Does the Pentagon really know where billions in U.S. aid to Ukraine is ending up?

by WorldTribune Staff, August 30, 2022

It could be called the black hole of Kiev.

Does the Pentagon know with any real accuracy where exactly the billions in U.S. military and other aid to Ukraine ends up?

Senior Airman Cameron Manson inspects cargo of ammunition, weapons and other equipment bound for Ukraine during a Foreign Military Sales mission at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. / Roland Balik / U.S. Air Force

Pentagon Inspector General Sean O’Donnell is quoted as saying in an Aug. 25 Bloomberg report that officials in Ukraine do their accounting of American equipment and aid with “hand receipts, it’s all paper.”

O’Donnell added that he doesn’t “think they have much fidelity” as to where the arms end up.

“Where do all of the weapons and aid end up, exactly? Nobody knows,” Jordan Schachtel wrote on Aug. 29 in The Dossier on substack.com.

“Ukraine is consistently ranked as one of the most corrupt governments in all of Europe,” Schachtel noted. “Given that reality, it might not come as much of a surprise that Kiev has no functioning mechanism to track the massive amount of inflows of American weapons and aid into the country.”

WorldTribune.com reported on Aug. 8, citing a CBS News report, that only 30 percent of the billions in aid to Ukraine actually reaches its intended destination.

CBS had quoted Jonas Ohman, founder and CEO of the Ukraine aid organization Blue-Yellow, as saying that U.S. and NATO officials bring weapons and supplies that are intended for Ukraine to the Polish border. From there, Ukrainian officials allegedly take control and U.S. oversight ends.

“All of this stuff goes across the border, and then something happens, kind of like 30% of it reaches its final destination,” Ohman told CBS News.

Since then however, CBS News caved to a pressure campaign reportedly initiated by Ukraine’s government and pulled its report examining the flow of arms and aid to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Schachtel noted that active duty American service members are being stripped of “vital munitions — including high-tech weapons that are not easily replaced — so that these arms and ammo can be sent to Ukraine.”

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin “has insisted upon draining American military stockpiles by a very significant percentage of overall inventory, rendering the U.S. military in a more vulnerable position,” Schachtel added. “The American military is being comprehensively disarmed to prop up the Biden Administration’s proxy war against Russia, and in the process of their pursuit of this skirmish, billions of dollars of weapons and aid are moving into a country with zero accounting or transparency mechanisms.”


Action . . . . Intelligence . . . . Publish