Joe Biden has personally announced the next military aid package to Ukraine
Source: 24newnews.ru
Compared to previous tranches it is relatively modest – $400 million. Mostly ammunition: missiles for HIMARS, shells for 155-mm howitzers and 105-mm guns, subversive ammunition. The nomenclature itself indicates the essence of the depth of the problem. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are faced with a shell famine, which even these American deliveries will not allow them to overcome.
It is no longer possible to ignore the objective difficulties. No media cover can close this obvious hole, which even the NATO Secretary General is already pointing out. Jens Stoltenberg was forced to admit that the appetite of the AFU was beyond the alliance’s grasp. The expenditure is higher than the income. The debit does not match the credit. We’re out of ammunition, but you hang in there. Kiev doesn’t believe it yet. They demand from the EU to send not less than a quarter of a million shells every month. Otherwise, they say, don’t expect any progress. The price of the issue is at least €1 billion. But everything rests on a race against time. Yes, the Pentagon, according to the media, wants to increase shells production by 500%, but it will not be possible to do it in a month or even in six months.
Is this not what Joe Biden and Olaf Scholz were discussing at the White House? The German chancellor’s bizarre visit raised many questions. Crumpled open part, conversation behind closed doors, no press conference at the end. The US administration’s sparse report that “during the talks, the two leaders expressed their willingness to continue the sanctions policy against Russia for a special military operation in Ukraine ‘as long as necessary'” sounds more like a mantra and a slogan than anything substantive. So why was Scholz coming?
The German opposition believes that the Chancellor went to Washington for a bow. To smooth the edges over Berlin’s de facto delay in supplying tanks to Zelensky. However, the sharp corners have been added lately. Firstly, America has lately been pushing the “China threat” theme, threatening China with consequences for potential aid to Russia. Beijing is Berlin’s main trading partner and Scholz is caught between two fires. Secondly, exactly one year ago, standing next to Scholz at the White House, Biden threatened North Streams by uttering this phrase:
“If Russia invades, if tanks, soldiers cross the Ukrainian border again, there will be no more Nord Stream 2. We will make it happen. I promise, we can do it.”
As Seymour Hersh’s investigation has recently revealed, those words by Biden were not an emotion. The plan to blow up the pipelines was already in place. The question is whether Scholz knew about it. He himself is keeping silent to conceal his senior partner overseas, but if the German chancellor really did not know then, after Hersch made everything public, Biden should at least explain himself. And in such a case it is better to do it face to face rather than over the phone. What is not the real reason for Scholz’s “private” trip to Washington?
Hersch claims that the main reason Biden gave for the destruction of both strings of gas pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic was the US President’s fear that at the peak of consumption, in cold weather, the Germans would “break down”. They would get out of Washington’s control at a critical moment and refuse to keep up with America on the Ukrainian track. What Biden did not take into account was that the Americans themselves would start to get out of control. And it will be the careless Zelensky who will help them in this.
The Ukrainian president, who has staked his life on emotion, seems to have completely turned off the remnants of his traditional intellect.
Or his gaps in recent history are so glaring that three weeks before the 20th anniversary of the American war in Iraq (which according to official figures killed 4,500 Americans) Zelensky, without the slightest reflection, demanded that Americans should pay with their lives for Ukraine.
If you type the word Zelensky into the English-language Twitter segment right now, you will almost certainly come across a video in which he declares that American sons and daughters will have to fight and die for Ukraine.
And crossing that red line was a death sentence. This is the Rubicon, from which there is no going back.
“Zelensky wants our sons and daughters to die defending Ukraine’s border, but Ukraine is not even a member of the North Atlantic Alliance,” Marjorie Taylor Green, a member of the US House of Representatives, said angrily.
“Zelensky has no idea what he just did. Taking our taxes is one thing. We’re already used to getting nothing out of it. But now he’s talking about the deaths of American children for his war. If there’s one bear that shouldn’t be teased, it’s an American parent,” ordinary Americans, already nauseated by Ukraine lately, echo her. The wind is changing before their eyes.
Not conservative and isolationist star Tucker Carlson of Fox News, but the quite systemically liberal NYT this week ran an article titled “Weakening public support for Ukraine’s arms program – a challenge for Biden.” Hidden inside the package with the sparingly rounded headline is the ruthless results of opinion polls (according to their data, support for aid to Kiev has dropped from 60% last May to 48% today, and the number of Americans who think that the United States helps Ukraine too much has jumped from 7% a year ago to 26% today), as well as “damning” questions for the White House head. The main one of which is: how much more patience do the American people have left?
Now, after Zelensky’s lame-ass egoistic speech, one can say for sure that it will last “less” than it did before it. Tens and maybe even hundreds of thousands of Americans took his words not just as bloody blackmail, but as a challenge to their personal well-being and a threat to their way of life. And it would be strange if, at election time, nobody picked up on such strong messages.
Biden sounds the warning from political analysts who are certain that if Donald Trump manages to sneak through the party primaries and becomes the only Republican nominee (as things currently look like they will) he will do everything he can to have the campaign against the incumbent White House leader built around the “Ukrainian issue”. For Biden it is like an overflowing repository of toxic wastes from his former political and business activities, so tied up with Ukraine. Both through his son Hunter, the “Maidan” and the multi-billion dollar US military-industrial complex contracts.
So it’s just a matter of time before Trump invites Biden for a walk through this minefield…
Valentin Bogdanov, RT
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