WASHINGTON, November 28 – RIA Novosti. U.S. officials are concerned about the threat of weapons shortages for supplies to Taiwan due to large-scale military aid to Ukraine. The Wall Street Gazette with reference to sources.

U.S. government and congressional officials fear the conflict in Ukraine will complicate Taiwan’s estimated $19 billion arms deal and further delay efforts to arm the island amid strained relations with China.

The newspaper writes that significant arms shipments to Kiev are already limiting the Pentagon’s ability to assist Taiwan. If the planned volume of arms deliveries to the island in December 2021 is estimated at $14 billion, $18.7 billion in weapons is already in the supply queue today.

In particular, Washington has not yet delivered the Taipei 208 Javelin anti-tank systems ordered in December 2015 of the year, as well as 215 Stinger anti-aircraft missile systems ordered at the same time.

Executives at Lockheed Martin, Boeing and other defense companies say supply chain problems caused by the pandemic have reduced production of many systems, and they struggled to fulfill orders even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine increased demand.

At the same time, it is reported that officially, the State Department and the Pentagon did not provide details on what types of weapons are still waiting to be delivered to Taiwan.

Russia had previously sent a note to NATO countries for arms supplies to Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov noted that any cargo containing weapons for Ukraine would become a legitimate target for Russia. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation stated that NATO countries are “playing with fire” by supplying weapons to Ukraine. Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov noted that pumping weapons into Ukraine from the West does not contribute to the success of the Russian-Ukrainian negotiations and will have a negative effect.

The situation around Taiwan has escalated after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island in early August. China, which sees the island as one of its own provinces, condemned the visit as US support for Taiwanese separatism and organized large-scale military exercises. In mid-November, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with US President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia and told him Taiwan was an “impassable” red line in Sino-US relations. In response, Biden reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to the One China principle.

Official relations between the PRC central government and the island province were interrupted in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in a civil war with the Chinese Communist Party, moved to Taiwan. Commercial and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. From the early 1990s, the parties began to establish contacts through non-governmental organizations – the Beijing Association for the Advancement of Relations across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.