KYIV — The Ukrainian lieutenant was at a firing position on the eastern front, commanding an artillery unit relying on US-provided M777 howitzers and other big guns, as lawmakers gathered in Washington to decide if his cannons would be forced to go silent for lack of ammunition.
But when the lieutenant returned to his base Saturday night, he got the news that he and millions of Ukrainians had been praying to hear.
“I had just entered the building after a shift change when the guys informed me that the aid package for Ukraine had finally been approved by Congress,” said the lieutenant, who is identified only by his first name, Oleksandr, in line with military protocol. “We hope this aid package will reach us as soon as possible.”
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The decision by US lawmakers to resume military assistance after months of costly delay was greeted with a collective sigh of relief and an outpouring of gratitude across a battered and bloodied Ukraine. It may have been late in coming, soldiers and civilians said, but American support meant more than bullets and bombs.
It offered something equally important: hope.
Immediately after the vote passed in Congress, Ukrainian citizens took to social media to offer thanks and express joy, posting American flag memes blending Ukrainian imagery with American symbols like the Statue of Liberty.
“I have tears in my eyes,” Anton Gerashchenko, founder of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, a research group, said in a message. “So much suffering, so much pain. So many lost friends and wonderful people in these horrible years of war. Now there is hope to save more lives of those who are still alive.”
The $60 billion military assistance package approved by the House is expected to be voted on by the Senate and signed by President Biden as early as Tuesday. The Pentagon has said it could resume sending weapons to Ukraine within days through a well-established logistics network.
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While the Pentagon has not released details of what will be included in the first assistance package, the United States has provided the bulk of the ammunition most desperately needed by Ukrainian forces, including shells for artillery and precision rockets for longer-distance strikes.
Ukrainian officials have said it will also probably help replenish Ukraine’s short- and medium-range air defense systems, including missiles capable of intercepting Russian ballistic missiles that are being used to devastating effect on Ukraine’s energy grid.
Some items, such as artillery shells, could start arriving relatively quickly, but both Ukrainian commanders and military analysts cautioned that it would take weeks before the assistance started to have a direct effect on the fight.
“The frontline situation will therefore likely continue to deteriorate in that time, particularly if Russian forces increase their attacks to take advantage of the limited window before the arrival of new US aid,” analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group, wrote over the weekend.
Oleksandr said the Russians had appeared determined recently to throw as many resources into the battle as quickly as possible to take advantage of Ukraine’s depleted arsenal.
“The Russians spare nothing, neither air bombs nor artillery,” he said. “They can fire up to two or three Lancets for every one of our cannons in a day, where one Lancet costs more than the cannon itself,” he said, referring to one of Russia’s most sophisticated drones.
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Franz-Stefan Gady, a consulting senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said that even with US assistance, the air defense situation “will remain challenging for many months to come.” Renewed assistance, however, will allow European nations to ramp up their own arms production, he said.
Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army major general who is a fellow at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based research group, wrote that replenishing air defenses and artillery would be the top priorities for Ukraine but that the bill allowed for other crucial and less visible support. That includes “spare parts for US tanks and armored vehicles, drones, mortars, radios, engineering equipment and the panoply of equipment required on the modern battlefield,” he wrote on his Substack page.
Since US aid stopped flowing into Ukraine this year, Russia has been able to seize about 139 square miles, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
As Ukraine was forced to shift to defense, the Russian arsenal has been bolstered by the delivery of missiles and drones from Iran and North Korea, while support from China has helped Moscow mitigate the impact of sanctions, helping the Kremlin to convert its economy to a wartime footing.
Russia has also managed to replace the more than 315,000 troops who have been killed or wounded in battle, according to US officials.
The Russian army is now 15 percent larger than it was when it invaded Ukraine, General Christopher Cavoli, the head of US European Command, said in testimony to Congress before Saturday’s vote.
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Ukrainian officials have warned that Russia is setting the stage for a larger offensive in the late spring or early summer.
While the Russians have so far failed to exploit Ukraine’s deficit in both men and arms to achieve a major breakthrough, military analysts warned they may still be able to make significant advances in the coming weeks.
Russian forces continue to advance west of the city of Avdiivka, around Oleksandr’s firing position Saturday. They are also pounding the strategically important hilltop fortress of Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine.
If the Kremlin’s forces can seize the important high ground in the area, an agglomeration of the largest cities in the Donbas region still under Ukrainian control would be threatened.
As they have done day after day for more than two years, rescue workers from Odesa on the Black Sea to Sumy near Ukraine’s northern border with Russia raced to pull people from the rubble of bombed-out buildings as the House voted Saturday.
“But this day is still a little different,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his Saturday night address to the nation. “Today, we received the long-awaited decision: the American support package we’ve been fighting for so hard.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.