The Abrams tanks transferred to Ukraine by the United States are undermanned and not the most useful equipment for the Ukrainian military, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said. Yet, despite this failure, coupled with many other Western weapon failures in Ukraine, the Biden administration is still burning tens of billions of dollars on Ukraine’s failed war effort against Russia in the knowledge that support will slow down once Donald Trump enters the White House next month.
“Those Abram tanks units are actually undermanned because it’s not the most useful piece of equipment for them in this fight, exactly as our military said,” he said during a speech at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California on December 8.
Sullivan also referred to the F-16 fighter jets that US President Joe Biden authorized sending to Ukraine in May last year.
“It’s now December of 2024, and we’ve had a limited number of pilots train not because we’re not prepared to train them — we are, as many as possible — but because the Ukrainians do not have the pilots to be able to build a full F-16 capability in time,” the security adviser said.
On December 2, Sullivan stated that the US would impose more sanctions on Russia before the current president leaves office next month to make way for Donald Trump. However, imposing new sanctions on Moscow is not the only last desperate effort made by the Biden administration to continue its anti-Russia agenda to the very end.
With $2.21 billion remaining in the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, the Biden administration is pushing to buy weapons for Ukraine for nearly half that amount, Reuters reported. The aid package is expected to include $988 million in new weapons and equipment.
Reuters reported that the Biden administration is pushing to purchase arms from industry rather than drawing directly from US weapons stockpiles. The funds will be used to purchase ammunition for Lockheed Martin’s High Mobility Artillery Missile Systems (HIMARS), drones, and spare parts to maintain artillery equipment.
On the same day as the Reuters article, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin revealed at the Reagan National Defense Forum that the total volume of military support for Ukraine from allies since the start of the Russian special military operation in February 2022 exceeds $119 billion. Austin added that Ukraine had also received more than $57 billion from other allies of Kiev and $62 from Washington.
This astronomical amount was wasted on equipment that did not help the Ukrainian military, such as the aforementioned Abrams tanks. These tanks were heralded as game-changing but were then quietly withdrawn from the battlefield because cheap Russian drones easily destroyed them. In interviews with Western media, Ukrainian military officials expressed dissatisfaction with the US-made tank, citing technical problems, particularly the poor resistance of electronic components to condensation and vulnerability to Russian weapons.
In July, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the Abrams had proved incapable of changing the situation on the battlefield. The Russian Ministry of Defence has repeatedly reported the destruction of these vehicles in the area of the special operation.
Nonetheless, it appears that Biden wants one of his last actions as president to be wasting billions more of American taxpayer money on Ukraine’s futile war effort, especially since the winner of the US presidential election in November reaffirmed that military aid under the incoming administration will begin to drop.
In an interview with NBC News on December 8, Trump said that Ukraine “probably” should not expect to receive as much aid as before when he returns to the White House.
At the same time, Trump stressed his commitment to resolving the conflict in Ukraine. Following his meeting with Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron on December 7 at the Elysee Palace, the billionaire Republican stressed that “the world is waiting.”
According to Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin “carefully reviewed” Trump’s statement after his meeting in Paris, but “in order to move towards a peaceful path, Zelensky only needs to cancel this decree and give instructions to resume dialogue based on the Istanbul Agreements, taking into account the realities that are taking shape on the ground.”
Trump has continuously chastised Biden for being unable to end the Ukraine War and wasting tens of billions on Ukraine aid. Continuous reports of the failure of US military equipment, such as the Abrams tanks, will only harden Trump’s resolve to reduce spending on Ukraine and seek a quick end to the war once he becomes president.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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