President Joe Biden announced on Jan. 25, 2023, that the U.S. would send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine – following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s repeated requests for more military tanks to help wage its war against Russia.

“This is about helping Ukraine defend and protect Ukrainian land. It is not an offensive threat to Russia. There is no offensive threat to Russia. If Russian troops return to Russia, where they belong, this war would be over today. That is what we all want,” Biden said in his remarks at the White House.

The president’s announcement came on the same day Germany confirmed it was sending 14 Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine – a fraction of the 300 tanks Ukraine has said it needs to push Russia back from occupied territory. The United Kingdom has promised 12 tanks, alongside several other Western European countries that are giving armored vehicles and other war supplies.

The U.S. has not formally declared war against Russia, but the battlefield in Ukraine serves as a classic case of a proxy war, waged without a formal declaration.

U.S. support for Ukraine has been a constant throughout the first year of conflict, most recently extending as far as inviting Ukrainian forces to train on an Air Force system in the U.S..

I am a scholar of U.S. foreign policy and international security. As the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches on Feb. 24, 2023, I think it is important to put U.S. aid to Ukraine in perspective – both historically and as compared to other current U.S. military aid commitments worldwide.

Doing so may help answer an important question: Is the U.S. prepared to support Ukraine for the long haul, or will its current high level of spending commitment be undone by the whiplash of polarized U.S. domestic politics?

Here are four key points about U.S. support for Ukraine to understand, and how the U.S. is signaling it will stand with Ukraine for the long term.

The delivery of Western tanks will bolster Ukraine’s arsenal. Until now, the Ukrainian military has been relying on older, prior-generation Soviet-era T-72s.

The Western tanks come with challenges, though. The Abrams, for example, relies on jet fuel, and it is expensive and complicated to maintain and train on. But the deployment of these tanks, along with tanks from Germany and the U.K., signals that the West would like to give Ukraine a fighting chance to retake the territory that Russia has conquered and occupied since February 2022.

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