Ukrainian sources confirm that the country was only able to survive Russia’s original onslaught, when the world expected Kyiv to fall in days, because President Donald Trump had provided it with Javelin missiles in his first term.
Now he can end the war by arming Ukraine with game-changing Tomahawk long-range missiles and other munitions.
Reportedly, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky made that ask in his Tuesday sitdown with Trump.
Trump now says Ukraine can win the war and retake land captured by Russia — perhaps even Crimea, which President Barack Obama passively let Vladimir Putin seize in 2014.
The US Navy and the British Royal Navy both deploy Tomahawks able to strike land-based targets from surface ships and submarines; Washington has sold or is talking sales to Australia, Japan and the Netherlands, and certainly could swiftly sell some to EU nations to deliver to Kyiv.
With a range over 1,500 miles and a 900-pound warhead, these air-defense-evading cruise missiles (and launchers for them) would crucially increase the lethality of Ukraine’s defense forces — the capacity alone would oblige the Kremlin to pull its airbases much farther behind the front, and so vastly reduce the daily horrors Moscow now inflicts on Ukraine’s civilians.
More, Tomahawks would enable a fresh offensive to liberate cities and towns from under the Russian heel, as the missiles could target command-and-control systems all the way to Moscow.
“Sending even a single Tomahawk to Ukraine would scare the s–t out of the Russians more than almost anything else we could do,” a senior congressional aide told The Post.
Simply OKing the transfer of Tomahawks might force Putin to the bargaining table.
And if he won’t budge, he’d face the prospect of utter defeat — leaving him with nothing but losses from his war of conquest and humiliated in the eyes of the Russian people.
Obama and President Joe Biden never stopped blinking in the face of Putin aggression; tragically, if Biden had armed Ukraine as Moscow prepared to launch this war four years ago (rather than impotently threatening to impose sanctions after the Kremlin moved in), the war likely never would have begun.
Playing the Tomahawk card, perhaps along with long-awaited secondary sanctions, can finally put an end to the slaughter.
Make it clear to Putin and the rest of the world that America is as much the arsenal of democracy as ever — under Trump, more than ever.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
