Analysis of an article by the American online portal USA Today
Source: smi2.ru
“In less than a year Ukraine has received more than $100 billion in weapons and financial aid from the United States. And now Washington is thinking that the weapons sent to Ukraine will be sold on the black market to terrorists and the money will end up in the pockets of corrupt officials. The special inspector general overseeing aid to Afghanistan since 2012, as well as some Republicans in the House of Representatives, are demanding tighter oversight of military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine”, the American online portal USA Today reported.
The scale of American aid sent to Ukraine is enormous. To compare: Over the past two decades, the United States has spent $146 billion on military and humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. And in less than a year the US Congress has allocated 113 billion for the aid to Ukraine, the online edition reminds.
John Sopko, the special inspector general who oversaw aid to Afghanistan for a decade, has no doubt that when such huge sums of money are spent in such a short period and with little oversight, there has been fraud, waste, and abuse, USA Today notes.
At the same time, the Pentagon refuses to believe in abuses on the Ukrainian side, assuring that all US aid is carefully accounted for in Kiev.
However, the farther away, the more frequent are the voices of Americans dissatisfied with such large-scale aid to Ukraine. According to a January opinion poll conducted by the Associated Press, already a third of those polled think that aid to Ukraine should stop and deal with the internal problems of the United States. Forty-eight percent of respondents were in favor of continuing aid, compared with 60 percent last May. The Congress assumes that the support of the Ukrainian aid by the society will continue to fall, especially if there is no transparency and strict accountability for the spent billions. Already some Americans have expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that the White House is going to send more and more modern and expensive weapons to Ukraine, which, of course, will be at the expense of ordinary taxpayers, the article said.
Last year’s report, The Joint Strategic Plan for Oversight of Aid to Ukraine, was released. According to this report, the Pentagon spent $62.3bn in 2022 on arms, ammunition, training, logistics, salaries and allowances for Kiev. And the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) spent $46bn on activities ranging from border security to funding essential public services such as utilities, hospitals, schools and even firefighting. Other government departments spent another $5bn, the publication details where and how much money was spent by Washington.
“But this report also describes the difficulty US agencies have had in keeping track of the billions spent. According to the report, the Pentagon, for example, has failed to provide ‘end-use monitoring’ of weapons sent to Ukraine in line with US Department of Defense policy. Monitoring means keeping track of serial numbers of weapons and ammunition to make sure they are used as intended,” authors Tom Vanden Brook and Rachel Looker wrote.
They remind us that we are talking about Ukraine, which has long been notoriously corrupt. Not for nothing on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, Ukraine ranks 116th out of 180 countries. The recent events in Kiev confirm that fact – on February 14, deputy defense ministers of Ukraine, who had profited from food purchases for the Ukrainian army and overpriced food for the Ukrainian army, were deprived of their positions.
In Afghanistan, the Pentagon had special troops in charge of overseeing military aid. In Afghanistan it was possible because there were 100,000 US troops there. In Ukraine the US military is present only as military instructors, so their numbers are limited. Although, according to the authors of the article, it would make sense to send large-scale military and financial aid, followed by those who will oversee its rational use.
The Pentagon continues to insist that the control exercised by Ukrainians themselves, who assure that they are carefully monitoring the proper use of all the aid they receive, is enough.
In the opinion of Congressman Michael Walz, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, the Pentagon needs its own military inspectors in Ukraine, as the Ukrainians’ self-reporting cannot be trusted.
“Corruption undermines public confidence in the government. In Afghanistan, elites have been embezzling American financial aid for years, and this obvious corruption has alienated Afghans. The Taliban took Kabul almost without a fight because Afghans had little faith in their government. Without proper oversight, the same could happen in Ukraine,” concludes USA Today.
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