President Joe Biden authorized this aid through his presidential drawdown authority, the fortieth such instance, which allows the military to take these weapons from their own stockpiles to provide them to Ukraine. This process takes a much shorter period of time than the alternative, which is when the Department of Defense essentially pays for United States defense contractors to build the weapons and then send them to Ukraine.
Ukraine has begun its long-awaited counteroffensive, and its forces have had some minor success in the start, though the initial phase of such attacks is often the most difficult. They have liberated a handful of villages, though they're a long way away from their ultimate goal of forcing every Russian troop out of Ukraine.
Sixteen U.S. Bradley infantry fighting vehicles have either been destroyed or damaged and abandoned in recent days, which represents almost 15% of the 109 that Washington has given Kyiv, CNN reported on Monday, citing Jakub Janovsky of the Dutch open-source intelligence website Oryx.
