its offensives in other ways in the past six months, burning through men and materiel in infantry assaults and other attacks far faster than it can replace them, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
In Kursk, that includes Russia sending waves of soldiers on motorcycles and golf carts to storm Ukrainian positions, Hummer said. The Ukrainian drone commander and his comrades defend the ground they have seized from Russia with firearms, tanks and armored vehicles provided by the US and other allies.
Ukraine’s supporters fear that the kind of immediate ceasefire Trump is urging would be mostly on Putin’s terms and allow the Russian leader to resume the war when his military has recovered.
“Putin is sacrificing his own soldiers at a grotesque rate to take whatever territory he can on the assumption that the US will tell Ukraine that US aid is over unless Russia gets to keep what it has taken,” Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, wrote on his Substack channel.
Putin’s need for troops led him to bring in North Korean forces. Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use longer-range missiles more broadly in Russia was partly in response, intended to discourage North Korea from deeper involvement in the war, one of the senior administration officials said.
Since 2022, Russia already had been pulling forces and other military assets from Syria, Central Asia and elsewhere to throw into the Ukraine fight, said George Burros, an expert on the Russia-Ukraine conflict at the Institute for the Study of War.
Any combat power that Russia has left in Syria that it could deploy to Ukraine is unlikely to change battlefield momentum, Burros said.
“The Kremlin has prioritized Ukraine as much as it can,” he said.