What went wrong with Biden's arms shipments to Ukraine
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It's nearly three years since Russia invaded Ukraine, and on the front lines, the battle grinds on. In Washington, D.C., the reelection of Donald Trump has ratcheted up uncertainty over Kyiv's war effort. Many Ukrainians fear the new U.S. president will impose peace on terms favorable to Moscow.

But even before the change of power, during the final year of President Joe Biden's administration, arms shipments to Ukraine were stalled until his term was nearly over. On this special episode, we look into why that happened and the consequences on the battlefield. I'm Christopher Walgesper in Chicago.

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In January, our reporters Anastasia Malenko, based in Kyiv, and Mari Saito in Berlin, traveled to eastern Ukraine to understand just how crucial U.S. military supplies have been to the war effort. So Anastasia and I were traveling to eastern Ukraine in around the middle of January. So you can imagine there's a lot of frost and frozen snow on the ground. It's freezing cold.

I mean, the weather was awful. I think Anastasia got sick of me complaining about it as a Ukrainian. I was also very cold, so I definitely agreed with the complaints. But we took a muddy road to get to the training field where some of the servicemen of the brigade that is currently fighting on Ukraine's eastern front, they showed us the American vehicles that they're currently using.

One of the driver and mechanics that we met on the training field goes by a call sign Tyson. So M113 is an armored personnel carrier. So as Tyson explained to us, it is absolutely instrumental for anything on the front line. So think supplying provisions, supplying ammunition, and most importantly, evacuating the wounded. He stressed transporters.

to us the importance of speed in those situations. So having these cars up and running and repairing them as fast as possible is the priority for Tyson and for his fellow servicemen. On the battlefield, there are a lot of mines and there are also a lot of drones. So these cars are big noticeable targets. So they get damaged quite a lot. But these vehicles also really keep the infantrymen who use them safe.

You know, because they're dealing with so much kind of damaged equipment on a day-to-day basis, they have become really ingenious with trying to find fixes that are fast so they can continue using these vehicles and get the vehicles back to the front as quickly as possible. It's kind of incredible because one of the soldiers showed us a video that was posted on social media of a Ukrainian recovery unit basically driving an armored vehicle into Ukraine

a field that was coming under fire from the russian side so they pull out a chain and they hook it up to this damaged vehicle and they're speeding out with this heavy vehicle in tow and it just these kinds of efforts show you just how important these armored vehicles are how prized they are

While Ukrainian soldiers at training facilities are desperate for these armored vehicles, Mari and Anastasia also visited a repair facility charged with keeping these valuable transport vehicles ready for action. The difficulty with these kinds of things is that we're working with our colleagues from D.C. who are looking at data, who are talking to policymakers, to politicians, to administration officials,

And then you're actually like on the ground, you know, in eastern Ukraine going to where the battle is being fought. And we were very interested in talking directly to mechanics, you know, about what their needs were. Exactly. Because we actually saw the damage that they were talking about. And we talked to mechanics who actually have to wait for spare parts, who could point at a car and say,

I can't fix it right now. And some of the stories that they tell you about places like Avdivka or the fights that they have been in, the difficult situations that they're seeing on the front, especially now, it's very, yeah, it's difficult to listen to, I think, truth be told.

But it's really important, I think, to hear directly from these soldiers about what they're seeing and what their issues are. Yeah. Exactly. It is a completely different experience. Just, for example, one of the servicemen we were talking to was fixing a Humvee that was damaged in the town of Chassivyar. So...

When we get to this shop of the 24th Separate Mechanized Brigade, which is a big repair facility where mechanics and soldiers from this brigade were fixing up American Humvees, essentially, in this big hangar. The first Humvee that we saw in this repair facility, the tires are blown out, the front part of the vehicle was mangled. I'm not sure if it had driven over a mine. I think we

We spoke to one of the mechanics who were looking at it. Yeah, he said he wasn't sure whether it was mine or drone damage, but he was basically telling us how easy it is to actually damage these cars because basically if a drone hits even one wheel and the car can't go any further, then a couple more drones can just finish the car before it's evacuated. So the people we talked to were actually talking about the importance of evacuating people first and foremost, but also evacuating these cars.

So Tyson and servicemen of the 24th Brigade all emphasized how important the spare parts and their speedy delivery is to repair these vehicles quickly and get them up and running and back to the front faster.

Back in Washington, D.C., our national security reporter, Erin Banco, was trying to figure out why it was just so arduous to get these supplies promised by U.S. politicians actually shipped to the front lines. What we found when we did our reporting is that there were two main issues that came up for officials inside the Biden administration, one of which was a concern mostly held among officials

officials inside the Pentagon, but also some inside the National Security Council, that whatever the U.S. did in terms of weapons shipments was going to provoke President Putin in Moscow to retaliating not just against Ukraine, but against U.S. military personnel based overseas and Europe writ large. The second concern held among, again, officials mostly inside the Pentagon was one of readiness. So did the U.S. have

enough of whichever weapon they were debating to send on to Ukraine? Could the U.S. risk potentially running out or running low on that weapon? The second piece of this puzzle is one of logistics. So sending weapons in any war from the U.S. to whichever country we're talking about is very complicated.

And so for really small shipments, say of things like night vision goggles or bullets or ammunition, that process can be pretty swift because we have a lot of those things in our stockpiles and they're pretty easy to move. But when we're talking about bigger things like tanks or heavy artillery, those kinds of things, just the shipping process in general can take a long time. That's just single shipments. Now, if you bulk all those shipments together, you're going

you're going to get delays because we can only move so many weapons at one time. But the key thing to look at here is that some of these weapons need to be refurbished and fixed before they made their way to Ukraine. That also slowed down shipments. And so it was always out of key a narrative of too little, too late. The key question for us was, if the shipments had gotten to Ukraine on time, would it have made a difference?

So what did you find out? What did the White House say about the speed of these deliveries? When we went to the Biden administration for comment about our reporting, one senior U.S. official rejected the notion that the U.S. moved too slowly or metered out the aid over time. This person basically said, look, without Washington's support, Ukraine would have lost significantly more ground and Russia would have advanced far further into Ukraine.

So they basically rejected the notion that slow deliveries was the reason for Ukraine losing ground. Now, another U.S. official did accept our analysis that things did move too slowly in 2024 and even went on to say that Jake Sullivan and the National Security Council had really pushed the Pentagon to move faster.

But again, that official noted that was not the reason why Ukraine lost ground in 2024 or why they failed to advance. They lay that at Kiev's feet for not having the manpower that it needed to make advances on the battlefield. Now, officials from the Pentagon and the Biden White House declined to comment on the record on Reuters findings.

Now, one thing I found interesting in your reporting is the use of the word delivered when talking about these weapons. It really seems that there's not a clear definition for the term.

This was one of the more interesting aspects of our investigation. So all the service branches have some sort of responsibility for tracking U.S. weapons that are sent to Ukraine. And some of them were using spreadsheets. Some of them were taking notes with pen and paper and then filling them in manually on a computer. But what we found is that some of these service branches, in particular the Army and the Navy, were tracking in those systems that shipments had been delivered to Ukraine from

Well, that's...

That sounds chaotic. It raises all sorts of questions from end-use monitoring concerns about where do these weapons end up once they get inside Ukraine and how do we make sure that they're in the right hands to confusion inside the Pentagon at any given moment throughout the war about where weapons were in the shipping pipelines.

A U.S. official familiar with the matter says the Pentagon has since updated internal manuals to clarify how service branches should define delivered. But to this day, it's not clear how broadly that rule has been implemented or whether it applies retroactively. The Pentagon did not respond to questions about these data discrepancies.

What did those final few months of 2024 look like for this whole process? We get to November. We get to around election time.

And only about half of what the U.S. had promised from its stockpiles from the 2024 promise had been delivered. And there's a real urgency inside the Biden administration to get shipments moving more quickly. The surge, quote unquote, the surge, as the Biden administration dubbed it, was announced in late September.

And any official you talk to about this will say it's because the president really wanted to spend all the money he could in the time he had left to get Ukraine what it needed. He wanted Ukraine to be able to defend itself through 2025. But it's also clear around this time that the polls are closing between Harris and Trump.

There's a lot of concern inside the administration about the extent to which Trump, if he wins, will cut off aid to Ukraine. So there's urgency on a lot of different fronts. And what we see is the announcement from the Pentagon in terms of pure dollar amounts of spending that takes place from October or the end of September to January is just an extraordinary uptick.

from what the U.S. had announced in the previous six months. Now, it should be noted that this looked on a graph like a big uptick. But in terms of monthly averages that the U.S. was spending from October to January, it was the same amount that the U.S. had been sending on average, monthly average, in 2022 and in 2023.

Why it was sort of dubbed a surge, and you see this uptick on the graph, is because there had been so little spending in shipments in the six months prior. And that's partly because there had been this massive spending bill on Capitol Hill that had stalled out. I do think it's important to note that it's really unclear at this point in the war whether any combination of weapon systems or policy decisions...

would have helped Kyiv, quote unquote, win by this point. There are some officials you talk to who say if we had front loaded everything at the beginning of the war and given Ukraine all of the best heavy weaponry at the beginning, then they would have had more of a chance of making gains really early in the war and we'd be at a different place. But again, it's just so hard to tell what would have happened. But it is important to note that

that these low shipments throughout 2024 did make a real difference on the ground for Kyiv. They really wanted to move more quickly. They wanted to be at a better place going into 2025 to be able to go into potential negotiations with Russia and to have a little bit more leverage at that table. Now, the Ukrainian military declined to comment and the defense ministry, as well as the president's office, did not respond to requests for comment on Reuters reporting.

Trump's Ukraine envoy, General Keith Kellogg, would not say directly whether the administration would continue to send weapons to Ukraine. So, Mari Anastasia, what's been the impact of all this on the front lines?

So when talking to Tyson, we asked him a similar question. Basically, what happens when you don't have the spare parts you need to get these vehicles up and running? And the thing he thought about first was the evacuation of the wounded. And he told us that there's been a lot of situations when if they didn't have the vehicle that was available to pick up someone who was injured, they would die. And there were a lot of stories like that. And it's quite difficult to talk about.

And you can look at cases like, you know, especially last spring going into summer where brigades like Tyson's were waiting for ammunition. And there was another soldier, right, that we spoke to who was in Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine, which has since been captured by Russian forces. Then I was in Donbass last year, right as U.S. Congress was passing the bill.

Sitting in trenches with these similar kind of soldiers where they are rationing mortar shells because they can't fire back because they don't have enough ammunition. Gosh, what's the mood, you know, in a trench or on a front line when you're acutely aware of just how little supplies you have left?

I think like, so for example, beekeeper, right, that you spoke to Anastasia, this is his call sign, a really interesting soldier that we met in this training field in eastern Ukraine. And he was talking about January, February 2024. And they have Russian soldiers coming.

Coming through water pipes to try and infiltrate behind Ukrainian lines is kind of harrowing, you know, scary scene. And they're sitting there with limited mortar shells. Exactly. Right? Yeah. And then one of the other servicemen I talked with from the 24th Brigade, Leonid Chacharov,

He was saying how he recently went on a repair mission closer to the front line and how the guys there were exhausted, of course, but that they were holding on because there is no other choice. These people work around the clock to repair any equipment that gets to them. One of the servicemen in the 24th Brigade was

was telling me a story about how they got Paladin Howitzer. And they basically got an order around 7 p.m. to have it done by the morning. They never worked on this type of equipment before. But then this group of like five to six guys managed to fix it together with another unit. And they said it was instrumental in repelling a Russian attack. The fact that that Howitzer made it to the front line in time meant that Ukrainians could actually repel an attack. It was as simple as that.

So despite these efforts to keep equipment running on the front lines, we've heard a lot about Russia regaining territory that Ukraine had clawed back. What's that look like in the areas you visited?

So we were talking to servicemen who work with equipment that's getting evacuated from some of the fiercest battles going on right now on Ukraine's eastern front. So you have Russian forces pushing north of Kharkiv city in the northeast. That's Ukraine's second largest city. They're pushing in Kharkiv region in Kopyansk, which was a very important city that Ukraine had managed to win back.

And then in Donetsk, like in Donbas, Chasiv Yar, which is where the 24th, the guys we met, are fighting in the city, a site of one of the fiercest battles, where Russian forces have been pushing to capture that city on the hill. It's a very important hilltop city. They've been pushing and pushing there and advancing on Pokrovsk, shelling it relentlessly,

So the numbers are not sufficient to kind of explain the scale of the war that's taking place and the battles that are taking place, but Russian forces are aggressively pushing forward. Yeah, that's what the servicemen said, too. They were saying that just the amount of manpower that Russia is throwing into these battles, it's difficult to describe.

Given what we know about Donald Trump's claims about ending the war, how do Ukrainians feel about heading into ceasefire negotiations given the state of things on the front lines?

When I was talking to some of the servicemen about the prospect of negotiations, just what they think about the political climate now, they kind of laughed it off and said, don't even ask about that. Because, I mean, these guys had to live with uncertainty for years now. And for them, uncertainty persists every day. It's not like it just entered the equation. I mean, from day to day, they have to react to what's going on on a very volatile front line. But they just don't know what will happen next.

I think, you know, as journalists, we kind of go into these places and we ask that question. And I think the very, very real question

Fact of the matter is that these soldiers are like trying to survive day to day, trying to keep their comrades alive day to day. I think there's just a general sense of fatigue and exhaustion. As Anastasia said earlier, it's like these guys have been living in war, in uncertainty. The feeling among them is whatever the rhetoric and the discussions are, this is their land and that they have to fight it. They have no choice.

A big thank you to Mari, Anastasia, Aaron, and their colleague Mike Stone for reporting on this story and to everyone covering the conflict at Reuters. The Reuters World News team includes Kim Vanell, Gail Issa, David Spencer, Sharon Reich-Garson, Jonah Green, and myself, Christopher Waljasper. Our senior producers are Tara Oakes and Carmel Crimmins. Lila de Gretzer is our executive producer.

Sound design and music composition by Josh Sommer. We'll be back on Monday with our daily headline show. To never miss an episode, make sure to follow us on your favorite podcast player or download the Reuters app.