He doesn’t think it’s going anywhere. He knows he’s just bullshitting for his domestic audience, that he hopes is too stupid to think through the implications of his accusations.
As you say, most of the “money” the US is giving Ukraine in actually in the form of physical goods - vehicles, weapons, ammunition, other stuff like clothing. And we’re publicly posting lists of how many of each item are being sent. It would be trivially easy to show that the received equipment is less than the promised, especially if it’s really 15% as he claims.
But he knows his audience. They won’t bother to think about any of that.
I mean, Ukraine is certainly not without a recent history of significant corruption. Doesn’t make these sorts of allegations believable. But, it is something to pay attention to, especially if/when rebuilding happens. And, of course, in regards to materials with more civilian uses - generators, fuel, etc.
Well yes, all countries have some corruption. But some have more than others - or at least rate higher on perceived corruption on the index, and Ukraine was definitely on the corrupt end and much closer to Russia than to the US in 2020, and had been for quite a while.
You can certainly argue that, if you want to provide statistics or cite sources. I’m just reporting what actual organizations that study corruption say, and that is that there’s a lot of corruption in Ukraine, and there has been for years. I acknowledge that much of this in perceived corruption rather actual corruption (which difficult to measure).
I just don’t feel like ignoring or underplaying longstanding issues (or claiming equivalency without some evidence) is a good thing to do.
Just because Ukraine is a nation being invaded does not mean that there were or are no serious internal issues, or that corruption isn’t/wasn’t one of them. At the very least, it’d made news articles (albeit, these were foreign, not domestic ones, so had an outsider view) and gotten attention as a particular problem for several years before this invasion.
I didn’t watch the video, but this morning I saw Denys’ daily update titled ‘Ukraine Will Leave Soledar’. If that’s the case I’m dismayed to see the setback.
Prigozhin needs to read about the German Brown Shirts and the Night of the Long Knives on June 30, 1934. Hitler ordered the leaders killed or arrested. It ended the Brown Shirts as political rivals.
Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces since 2012, has been appointed commander of the Russian invasion army in Ukraine, replacing General Surovikin, who had held the position for the last three months. Chief of the General Staff is the highest-ranking officer of the Russian Armed Forces, so it remains to be seen whether someone else will replace Gerasimov in that role. I will note that Adolf Hitler assumed the comparable position of Commander-in-Chief of the German Army in December 1941.
Correction: Hitler made himself head of the German army (Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres) in December 1941, but the head of the German armed forces as a whole (Chef des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht) was Wilhelm Keitel, who held the position throughout the war.
Absolutely. This war could be won with better aircraft and heavy armor.
It fustrates me the rules for the bad guys can be ignored. I’ve seen documentaries with Korean War pilots talking about dogfights with Chinese Migs. The talk heard on the radio was Russian. Nobody risked provocation by accusing Russia. Publicly it was accepted these were Chinese aircraft and pilots.
Yet NATO is afraid to give Ukraine 35 year old Soviet planes. Oh my goodness we’ll piss off Russia.
I wouldn’t suggest using American pilots. They aren’t trained to fly MiGs and we don’t want POW hostages like Vietnam.
Yeah. No one worries about annoying the quiet guy in the pub. It’s the noisy crazy guy who looks like he’d take a swing at you that you worry about. No one, not even Russia, thinks the US would be the first to use nukes, but everyone thinks Russia might.
