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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Desperate Ukraine tells U.S. ‘bureaucracy' is no excuse for failing to provide critical weapons and ammunition |
| 2022-04-11 |
| [CNBC] WASHINGTON — A Ukrainian delegation warned U.S. officials in Washington this week that security assistance packages are not arriving quick enough in the besieged country, a plea that comes amid Western security claims that the Kremlin will soon intensify its military campaign. Over the past week, the delegation of Ukrainian civil society advocates, military veterans and former government officials met with 45 lawmakers, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, officials at the departments of State and Defense and the National Security Council at the White House. "It’s the 44th day of the war that we were supposed to lose on the third day," began Daria Kaleniuk, who runs Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, a national organization that assists Ukraine’s parliament and prosecutor’s office. "What we need now is to arm our military and our territorial defense units to be able to prevent more graves in the backyards of innocent people," she said on Friday. Kaleniuk added that U.S. lawmakers and Biden administration officials outlined a number of justifications for why certain weapons systems cannot be delivered, citing logistics issues, lack of inventory and bureaucratic limitations. "The six-year-old boy who is visiting his mother’s grave in his backyard does not want to hear about bureaucracy as an excuse for not delivering weapons to Ukraine," Kaleniuk said. "This is an extraordinary situation where extraordinary measures have to be done. Lift your bureaucracy, lift it now. The president of the United States has huge power, Congress has huge power. We know it’s possible," she added. Earlier in the week, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba also made a plea to NATO allies to catalyze the delivery of their arms commitments. "Either you help us now, and I’m speaking about days not weeks, or your help will come too late," Kuleba told reporters at NATO’s headquarters on April 7. "I have no doubt that Ukraine will have the weapons necessary to fight. The question is the timeline. This discussion is not about the list of weapons. The discussion is about the timeline when do we get them and this is crucial," he said, adding "people are dying today, the offensive is unfolding today." When asked about Kuleba’s comments, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken downplayed concerns that allies were withholding weapons explicitly requested by Ukraine. "They’re coming forward with new systems that they think would be helpful and effective," Blinken said from NATO’s headquarters. "We put our own expertise to bear, especially the Pentagon to help determine what indeed we think could be effective. What Ukrainians will be ready to use as soon as they get it, and what we actually have access to and can get to them in real-time," he said, adding that the U.S. is working expeditiously to get appropriate weapons to Ukraine. Blinken’s comments echo those of U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley. Austin and Milley told lawmakers last week that some weapons systems on Ukraine’s wish list require months of training in order to operate. This was another piece linked to at FR by Zhang Fei, who wrote the following in the comments: Ukraine ping During the Yom Kippur War, Nixon ordered direct airlifts of late model weaponry from US stocks in Europe to Israel, and raised the readiness level of US nuclear forces to DEFCON 3, in response to the possibility of Russian intervention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War. Whereas currently, Moscow Joe is slow-walking the aid. Ukrainians are fighting a high-intensity war with a major power, and Moscow Joe is allocating aid to be provided at leisure. Meanwhile, we funded the Afghans lavishly to fight a two-bit enemy (the Taliban) engaged in desultory guerilla warfare that killed maybe a thousand combatants on both sides a month. The Ukrainians have killed over 15,000 Russians in a month. That takes a lot of ammo and equipment which gets used up or destroyed by the enemy. Modern warfare isn’t like its ancient counterpart - the weapons aren’t swords and spears that merely have to be cleaned off and sharpened to get more use out of them. Moscow Joe was paid by Putin through Burisma, which is owned by one of Putin’s cronies, Zlochevsky, who left Ukraine along with Putin’s puppet, Yanukovich, after the Maidan Revolution. I gotta hand it to Putin - he might not be the greatest war planner, but he made sure Trump was up to his eyeballs in alligators for the entire length of his tenure. Igor Danchenko, the guy who was arrested over his role in fabricating the Steele dossier, is Russian. He appears to be a Russian agent planted by Putin inside the Democratic party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Danchenko One of the ways you discredit your enemy is by planting evidence that suggests he is your paid agent. That was Danchenko’s assignment within the Democratic party - to help stick it to Trump. |
| Posted by:Thing From Snowy Mountain |
| #22 I don't either. Yellow blue bus! |
| Posted by: Phiting Brown2268 2022-04-11 23:38 |
| #21 Individual one (Saying Snootily): Where I come from we don't end a sentence with a preposition. In German, the prepositions that end sentences are really separable verbs. As it happens, very often it’s the same in English, which Indiv.#1 is ignorant of — an inheritance from English being at root a Germanic language. ;-) A number here, including our badanov, trained as journalists, with a hefty dose of grammatical training. Which makes their deliberate use of the colloquial idiom even more amusing to a certain kind of mind. Asseverated. A new word for me — thank you! (For several semesters in a row there were never enough of us to justify a beginning class in Russian at my university, so I finally gave up and took Hebrew again. So I don’t know how to say it in Russian. Sorry.) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2022-04-11 23:21 |
| #20 Individual one (Saying Snootily): Where I come from we don't end a sentence with a preposition. Individual Two: Oh. Where do y'all come from, bitch. |
| Posted by: badanov 2022-04-11 22:59 |
| #19 ^ Acknowledged. Agreed. Asseverated. (That's a 1,000-ruble word. I accept dollars - even if fewer and fewer will.) |
| Posted by: Phiting Brown2268 2022-04-11 22:32 |
| #18 And, of course, the argument about language deftly deflected away from the Truth They Do Not Want To Acknowledge: that Biden's actions are intentionally helpful to Putin. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2022-04-11 22:27 |
| #17 |
| Posted by: Phiting Brown2268 2022-04-11 22:12 |
| #16 Don't worry about PB. He will be too busy inhaling furious amount of Russian wang tonight to respond very much. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2022-04-11 22:10 |
| #15 Which English? I was reared bilingual English and American, where both dialects of the language were my parents’ — and many of their friends’ — Nth language. Mama learnt English at Oxford University’s private high school after the war in Holland, then emigrated to New York City for university. That was after her native German, Dutch, and French. Her favourite cousin was proud to speak English with an Oxford accent, her French from the Sorbonne, and naturally the family spoke Hochdeutsch with a Hildesheim accent, the purest of the pure, while Mama’s English is deliberately Standard American and her French picked up in Geneva while she was at medical school escaping the matchmaking efforts of her mother and her first mother-in-law, both very managing women. Mama found the Flemish I learnt in Brussels highly amusing, but the Dutch look down on the Flems as ignorant hillbillies. Daddy polished his English while serving as a Russian translator for the Hindi regiment stationed in Iran during the war, which was layered on top of his four mother tongues of Russian, Latvian, German, and Yiddish — typical of his peers in his birthplace — classical Latin and Greek, Hebrew, and enough Arabic and Farsi to get by on the street. He was nearly forty before he arrived in America, and his attempts at strong language sounded like he was working from memorized conjugation tables. And after living in a variety of places, my second person plural is as likely to be you guys, y’all, or you lot, depending on the last person I spoke with or the last thing I read. And as a sheltered child of an ivory tower, I rely on Mr. Wife and the good people here to translate all sorts of American vocabulary I hadn’t previously encountered. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2022-04-11 21:26 |
| #14 |
| Posted by: Phiting Brown2268 2022-04-11 21:11 |
| #13 Paging Phiting Brown, your fry cook job wants you to finish your shift. Please exit your mom's basement. |
| Posted by: Woodrow 2022-04-11 20:59 |
| #12 |
| Posted by: Phiting Brown2268 2022-04-11 20:34 |
| #11 Please don’t try the linguistic snob thing here, Phiting Brown2268. It demonstrates a certain level of class insecurity — and interferes with recognizing actual ability. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2022-04-11 20:18 |
| #10 |
| Posted by: Phiting Brown2268 2022-04-11 18:32 |
| #9 I'd say you're deliberately misunderstanding what I'm saying, but you're probably just lying through your teeth. I'm upset that Joseph Robinette Biden, of the Burisma Payroll, always seems to "accidentally" make decisions that involve turning over huge amounts of our economy to Putin and his allies, and for a much longer time than when Putin went to war (again) in Ukraine. If y'all weren't fake ass pretend populists y'all might have actually managed to scrape up some energy to be upset about that. But you don't, and it says a lot. I think we've had this conversation before under a different 'nym for you. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2022-04-11 18:02 |
| #8 Giving billions in gold to appease an enemy actually did work brilliantly in one place in recent years: Chechnya. Worked brilliantly, in fact. With piles of gold (literally), Russia turned Kadyrov from an implacable enemy into a staunch ally. Every man has his price. SSSHHH! You can't say that.... why that there's the PUTLER you're praising! |
| Posted by: Fat Bob Thrating1879 2022-04-11 14:39 |
| #7 Why don't they try throwing wads of dollar bills at the Russkies? Worked for the Taliban. We already do. About a billion dollars a day. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2022-04-11 14:14 |
| #6 Really? Ohh thanks, just a pedestrian mind here. [sobs] |
| Posted by: Dron66046 2022-04-11 13:52 |
| #5 They've toned it down since the beginning of the invasion. Back then they were saying "We hate you, give us arms." Now they are reduced to trying to guilt the US into donating arms. |
| Posted by: Vespasian Ebboting9735 2022-04-11 13:44 |
| #4 ^ You ain't bad yourself, Dron. I've learned a lot from you. |
| Posted by: Matt 2022-04-11 13:41 |
| #3 Zhang Fei is always such a joy to read. |
| Posted by: Dron66046 2022-04-11 13:28 |
| #2 Why don't they try throwing wads of dollar bills at the Russkies? Worked for the Taliban. Just saying. |
| Posted by: Dron66046 2022-04-11 13:26 |
| #1 Looks like they'll have to make do with that $15 Billion cash we already gave them. |
| Posted by: Cesare 2022-04-11 12:52 |