A PR offensive to inundate the American public with pro-Ukraine war advertisements during the 2024 election is the latest initiative of neocon chickenhawk Bill Kristol. While targeted at GOP voters, the campaign appears to be another Democratic Party front.
“The Ukrainian Army is not winning. In fact,” argued retired U.S. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, “it’s losing badly. Ukraine is being destroyed. Its population is being slaughtered in lopsided battles with a technologically superior enemy or scattered by the millions to the rest of the globe as refugees. Ukraine is running out of soldiers.”
“As that happens, the question will inevitably arise who’s gonna replace them? If the Ukrainians can’t beat Putin, who will? The answer, of course, will be us. American troops will fight the Russian army in Eastern Europe. That’s most likely. And the assumption is we’ll win. But will we win?” the former primetime host wondered before bringing in Macgregor.
The colonel reported that at least 40,000 Ukrainian men had been killed in just the last month bringing the total estimate to around 400,000 since Russia had invaded in Feb. 2022. “We don’t even know how many people have been wounded, but we know probably upwards of 40- to 50,000 soldiers are amputees.”
“We know the hospitals are full,” he added before noting that many “Ukrainian units at the platoon and company level,” measuring from 50 to 200 men at a time, have been surrendering to the Russians for the sake of the wounded “because they can’t fight anymore.”
“All of this happens in a way that is just not reported in the West. And in the meantime, rather than admit that this is a terrible tragedy that should be ended, on humanitarian grounds if no other, that the killing should stop — as President Trump said ‘Stop the killing,’ we’re gonna continue,” lamented Macgregor. “And this puts the Russians in the unhappy position of marching further west.”
It was later suggested that the Russians had not been initially prepared for the conflict, but had since amassed around 750,000 troops in and around their neighboring nation and could grow to a force as large as 1.2 million over the next year.
Meanwhile, Macgregor slammed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “and the radicals around him” who’ve “basically committed to fighting this war to the last Ukrainian. And of course, I’m sure that Mr. Zelenskyy and friends are anxious at some point to retire to their estates in Florida, or Venice or Cyprus to collect on the billions that they’ve managed to steal or siphon from all the aid that we’ve provided. Remember, Ukraine is probably one of the most corrupt places in the world.”
Good interview except when Tucker brings up Sarah Ashton-Cirillo. You don’t have to agree with her (I don’t) but Tucker didn’t need to feed the flames of the culture war. At least, Macgregor didn’t take the bait.
Let us travel back in time to April 9, 1999. It was the middle of hot season in the West African country of Niger and 120 degrees in the shade. Jocelyn, one of the authors, was a newly minted Peace Corps volunteer and had recently arrived in a rural community 60 miles south of Niamey, the capital, where she would spend the next two years. That day, President Ibrahim Bare Mainassara and five other people were shot dead at the airport, a mutiny by his presidential guard. But there was no international outcry, no evacuation of Americans and Europeans. Jocelyn was told to stay put in the small community where she was living. Life went on as usual.
The Biden administration has been criticized in recent days over the support offered to survivors of the deadly wildfires in Maui, compared to the billions in U.S. aid sent to Ukraine.
To date, the Biden-Harris Administration has approved nearly $7 million in assistance to nearly 2,200 households, including nearly $3 million in initial rental assistance.
If enacted, the supplemental would provide $24.0 billion of additional aid to Ukraine – on top of the $113 billion the United States provided in 2022 alone. This includes $13.1 billion of military aid and replenishment of Pentagon weapons stocks, $8.7 billion of economic and humanitarian aid, and $2.3 billion to leverage additional aid from other donors through the World Bank.
That’s approximately $137 billion to Ukraine, $10 million, or so, for Hawaii (in soft loans and rental assistance)!
Turse explained in a recent article that in 2002 and 2003, the first years of US counterterrorism assistance to Niger, the State Department counted just nine terrorist attacks in all of Africa.
“Last year, the number of violent events in Burkina Faso, Mali, and western Niger alone reached 2,737, according to a report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution. This represents a jump of more than 30,000 percent since the US began its counterterrorism efforts,” Turse wrote.
But the effort to get a speedy appropriation has foundered after the Biden administration sought $12 billion in emergency funding that would extend disaster relief programs while simultaneously requesting some $24.1 billion in military spending for Ukraine in the same package.
That means that funding Hawaii’s needs for Maui’s recovery has been tied to funding to back Ukraine’s military, an increasingly unpopular topic in some Republican circles. When the House passed its fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill early this summer, a contingent of several dozen House Republicans sought to prohibit additional U.S. assistance to Ukraine.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Congress has authorized $113 billion in spending on the war. If the new package is approved, the total will reach about $137 billion.
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