CNN  — 

The US military’s top commander in Europe compiled a list of weapons systems the US possesses that could help Ukraine in its fight against Russia that the Biden administration has not yet provided, including air-to-surface missiles and a secure communications network used by NATO.

In an annex attached to a classified report about the Biden administration’s Ukraine strategy that was delivered to Congress early last month, Gen. Chris Cavoli outlined a list of US capabilities that could help the Ukrainian military fight more effectively, according to people familiar with the report.

The list included the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, a type of air-launched cruise missile, and a communications system known as the Link 16 — a data sharing network used by the US and NATO that is supposed to enable more seamless communication between battle systems and is particularly useful for air and missile defense command and control. Ukraine has asked for both systems repeatedly, another source familiar with their requests said.

Cavoli’s list does not address why the US hasn’t provided systems that he assesses would be of value. But US officials have previously expressed concerns about sensitive US technology falling into Russian hands, which one source said is likely the holdup with the Link 16 system. The air-to-surface missiles, which are fired from fighter jets, might not be useful to the Ukrainians unless they achieve some level of air superiority, the source added.

Nearly three years into the war, the Ukrainians are still pleading with the US to provide more advanced weaponry and lift restrictions on how long-range missile systems provided by the US can be used. And with the US presidential election less than one month away, the future of the US’ support for Ukraine is uncertain, even as the US says it is working to make sure Ukraine has what it needs to last them through at least the end of 2025.

The Ukrainian government continues to lobby hard. When President Volodymyr Zelensky met with President Joe Biden at the White House late last month, he came armed with a detailed list—not of weapons, but of targets inside Russia that he wants to hit with US-provided long-range missiles, known as ATACMS, according to sources familiar with the meeting.

The list is a key part of Zelensky’s “victory plan” for winning the war. Biden, who has to date prohibited the Ukrainians from deploying the missile systems for deep strikes into Russia, was not entirely dismissive of the request, the sources said. But he was ultimately non-committal.

The leaders agreed to keep discussing the issue. But Biden won’t be meeting with Zelensky again in the near future after he canceled a trip to Germany for a gathering of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group this week, and it remains unlikely that the US will change its policy on long-range missiles, officials told CNN.

Broadly, US officials say they are giving Ukraine everything that the US military assesses Kyiv needs at this moment to support its fight. Officials also argue that that the US’ limited supply of long-range ATACMS systems are better used against targets in Crimea. The Ukrainians have already conducted several successful strikes deep inside Russia using their own long-range drones that have damaged Russia’s defense industrial base, US officials note — drones that in fact have a far longer range than the ATACMs.

US officials have also said that Russia has moved some of its most valuable targets outside of the ATACMS’ 180-mile range, anyway. The Ukrainians have argued, though, that there are plenty of Russian assets within range, including military bases and production and logistics facilities, that would make for strategic targets.

As a way to “Trump-proof” US security aid, should former President Donald Trump win in November, the US and its allies have been working on ways to ensure that Ukraine has what it needs through the end of 2025. NATO has established its own mechanism for facilitating aid and military training, which was launched in July. The Pentagon is also getting closer to offering contracts to private American companies to travel to the country and help with the equipment sustainment and logistics there, officials said, a key part of making sure Ukraine’s weapons and equipment don’t break down at key moments.

Broadly, though, the US is hoping that 2025 marks a turning point for Russia’s ability to sustain its own war effort.

Russia has lost hundreds of thousands of fighters in close to three years of fighting. To make any substantial gains on the battlefield, officials have long believed President Vladimir Putin will need to order another politically risky troop mobilization. And both US officials and independent analysts say that although the Kremlin has successfully shielded its economy from some of the bite of western sanctions in the near-term, there are some signs that its economy may begin to show strain by the end of next year.

Putin “always thinks Americans have attention deficit disorder,” CIA Director Bill Burns said during a national security conference in Sea Island, Georgia, on Monday. “This is one of those cases where we have to demonstrate the strength of our support for Ukraine, because there’s a lot riding on this.”

Still, critics say that the administration’s plan for victory in Ukraine remains fuzzy. According to one source who read the report, the classified strategy delivered to Congress defined victory only in vague terms of Ukrainian sovereignty and self-determination. In another classified annex, it suggested categorized that might be used to judge success, such as reclaimed territory, but provided no benchmarks.

For now, the picture on the battlefield remains fluid. Russia has made grinding gains in the country’s east, which officials see as Putin’s priority. Ukraine earlier in the year seized a huge swath of territory inside Russia that it continues to hold, for now, a move that some officials believe may stretch Kyiv too thin across the front lines in the east.

In the late afternoon on 7 October, an Israeli software engineer in his mid-30s found himself driving down a deserted road parallel to the perimeter fence that separated Gaza from Israel. He had been fighting for hours with an AK-47 taken from a dead Hamas militant. Now he and three friends were headed to the town of Ohad to search for relatives who had gone missing.

“Only when we set off south did we understand how big this was. It was like an apocalypse,” the engineer, who did not want to be named, said last week. “There were hundreds of bodies of civilians inside their cars or on the road, hundreds of dead terrorists with their pickup trucks or motorbikes. There were dead police, army vehicles on fire. We were alone.”

He was among scores, possibly hundreds, of Israelis who headed independently to the combat zone around Gaza on the morning of the raid launched by Hamas on 7 October last year. Many were lauded as heroes by their compatriots, but that they were needed at all underlined the deep failures of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that, a year on, remain part of the traumatic legacy of the attack for millions of Israelis.

The continuing recriminations are part of a bitter broader argument over who to blame for the biggest security failure in Israel since the foundation of the country in 1948. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has avoided accepting responsibility, though several senior military and intelligence officials have resigned or admitted their errors.

In all, about 1,200 were killed in the raid launched by Hamas. Most of the dead were civilians, many murdered in their homes or at a music festival. Victims included children and elderly people. A UN inquiry found reasonable grounds to believe that attackers committed sexual violence at several locations, including rape and gang-rape. Hamas militants, and other extremists from Gaza who followed them, also seized about 250 hostages, of which approximately 100 remain in the territory.

Since the attack, Israel media has picked over what went wrong. A picture has emerged of top commanders caught between their growing concern after warnings of a possible mass attack into southern Israel from Gaza, and the prevailing belief among senior officers and the top political leadership that Hamas had been deterred by repeated bouts of conflict. Many officials were convinced that huge sums of direct aid sent into Gaza from Qatar and other economic incentives such as permits for Palestinian labourers to work in Israel had also convinced Hamas, which had been in power since 2007, to forgo violence in at least the short term. At a counter-terrorism conference months before the attack, David Barnea, head of the Mossad, Israeli’s main foreign intelligence service, did not mention Hamas in a speech about potential threats to the country.

“We were complacent and lazy and suffered a sort of groupthink and we are going to pay a huge price for that,” one military intelligence officer, a specialist in Gaza, told the Guardian shortly after the 7 October attack.

A second big problem was the faith placed in the supposedly impregnable billion-dollar fence built around the territory.

Reservist officers who had served several tours around Gaza were shocked by a new attitude among IDF officers in the year before the attacks.

“There were vehicles that simply didn’t run, equipment that didn’t work, patrols that didn’t happen because there was no threat. When we asked how we were meant to fight back if there was a big attack, they told us … it just wouldn’t happen,” a reservist combat medic said last month.

“We were told that the first line of defence is Hamas, because they’ve got too much to lose now by an attack and will themselves restrain their own people, and anyway then there’s the fence, which no one can get through. I actually argued with my senior officers over this but it went nowhere.”

Just days before the attack, a series of mistakes were made. Concerned local military commanders ordered assessments, which reported intense training by elite Hamas fighters, but failed to act. When dozens, possibly hundreds, of Israeli sim cards suddenly were connected to Israeli networks in the early hours of 7 October, Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, sent only a small team to the border. At a hastily convened meeting at about 3.30am on 7 October, senior IDF officers remained unsure if the unusual Hamas activity in Gaza was a training exercise or preparation for an attack.

But though public anger at intelligence services has been great, some of the most bitter reproaches have been levelled at the IDF itself for failing to mobilise faster to defend communities. Though some regular military units, the police and other services did deploy in the first hours of the 7 October attack, it was often small groups of reservists who had grabbed uniforms or weapons at home who joined the battle, sometimes playing decisive roles.

Nimrod Palmach, a reservist major and the chief executive of an Israeli NGO, defied orders to join his special forces unit in Jerusalem and drove south after hearing that “thousands of terrorists” were in the kibbutz of Nir Oz, where 46 of about 400 residents were killed by militants going from house to house and 72 were abducted, according to the UN.

“I just took a handgun and went as far as I could. I realised that every moment, people were being killed. I left a video testament on my phone for my kids so it could be found if I was killed myself,” he said.

Armed with an assault rifle taken from a dead Hamas militant, Palmach took body armour from a dead soldier and fought for hours alongside other reservists and small groups of regular soldiers around the kibbutz of Be’eri, where, according to the UN report, 105 residents of the kibbutz were killed by the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an allied group, as well as armed civilians from Gaza.

“At the beginning it was just us and special forces who were coming from their homes but as the day went by more and more sporadic [regular IDF] forces arrived. By late afternoon, the full IDF came, in full gear, combat battalions. A lot of good fighters were waiting for directions and orders which never came,” Palmach said.

One reason for the slow response was that the IDF’s forces around Gaza were fighting for their lives through the critical first hours of the Hamas attack when most casualties were inflicted. Defenders were not at full strength because of the holiday weekend – the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah – and only a few hundred soldiers were scattered in small detachments around the perimeter fence. Many were killed or abducted when their positions were overrun; others fought desperately for hours to avoid the same fate. A heavy assault on the main local headquarters at Re’im, just a kilometre from the Nova festival, was nearly successful, which in part explains the apparent paralysis of local commanders and their superiors. Critical surveillance and communications gear was knocked out in the attack.

“There was no central command so we didn’t know what to do and where to go … There was no connection between the units,” said a special forces soldier who was one of the first to reach the combat zone. “We were too few, and [when] we tried to get into the kibbutzim we were attacked by hundreds of Hamas men – we pulled back to wait for bigger forces.”

Several of those interviewed by the Guardian remembered how the situation began to stabilise late on 7 October, though fighting continued for more than 48 hours as remaining militants were found and killed. Some stayed on to help, others drove back to the homes they had left just 10 or 12 hours before. As the initial shock wore off, they tried to understand the day’s events.

“We always trained to attack, to be aggressive … but it was the opposite,” said the special forces soldier. “I still [see] … the dead kids, burned bodies, the girls at the festival.”

As for the engineer, he has yet to make sense of what went wrong on 7 October 2023.

“I actually just really don’t know what happened,” he told the Guardian. “I keep thinking about it. But I don’t know.”