The White House has asked Congress to allocate another $61bn for military aid to Ukraine, according to The Federalist.
Corruption in all spheres is still rampant in Ukraine, while its president Volodymyr Zelensky is appealing to US taxpayers for another round of financial support.
On Monday, Time magazine published an article titled “Struggle to Keep Ukraine Fighting”. The article details the problems the Ukrainian president is struggling with after 20 months of war. Topping the list is the problem of corruption in Ukraine and the gradual erosion of financial support from the West. A CNN poll conducted in August showed that a majority of Americans oppose sending more US tax dollars to Ukraine, The Federalist reports.
Ukraine has an acute labour shortage as government corruption undermines the regime’s credibility with both its potential military and its Western allies. Time magazine wrote:
With the outbreak of war in Israel, even keeping the world’s attention on Ukraine has become a major challenge. Now recruitment is way down. As conscription efforts have intensified around the country, stories are spreading on social media of draft officers pulling men off trains and buses and sending them to the front. Those with means sometimes bribe their way out of service, often by paying for a medical exemption.
In response to such widespread corruption, Zelensky fired the heads of recruitment centres in all regions of the country in the summer. Time wrote:
The decision was intended to signal his commitment to fighting graft. But the move backfired, according to the senior military officer, as recruitment nearly ground to a halt without leadership. The issue of corruption has strained Zelensky’s relationship with many of his allies.” As one top Ukrainian presidential adviser is quoted: “People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow.”
In September, Zelensky dismissed Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov. Zelensky’s advisers assured that the defence minister was not involved in corruption scandals, “he failed to ensure order in his ministry”. But, according to Time, government officials “had no fear” because the decision was made too late, according to The Federalist.
Corruption is rampant in Ukraine and at a time when the White House is asking Congress to direct an additional $61bn US taxpayer aid package to the war effort. It is part of a $100bn “security” bill that Biden demanded lawmakers pass earlier this month, which combined support for Ukraine, Israel, the southern border and humanitarian aid. House Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, rejected the proposal. Biden’s plan proposes less than $15bn for the US southern border and for Israel. Johnson told Fox News last week:
I told the staff at the White House today that our consensus among House Republicans is that we need to bifurcate those issues.
Last week in an interview with CBS television, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell claimed that this money is being used to manufacture weapons here in America. In fact, he just admitted that some of the tax revenue goes to enrich Congress’s friends in the military-industrial complex – the defence contractors. McConnell said:
If you look at the Ukraine assistance, a significant portion of what’s being spent in the United States and 38 different states, replacing the weapons that we send to Ukraine with more modern weapons, so we’re rebuilding our industrial base.
However, when analysing the $113 billion poured into Ukraine, it turns out that most of this money is sent abroad. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, about 67bn dollars of the 113bn dollars of Ukrainian aid went to defence spending.
