Thanks. I wonder why it can’t just be “Gift” instead of “Lease.” The United States can’t seriously expect a postwar Ukraine with a shattered economy to repay anything. That would be like Elon Musk “loaning” $200,000 to some unemployed cancer patient to pay their medical bills. Just flat-out gift it. (Maybe not the best analogy but you know what I mean)
My take is that Lend-Lease will probably mean it is mostly a gift and will eventually be forgiven but reserves the US some leverage in the post-War rebuilding of Ukraine and some direction of its politics.
Can’t. Not without a lot of specific and fiddly legislation, and that takes time. Every time. Lend-Lease is a proven system and is very flexible to current needs.
I saw a good quote today on Lend-Lease:
Bureaucracy, we all know, is an enemy in a crisis, so streamlining processes and improving speed and agility is extremely, extremely important
Ukrainian-American Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., said on the House floor Thursday.
Just a very quick history lesson on Lend-Lease. By November 1940 Churchill had written Roosevelt that England would soon be unable to pay for new weapons bought from the United States. FDR faced a still-potent opposition (some in his own party) from Isolationists and “American Firsters” who wanted nothing to do with this “European War”. So he came up with the Lend-Lease program. As he described it (and whatever else franklin Delano Roosevelt was, he was a masterful explainer):
It passed Congress 265-165 and the Senate 60-31, showing that there was doubt about how much to support the British.
OK, history lesson concluded. Press on.
I’d love to know who the 165 and 31 Anti-british Nazi supporters were.
Would like to see all A-10 Warthogs get donated to Ukraine. They were headed to the nursing home to play Bingo in a few years anyway, might as well let them go out in a career-fulfilling blaze of T-72-killing glory.
I’m sure if it makes sense, the US will send more. It’s not like they are sending the one-third all at once anyway.
I don’t think this is wise. It won’t matter what they were there for if one of them is killed. The US will have to react and it will have fewer options available than it does now.
While I think it’s a mighty fine ground attack aircraft, and I think it still could be useful in this theater if provided with sufficient numbers of air superiority fighters to protect them: man, that’s a tall ask to even happen in a year. Training all the pilots and ground crew on the aircraft would be a lot of work. If we’re at six months into this conflict, and it’s still a stalemate in the east, that seems like a sane-ish plan. At the moment, Ukraine seems to be holding in the east, and I’d suggest we go further with more capable drones at the moment, to be honest.
And of course, if you’re going to train them on a new aircraft and we’re pretty much talking fantasy, I’d say a F-35A would be a more expensive option - but it’d signal “Yeah, they’re joining NATO” better than anything else. It’d almost surely be more effective, in the end. It can perform both roles. Plus, it’d send a much stronger signal than sending aircraft we’re phasing out.
There was a real fear at the time of getting involved in another war in Europe. It was not a question of supporting Nazis or not.
The US had already gone from a declared state of neutrality in which they wouldn’t sell or provide any armaments to any parties, to a “Cash and Carry” basis.
Roosevelt really wanted to support the British but couldn’t get too far ahead of Congress. The idea of Lend - Lease was to seem to be getting something in return rather than simply giving it as aid.
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The daily count of destroyed Russian equipment is trending upward again. This is about Day nine or so of the offensive. things may be hotting up again.
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My school district has just enrolled its first Ukrainian refugee. He starts elementary school tomorrow. We are scrambling to find Russian and Ukrainian speakers. I am very happy about this.
Unlike a human creditor with a human debtor, the US can afford to wait a very long time for repayment.
So far, only four nations have repaid their lend-lease debt from WWI: Finland, Greece, Liberia, and Cuba. Britain, France, and Italy still owe money from The War to End All Wars. Why the hold up? They say they intended to use the money from reparation from Germany in order to pay their WWI debt to the US, and Germany hasn’t completed reparations.
WWII lend-lease is even more of a mess. Some nations have repaid little or nothing, including the USSR (which no longer even exists), Iran (I expect they will continue to not pay), Indonesia, and China.
Finland was the first to pay off their WWII lend-lease debt (they viewed settling that debt to be necessary for their neutral stance and used the fact they owed nothing to the US as a argument with the Soviets that they were truly neutral). Britain has also repayed its debt as of 2006. I believe some of Britain’s debt was settled not with actual money but with exporting of certain new technologies and assistance with the Manhattan project so, presumably, terms of repayment are somewhat negotiable. But other than Finland and Britain no one has repayed the US but hey, they might do so in the future. In some cases - such as the USSR - it wasn’t really expected we’d get our money back but having the Soviets fight on the eastern front was useful to the Allied war effort.
So no, no one is expecting a shattered Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of this war to repay a debt. But nations exist longer than a human generation and repayment can wait for Ukraine to rebuild. Lend-lease in the two world wars did not hurt the US, helped US allies, and at least some of it has been repaid so overall it’s probably of more benefit than harm.
Story in the Guardian today about how Zelensky and his family barely escaped capture or assassination in the first days of the invasion. Russian paratroopers stormed the presidential compound and nearly got through.
That would have been a far different war.
I wonder how she feels about Putin? Is there an internal conflict?
That would be for another thread. Too political for a breaking news thread.
I think it would be a new thread.
You’re quite right. I did it again. Sorry!
I’ve read Zelinsky’s wife initially opposed his entry into politics. They had a very comfortable life from his acting. He could have been working or vacationing in Europe when the war started.
I remember when it happened some humor columnist “quoted” the Finnish ambassador explaining it didn’t cost that much and gave them bragging rights. “Finland is the only country in the world to pay its WWII debt.”
Edit: Howcome the title got edited? Are we expecting a second invasion, as opposed to an escalation of the first one?
We had a Finnish foreign exchange student in high school who made a point of noting Finland’s payment of its debt. (My Finnish stepfather – he and mom got married when I was in my 20s – never mentioned it.)