The US presidential administration expects that Congress will consider a request for additional funding to assist Ukraine, the coordinator for strategic communications at the White House National Security Council, John Kirby, said at a regular briefing.
Kirby also noted said that Ukraine was experiencing a shortage of air defence missiles. He told reporters:
The Ukrainians are making some tough decisions on the battlefield about what they’re going to shoot and what they’re going to save for another day.
He added that the Russian Armed Forces were overloading Ukraine’s air defence systems, but they were quite “effective”. At the briefing, he emphasised:
But that — but what they are doing are trying to overwhelm Ukrainian air defence systems. And those air defence systems have been pretty effective at knocking a lot of this stuff out of the sky. Things get through, obviously. They don’t get — they don’t hit everything.
At a briefing on 22 January, Kirby said that the next few months would be critical for Ukraine as much of its weapons were depleting, but the US was committed to the strategy of supporting Kyiv and would continue to help.
In an interview with the Ukrainian publication Focus, an adviser to the AFU Air Force command, Yuriy Ignat, said that the Ukrainian command was afraid to store large stocks of missiles for air defence systems on its territory because they could be destroyed by the Russian Armed Forces. He noted that the situation was similar with the fleet of F-16 fighter jets, which could become a “good target” for the Russian Armed Forces.
