American military aid to Ukraine takes sometimes surprising paths.
These pass through Israel in particular, a country which has nevertheless undertaken since the beginning of the war not to supply any weapons to the two belligerents.
The Pentagon is indeed drawing on the reserves of ammunition and equipment that the United States has on the soil of the Jewish state to support kyiv against Moscow, revealed the New York Times, Tuesday, January 17.
Ammunition hidden somewhere in Israel
Tel Aviv agreed to Washington withdrawing around 300,000 munitions to send to Ukraine.
Half are already being shipped, Israeli and American officials told the New York Times.
The request was "made during an encrypted telephone exchange between the American Secretary of Defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, and Benny Gantz, who was then Israeli Minister of Defense", details the American daily.
This agreement was therefore negotiated before December 29, 2022 and the return to power of conservative Benjamin Netanyahu, known to be closer to Vladimir Putin than his predecessor Yair Lapid.
This Israeli detour of American aid highlights the existence of an arms depot in Israel little known to the general public, which has an undetermined number of weapons and ammunition, stored in places whose location is kept secret.
These are the WRSA-I - the War Reserve Stocks for Allies-Israel, or "war reserve stocks for allies-Israel" -, which have "ammunition and armaments of a maximum value of 4 billion dollars" , notes a congressional report on US aid provided to Israel published in 2022.
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The creation of this deposit was decided by mutual agreement between Washington and Tel Aviv after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It was to facilitate American military support to its main ally in the region in the event of a crisis and "to avoid what s happened in 1973 when US President Richard Nixon delayed the delivery of weapons to Israel," Politico said in an article on WRSA-I published in 2014.
Initially, in the 1980s, the ammunition stored there could only be used by the United States, should it intervene directly in a conflict in the region.
These armaments have, moreover, never been exclusively reserved for the defense of Israel.
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush allowed the Israeli military to use it, but only as a last resort during a crisis.
And Washington had to agree.
This turning point had, then, everything to do with the efforts of the American administration to sell armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia, underlines the report of the Congress.
The United States wanted to reassure Tel Aviv by allowing it access to this gigantic ammunition depot.
Ukraine fires 90,000 shells per month
Washington opened the doors of the WRSA-I much wider in the early 2000s. The Israeli request to dip into these reserves only required the agreement of the American military.
The political power might not even be informed.
A reality that took the White House by surprise in 2014, during one of the only two episodes in which Israel used this ammunition.
Eight years after receiving the green light from Washington in 2006 to use it during the conflict against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Israeli army drew on this stock during the war in Gaza.
Except that in 2014, Barack Obama was unaware.
The American president was presented with a fait accompli, discovering that mortar shells from his stockpiles in Israel had been used to bombard Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“This discovery was a shock that made Barack Obama furious with Benjamin Netanyahu,” reported the Wall Street Journal in 2014. But the American president could not do much about it: Tel Aviv had followed the procedure to the letter, which did not required him only to obtain the agreement of the American soldiers.
In the same way, the Israeli government cannot really prevent Washington from using a stockpile that belongs to it to help Ukraine.
The United States has no real choice if it wants to continue to support kyiv.
Ukraine depends almost 100% on artillery munitions from the West to continue to stand up to Russia, recalls the New York Times.
Problem: Ukraine uses nearly 90,000 shells per month, almost twice what the United States and its European allies can produce monthly, according to American authorities interviewed by The New York Times.
It is therefore necessary to dip into the stocks.
Washington does not want to dip too much into its national reserves and prefers to deplete its deposits abroad, the two main ones being in Israel and South Korea.
Seoul accepted without flinching.
The art of not angering Moscow
Tel Aviv, for its part, does not want to upset Moscow.
"First and foremost because Israel needs to maneuver freely in Syria and Russia controls the Syrian skies," says Omri Brinner, analyst and Middle East geopolitics specialist at the International Team for the Study of Security (ITSS) Verona, an international collective of experts in international security issues.
But that's not all.
Israel also needs to have good relations with Russia to have access, if necessary, to information on the actions of Iran, one of Moscow's best allies in the region.
"This transfer of ammunition to the Ukrainian front from Israel should not, however, harm Israeli-Russian relations too much, because Tel Aviv can always say that it is American ammunition, transported by the Americans", underlines Omri Brinner.
This expert would not be surprised, however, if Moscow asked Tel Aviv "for a concession, whether in the field of intelligence [exchange of information, Editor's note] or in the economic field".
The American decision also poses an internal security problem for Israel.
"If the government believed that there was an imminent threat against Israel, it would surely have protested more against this transfer of ammunition," said an expert on Russian-Israeli relations interviewed by France 24 and who preferred to remain anonymous.
In a way, the agreement of Israel obtained by Washington without too many problems proves that the Jewish state currently feels rather safe.
The United States has certainly promised that it will refill the WRSA-I as soon as possible, but in the current context of the war in Ukraine, it may not be easy to find 300,000 munitions overnight. .
But not impossible, believes Omri Brinner: "Washington can quickly tap into the other stocks they have in the region, whether in Egypt or Saudi Arabia."
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