Ukraine has received barely enough modern vehicles for “even four out of 14” brigades the Ukrainian army has been organizing, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN on Sept. 15. 

A Ukrainian brigade typically has 2,000 troops in three or four battalions, each of which normally has 31 vehicles: armoured trucks, tracked armoured personnel carriers or tanks, depending on the kind of battalion. Fourteen brigades would need around 1,300 vehicles. By Zelensky’s count, the new brigades are short by a thousand.

It’s not that Ukraine’s allies haven’t pledged a lot of vehicles. Since Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022, these allies have promised around 5,200 tanks, APCs and armoured trucks – most of them modern designs. These are additive, of course – Ukraine went to war nearly three years ago with thousands of ex-Soviet vehicles, and many thousands more in storage.

But 30 months of hard fighting has taken a toll. According to Oryx, an intelligence collective that tracks vehicle losses in Ukraine, the Ukrainian military has lost no fewer than 4,700 vehicles to Russian action. The vehicles the allies have pledged are barely adequate to replace battlefield losses – and are totally inadequate to both replace losses and equip the dozens of new brigades Kyiv has formed since 2022.

Worse, the allies have been slow to honor their pledges. Of the 5,200 vehicles they’ve promised, just 2,900 have been delivered. Many of the others are still awaiting refurbishment after years or decades in storage. 

Perhaps most notably, a Belgian-Danish-Dutch consortium has handed over just 60 or so German-made Leopard 1 tanks 19 months after first offering nearly 200 of the tanks to Ukraine. The Danes blame the Germans for taking too long to repair the 1980s-vintage Leopard 1s. The Germans blame a shortage of spare parts.

Desperate to equip new brigades with heavy equipment – any heavy equipment – the Ukrainian defense ministry has scoured warehouses and vehicle parks for “what we had,” Zelensky said. What the Ukrainians had was a lot of Cold War leftovers, including BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles dating back to the 1960s. 

The problem, of course, is that a 60-year-old BMP-1 with its paper-thin armour is hopelessly vulnerable to modern anti-tank weapons and drones. Riding in a BMP-1 is better than marching into battle on foot, but only barely.

What’s especially galling about Ukraine’s vehicle shortage is that its biggest ally, the United States, has thousands of surplus M-1 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles sitting in desert storage – but has given Ukraine just 31 M-1s and a little more than 300 M-2s. 

The United States could solve Ukraine’s vehicle problem in an instant. It even has the funds to do so – nearly $6 billion in so-called “presidential drawdown authority” that pays for new weapons after the president sends old weapons to an ally. It’s the policy of US president Joe Biden, a Democrat, to give away only those vehicles he can replace.

Worryingly, Biden has been inexplicably slow to use his drawdown authority. By law, the current drawdown funds expire on Sept. 30. The White House has asked the US Congress to include a clause in a budget patch that would extend the funding into next year, but that funding patch passes or fails at the whims of the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson. 

Bear in mind, this is the same speaker who blocked US funding for Ukraine for six months starting back in October. Johnson’s allegiance lies with disgraced Republican ex-president Donald Trump, and Trump’s allegiance – it seems – lies with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

For Americans, all this politicking is frustrating. For Ukrainian troops who desperately need modern vehicles to give them a fighting chance along the front line of Russia’s brutal war, it’s more than frustrating. It’s a matter of life and death – not only for them but for their families and their entire nation.