Pentagon inspector general warns of Ukraine’s ‘endemic corruption’

https://www.washingtonexaminer...-endemic-corruption/

The Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General warned that Ukrainian corruption is a persistent challenge as the war against Russia has created new opportunities for it.

The corruption risks include possible bribes, kickbacks, and inflated procurement costs, especially for lethal procurements within the Ministry of Defense, according to the inspector general’s second quarterly report to Congress on Operation Atlantic Resolve, the name of the administration’s operation to arm Ukraine.

“Working hand in glove with our oversight partners, we are committed to ensuring comprehensive oversight over all aspects of American taxpayer resources provided in support of Ukraine,” Inspector General Robert Storch said.

The report, released on Thursday, came several weeks after Congress passed President Joe Biden’s supplemental funding request that included roughly $61 billion in military aid for Ukraine. A select group of isolationist House Republicans held up the aid package for several months, which Ukrainian and U.S. officials said had demonstrable impacts on the battlefield.

The shortages are being felt most acutely in the area around Kharkiv, a major Ukrainian city near the country’s northeastern border.

“Russia has begun a new wave of counteroffensive actions in this direction,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said this week. “Ukraine has met them there with our troops, brigades, and artillery.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a $2 billion aid package on Wednesday during his surprise trip to Ukraine.

As of March 31, there were a total of 62 open investigations into allegations of grant and procurement fraud, corruption, theft, program irregularities, and counterproliferation of technology of weapons system components. Nearly half of the investigations are related to the diversion of aid, while corruption and procurement fraud were second and third most common among those categories.

Twelve of those investigations were initiated during the second quarter, while two were closed.

To date, none of the investigations related to Operation Atlantic Resolve have resulted in indictments or convictions, though the majority of investigations are still ongoing, Pentagon OIG spokeswoman Mollie Halpern told the Washington Examiner.

The report, citing the State Department, described Ukraine’s “corruption and rule-of-law concerns” as the “greatest challenge for post-war economic recovery and attracting foreign investment.”

The inspectors general from the Pentagon, State Department, and U.S. Agency for International Development are leading the federal government’s oversight of approximately $113 billion in aid and funds marked for Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Office of Defense Cooperation-Kyiv told the inspector general’s office that 88% of defense articles were compliant, while 12% were unaccounted for or “delinquent.” It represents a 13% increase in compliance from the previous quarter.

In January, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said there was “no credible evidence of the misuse or illicit diversion of American equipment” provided to Ukraine, but there have been other corruption allegations during the war.

Ukraine’s Security Service announced in January it discovered a mass corruption scheme involving the purchase of 100,000 mortar rounds for its armed forces in the fall of 2022. Ukraine’s defense ministry paid Lviv Arsenal for the ammunition, but it was never received. Instead, some of those funds ended up being transferred to foreign accounts.

In December, a senior Ukrainian defense ministry official was accused of embezzling the equivalent of $40 million in a separate case involving a contract for artillery shells.

You don't say

quote:

Originally posted by egregore:
^^^ Can't be much of a war zone if it's safe enough for a top cabinet secretary to go over there and play gee-tar.

The Studio was probably no where near Ukraine.

From The New York Times

As Russia Advances, NATO Considers Sending Trainers Into Ukraine

The move could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war. The Biden administration continues to say there will be no American troops on the ground.

https://archive.ph/bEnrx

NATO allies are inching closer to sending troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces, a move that would be another blurring of a previous red line and could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war.

Ukraine’s manpower shortage has reached a critical point, and its position on the battlefield in recent weeks has seriously worsened as Russia has accelerated its advances to take advantage of delays in shipments of American weapons. As a result, Ukrainian officials have asked their American and NATO counterparts to help train 150,000 new recruits closer to the front line for faster deployment.
So far the United States has said no, but Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that a NATO deployment of trainers appeared inevitable. “We’ll get there eventually, over time,” he said.

For now, he said, an effort inside Ukraine would put “a bunch of NATO trainers at risk” and would most likely mean deciding whether to use precious air defenses to protect the trainers instead of critical Ukrainian infrastructure near the battlefield. General Brown briefed reporters on his plane en route to a NATO meeting in Brussels.

As a part of NATO, the United States would be obligated under the alliance’s treaty to aid in the defense of any attack on the trainers, potentially dragging America into the war.

The White House has been adamant that it will not put American troops, including trainers, on the ground in Ukraine, a position that an administration official reiterated on Thursday. The administration has also urged NATO allies not to send their troops.
But in February, President Emmanuel Macron of France said that “nothing should be ruled out” when it comes to sending Western troops to Ukraine. Mr. Macron has doubled down on his comment since, including after senior American diplomats asked him to stop.
The government of Estonia has not ruled out the possibility of sending troops to western Ukraine to take over rear roles that could free Ukrainian troops to go to the front, Estonia’s national security adviser said this week.

Lithuania’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, backed Mr. Macron’s stance in an interview with the The Guardian last week. “Our troops have been training Ukrainians in Ukraine before the war,” he said, adding, “So returning to this tradition might be quite doable.”
The American military has done training for Ukrainian troops in Poland, Germany and the United States, but pulling troops out of Ukraine is time consuming. American officials now acknowledge that the current training by Ukrainian forces is not sufficient, and that they need better and faster training to push back on an expected Russian drive this summer.

The United States used to help run a NATO training program at Yavoriv, in western Ukraine, but American troops were pulled out from there at the start of the war.

American and allied training has not always been successful. Before a Ukrainian counteroffensive last summer, U.S. soldiers provided training in Germany to Ukrainian units on maneuver warfare, mine clearing and other tasks. But learning how to use tanks, artillery and infantry troops in a coordinated way is difficult, particularly in a short 12-week period. Compounding the problem is that Ukrainians are facing a battlefield far different and more intense than what American forces have fought on in recent years.

Moving the training into Ukraine, military officials acknowledge, would allow American trainers to more quickly gather information about the innovations occurring on the Ukrainian front lines, potentially allowing them to adapt their training.
NATO last month asked Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, the supreme allied commander for Europe, to come up with a way for the alliance to do more to help Ukraine that would mitigate risks. A U.S. official said on Wednesday that one possibility could be training Ukrainian troops in Lviv, near the country’s western border with Poland.

But Russia has already bombed Lviv, including a few weeks ago when Russian cruise missiles struck critical infrastructure there.
Some officials say that large numbers of new Ukrainian recruits might still be sent to sprawling training ranges in Germany and Poland.
But logistically that requires transporting the troops to the U.S. Army’s training grounds in Grafenwoehr, Germany, putting them through complex maneuvers meant to teach them combined arms warfare and then sending the troops nearly 1,000 miles through Lviv and then Kyiv for deployment to the front lines.

“Remember, when Russia first invaded Crimea in 2014, we sent increased troop numbers into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces in western Ukraine, and we kept rotating them in all the way to 2022, when we got spooked and withdrew them,” said Evelyn Farkas, the former top Pentagon official for Ukraine during the Obama administration. “It shouldn’t surprise anyone now, when manpower is in short supply at the Ukrainian front, that NATO members and the alliance leadership consider how to help again from the rear.”

Other NATO allies, including Britain, Germany and France, are working to base defense contractors in Ukraine to help build and repair weapons systems closer to the combat zone — what military officials have described as a “fix it forward” approach. Current and former U.S. defense officials said the White House is now reviewing its ban on allowing American defense contractors in Ukraine, although a small number have already been allowed in, under State Department authorities, to work on specific weapons systems like Patriot air defenses.

“There is an element of ally malpractice in the fact that we’re providing masses of Western equipment to Ukraine, but not giving them the resources to sustain it,” said Alexander S. Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and a Ukrainian-born American combat veteran.

quote:

NATO allies are inching closer to sending troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces, a move that would be another blurring of a previous red line and could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war.

Seems eerily similar to US sending military advisors to Vietnam before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. But hey, we're killing a lot of Russians so there's that.

This shit is mind-numbingly predictable.

quote:

Originally posted by bdylan:
This shit is mind-numbingly predictable.

Same script, different war.
Have a buddy that was in Laos when they were denying it.

quote:

Originally posted by wcb6092:
From The New York Times
“There is an element of ally malpractice in the fact that we’re providing masses of Western equipment to Ukraine, but not giving them the resources to sustain it,” said Alexander S. Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and a Ukrainian-born American combat veteran.

Vindman is a dirtbag traitor and I hope justice finds him while I’m alive to learn of it.

That said, he’s not wrong on this statement although I draw different conclusions than him. I was an Advisor flying attack aircraft in the Afghan Air Force and often found myself thinking along similar lines: that the concept of Equipping & Advising is itself sound, but US execution is wrong. Because we see the effort as something short of war, and so adjust our ROE and authorities accordingly. But the only hope of advising to be successful is to go all in committed to the partner effort. Full combat.

There’s always a charlatan trying to do war on the cheap and drawing folks in by incrementalism and fake promises. But my experience was if you’ve reached a point where violence is the answer, you must fully commit to it. Advising has a place in the total war effort (assuming there’s a credible partner who shares our vision for an end state, something we don’t have in Ukraine), but is dangerously futile if used incorrectly or with shitty partners.

quote:

Originally posted by arabiancowboy:
There’s always a charlatan trying to do war on the cheap and drawing folks in by incrementalism and fake promises. But my experience was if you’ve reached a point where violence is the answer, you must fully commit to it. Advising has a place in the total war effort (assuming there’s a credible partner who shares our vision for an end state, something we don’t have in Ukraine), but is dangerously futile if used incorrectly or with shitty partners.

This rings especially true to me. This is not a good path we're going down here. You put it way more eloquently than I could.

Meanwhile Back At The Ranch

Xi Lauds China-Russia Ties as Putin Arrives in Beijing

Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to work with counterpart Vladimir Putin to "rejuvenate" their countries as the pair started a day of talks in Beijing, saying China would "always be a good partner" of Russia, according to Chinese state media.

Putin arrived on Thursday for a two-day state visit that will include detailed talks on Ukraine, Asia, energy and trade with Xi, his most powerful political backer and fellow geopolitical rival of the United States.

"The China-Russia relationship today is hard-earned, and the two sides need to cherish and nurture it," Xi told Putin as they met in Beijing's Great Hall of the People.

"China is willing to ... jointly achieve the development and rejuvenation of our respective countries, and work together to uphold fairness and justice in the world."

China and Russia declared a "no limits" partnership in February 2022 when Putin visited Beijing just days before he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, triggering the deadliest land war in Europe since World War Two.

By picking China for his first foreign trip since being sworn in this month for a six-year term that will keep him in power until at least 2030, Putin is sending a message to the world about his priorities and the strength of his personal ties with Xi.

'STABILIZING'

Putin told Xi their co-operation was a stabilizing factor.

"It is of crucial significance that relations between Russia and China are not opportunistic and are not directed against anyone," Russia's RIA Novosti news agency cited Putin as saying.

Later describing their initial session as "warm and comradely," Putin outlined sectors where the two are strengthening ties, from nuclear and energy co-operation to food supplies and Chinese car manufacturing in Russia.

The leaders formally signed a statement deepening their strategic relationship, with Xi saying both sides agreed that a political settlement to the Ukraine crisis was the "right direction."

Putin said he was grateful to China for trying to solve the crisis, adding that he would brief Xi on the situation in Ukraine, where Russian forces are advancing on several fronts.

In an interview with China's Xinhua news agency before his departure, Putin praised Xi for helping to build a that partnership based on national interests and deep mutual trust.

"It was the unprecedentedly high level of the strategic partnership between our countries that determined my choice of China as the first state that I would visit after taking office as president," Putin said.

Informal chats between the leaders and senior officials of both sides to be held over tea and dinner later on Thursday are expected to be key to the two-day trip.

Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov said the talks would range over Ukraine, Asia, energy and trade.

Putin's newly appointed defense minister, Andrei Belousov, as well as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu and Ushakov will also attend, along with Russia's most powerful CEOs.

75 YEARS OF TIES

Putin, 71, and Xi, 70, will participate in a gala celebration marking 75 years since the Soviet Union recognized the People's Republic of China, which Mao Zedong declared in 1949.

The United States casts China as its biggest competitor and Russia as its biggest nation-state threat while U.S. President Joe Biden says this century will be defined by an existential contest between democracies and autocracies.

Putin and Xi share a broad world view, which casts the West as decadent and declining, just as China challenges U.S. supremacy in everything from quantum computing and synthetic biology to espionage and hard military power.

After meeting Xi, Putin said they were working for a multi-polar world, without closed alliances in Asia.

Putin will also visit the northeastern city of Harbin, which has historic ties to Russia. A mall devoted to Russian-made goods from about 80 Russian manufacturers opened on Thursday, the China Daily said.

China has strengthened trade and military ties with Russia in recent years as the United States and its allies imposed sanctions on both countries, particularly Moscow, for its invasion of Ukraine.

Western governments say China has played a crucial role in helping Russia withstand the sanctions and has supplied key technology that Russia has used on the battlefield in Ukraine.

But China, once Moscow's junior partner in the global Communist hierarchy, is by far the most powerful of Russia's friends globally.

Putin's arrival follows a mission to Beijing late last month by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in part to warn China's top diplomat Wang Yi against growing military support for Russia.

From the U.S. think tank "The Rand Corporation"


U.S. Escalation in Ukraine Needs a Plan

https://www.rand.org/pubs/comm...ack&utm_medium=email

quote:

From the U.S. think tank "The Rand Corporation"
U.S. Escalation in Ukraine Needs a Plan

^^^ Published by the Washington Post.
By Samuel Charap and Jeremy Shapiro
This commentary originally appeared on Washington Post on June 3, 2024.

The Biden administration's decision to approve Ukraine's use of U.S. weapons to attack targets inside Russia is, as President Biden might say, a big deal. Ukrainians argue that this change will derail the Kremlin's offensive in the Kharkiv region and perhaps even turn the tide of the war. Russian officials and propagandists claim it is a major escalation and have threatened to strike back directly at the United States or its allies.

Also, by the Washington Post, the next day:

The Pentagon is learning how to change at the speed of war
By David Ignatius
https://archive.ph/KlwUH

Until very recently — so recently you will be forgiven lack of notice of the change — it was fashionable among elites to wring their hands over letting robots decide whether to kill people. Countless conferences were devoted to the subject, new UN departments were designed, and new job descriptions were drafted, spawning battalions of specialized military bioethicists.

Zing! What was that? That was bioethics flying out the window. Sorry, chaps, pack it in. All those new ethics experts and professors and opinion influencers just became redundant. They are moot.

Pre-pandemic, so-called autonomous killing machines were de facto no bueno, the stuff of war crimes. Everyone agreed they were bad. Even if a robot lines up the shot and delivers the killing blow, an accountable human, not an unaccountable machine, must make the ultimate decision to take another human life.

The risks could not possibly be more well-known. Hollywood has thoroughly explored the subject to the point of cliché in countless silver screen series, from The Terminator and its innumerable sequels, spinoffs, and television adaptions, to Netflix’s Black Mirror, whose bleak, terrifying, and unforgettable 2017 episode “Metalhead” conclusively settled the argument in 41 minutes of runtime.

On June 4th, 2024 — mark the date — the Washington Post quietly ran an unobtrusive “good news” op-ed headlined, “The Pentagon is learning how to change at the speed of war.” To call it “just an op-ed” would do violence to its malevolent significance. First of all, the author, spy novelist and columnist David Ignatius, is one of WaPo’s most senior writers, and it’s a poorly hidden secret he is inextricably intertwined with the deep security state.

In other words, David and the CIA are besties. He knows what he’s talking about, and probably much more.

David’s op-ed began gently chiding the U.S. military for, with the very best of intentions, its antiquated ‘addiction’ to overly complicated, finicky, insanely expensive, super high-tech, human-directed weapons systems, rather than cheap, practical, reliable, and effective alternatives like the Russians are using to beat the Dickens out of Ukraine.

Ignatius ripped off the band-aid, rebelliously breaking from all conventional wisdom, and authoritatively accused the U.S.’s powerful and influential military-industrial complex of being systematically broken.

David Ignatius — the military-industrial complex’s best friend in media — openly scoffed at U.S. generals’ multi-billion dollar high-tech toys, which he predicted were so vulnerable they would only survive the first few minutes in a war with China:
image.png

David described an existential crisis. And you know Obama’s first rule: Never let a good crisis go to waste. The country thus breathlessly awaits an intervention, a Hegelian solution to the problem the MIC created, a savior. What could it be?

Most folks now agree the Russians’ pragmatic, entrepreneurial approach in Ukraine has decisively proven its battlefield superiority over our fancy, high-tech, acronymized weapons that took decades to develop: our top-tier M1 Abrams tanks, our PATRIOT air defense systems, our HIMARS and ATACMS missiles, our JDAMS flying bombs, and our networked cluster munitions.

They all literally or figuratively bogged down in the Ukrainian rasputitsa. In other words, stuck in the mud.
image 11.png
Desert tanks struggle in Eastern European mud

But the bigger problem is that all our defense systems, from the most modest mobile artillery unit to the sky-scraping F35 intelligent fighter jet, are all e-something, or i-something. They are all linked together, connected to the internet, in a networked global battlefield information system (GBIS). They were designed to be centrally controllable from the confines of an op center safely concealed under two hundred feet of granite below the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

Unfortunately, the Russians — those ‘incompetent,’ slipshod, gas-station-with-nukes ice jockeys — somehow overtook us in electronic jamming technology. And then kept going, without looking back. The Russians are jamming all our toys!

Our Borg-like, electronically interconnected technology is dead in the water, or in the mud, if it can’t talk to the other parts of itself. Worse, Russian jamming cuts it all off from its handlers thousands of miles away in America. In other words, it’s damned useless, which is why Ignatius predicted it wouldn’t last five minutes against China.

Ignatius’ description of this perfectly foreseeable development understated the terror and panic on the part of U.S. generals. It all worked so well against Saddam Hussein’s disorganized army! But the generals are slowly and reluctantly coming to terms with the fact our entire arsenal is close to useless against near-peer adversaries like Russia and China.

In desperation, and because Ukraine uber alles, all those ethical concerns over autonomous weapons systems instantly became as obsolete as our trillion-dollar aircraft carriers. The ban on machines that kill on automatic has been swept aside.

It’s an emergency, dummy.

Then, Ignatius described the easy fix to the problem. The simple correction is truly autonomous weapons, weapons that can’t be jammed, weapons that don’t have to talk to each other, weapons that push the pesky humans right out of the picture. In the same way the military is now quietly moving aside the humans, David also glided right over the pesky ethical issues, which earned not a single syllable in his column.

Ignatius said the only answer is machines that can think for themselves:
image 2.png

The military is way ahead of us. It’s almost too late to even hold a debate over whether saving Ukraine is worth a Metalhead future. Two years ago, the Deep State’s influential Council for Foreign Relations openly argued to cut off debate, in its article “Stop the “Stop the Killer Robot” Debate: Why We Need Artificial Intelligence in Future Battlefields.”
image 10.png
Coming soon to a pet store near you

Read it for yourself. The CFR waved off arguments about risks the robots will run amok and kill civilians. Humans make mistakes too! Soldiers kill civilians all the time! Robots might be even more accurate deciders of who to kill, and when. Who knows?

But the CFR never grappled with the accountability problem. Who’s responsible when the robot goes rogue and wipes out a village, or a wedding, or a whole city? Who’s tried for the war crimes?

Nobody, that’s who. You can’t expect technology to be perfect, dummy.

You can’t put a robot on trial. Come on, be serious.

The government knows full well that public outcry will only slow down the killer robot train. The military is now moving with mind-blowing, demonic, uncharacteristic speed toward building its dystopian, robot-armed future. The first fully autonomous killing machines have already been designed, built, and delivered to Ukraine.

To our chagrin, we learned during the pandemic that government can move unimaginably fast when it wants to. Ignatious heard it directly from Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks:
image 3.png

Autonomous killer drones are nothing more than autonomous killer robot dogs with wings.

Ignatius also assured us that the Air Force is, right now, building robotic fighter jets labeled with the grim euphemism “uncrewed.” The robots can keep on fighting, long after the human crews are gone.

Similarly, last month, the Navy formed a new squadron of hundreds of fully autonomous, uncrewed boats, a water swarm with the unwieldy name, “Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft.” GARC doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but maybe it echoes the last thing dying sailors say.

Instead of applying that awkward acronym, the Navy has nicknamed its new robot squadron the “Hell Hounds.” Coincidentally, Hell Hound also aptly describes the shiny robot dogs prowling Metalhead’s bleak, apocalyptic landscape, where they will forever be roaming in metallic packs, slowly herding the shrinking remnants of the human race into extinction.

It’s easy to blame Congress for failing to pull the plug, slow things down, or at least hold a public debate. But remember: attractive, well-spoken military analysts constantly deliver confidential, top-secret briefings to Congressmen, direly warning them China will win in five minutes unless we do something.

What can I say? It’s 2024. Here come the terminators, and nothing can stop it. We all knew this day was coming; we just didn’t think it would come from us.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com...rue&utm_medium=email

From the Washington Post:

Basic training in Ukraine is barely covering the basics, commanders say

https://archive.ph/T55zl#selection-447.0-447.71

Ukrainian commanders in the field say they are bracing for most of the new troops under a new conscription law to arrive with poor training.

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — As Ukraine prepares to mobilize tens of thousands of men to address a critical shortage of soldiers amid intensified Russian attacks, Ukrainian commanders in the field say they are bracing for most of the new troops to arrive with poor training.
Ukrainian commanders have long griped about lackluster preparation for recruits at training centers. But with Russia on the offensive, the persistent complaints are a reminder that a newly adopted mobilization law intended to widen the pool of draft-eligible men is just one step in solving the military’s personnel problems.

An influx of conscripts under the new law is still months away. In the meantime, commanders are redeploying soldiers from rear positions to fighting units near the front. President Volodymyr Zelensky last month also signed a law to allow some prison inmates to join the military in exchange for a chance of parole — copying a Russian tactic that provided thousands more fighters but is also releasing violent criminals back into society.

Wherever the new soldiers come from, Ukrainian field commanders said that because training is so deficient, they must often devote weeks to teaching them basic skills, such as how to shoot.

“We had guys that didn’t even know how to disassemble and assemble a gun,” said a 28-year-old deputy battalion commander from the 93d Mechanized Brigade, whom The Washington Post agreed to identify by his call sign, Schmidt, according to Ukrainian military protocol.

“We are just wasting a lot of time here on basic training,” Schmidt said, adding: “If, God forbid, there will be a breakthrough near Chasiv Yar, and we get new infantry that doesn’t know basic things, they will be sent there to just die.”

With Ukraine’s forces critically understaffed and losing ground, the failure to provide adequate basic training for soldiers underscores the dire situation Kyiv is facing more than two years after Moscow’s invasion.

Russia has made gains this year in large part because Ukraine’s military doesn’t have enough troops to defend against relentless assaults, soldiers say, while the government has been slow to ramp up its mobilization efforts.

To get more troops to the battlefield immediately, Zelensky’s recently appointed military chief, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, has redeployed people who were previously serving in jobs such as guarding bridges and other infrastructure far from the combat zone to brigades engaged in some of the fiercest fighting.

The move was designed in part to reduce the number of men who would have to be drafted — an issue that is politically fraught for Zelensky. Syrsky’s predecessor, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, had proposed drafting close to 500,000 people — a figure Zelensky publicly rejected by saying that he had not been shown evidence that it was necessary and that Ukraine would struggle financially to pay so many new soldiers’ salaries.

For front-line commanders, any new troops are welcome, given that some units have endured months without reinforcements. But many of these redeployed arrivals appear ill-prepared, commanders said, despite many having served in the military since the start of Russia’s invasion more than two years ago, albeit far from the battlefield.

Until about a month ago, a Ukrainian soldier, whose call sign is Val, had been standing guard on a bridge in the southern Odessa region — the same job he’d been doing every day since he enlisted at the start of the invasion.

On April 30, Val was told that he was being transferred to combat duty. Within 24 hours, he was assigned to the 93rd Brigade and instructed to deploy to the eastern Donetsk region. He didn’t even have time to pack his things — some had to be shipped later.
“It’s scary,” the 31-year-old said. “Nobody was really prepared.”

For a reconnaissance unit in the 42nd Mechanized Brigade, which was recently redirected to the northeast Kharkiv region to defend against a renewed Russian offensive, many of the scouts had just been reassigned from rear roles and were given just two weeks’ preparation before being sent into combat, to carry out tasks that at times require sneaking behind enemy lines.

What is taught in Ukrainian training centers “is complete nonsense,” said a 32-year-old soldier in the unit with the call sign Chirva. “Everything is learned on the spot.”

An officer who has spent more than a year instructing new soldiers at one of Ukraine’s facilities said the training centers are low on Soviet-caliber ammunition because it is being saved for troops on the battlefield. That means recruits get little experience firing live rounds. The officer said the training center received just 20 bullets per person.

“There are no grenades for throwing in training centers, and there are no grenade launcher rounds in the training center,” said the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so publicly. “This is the problem.”
“We don’t have a proper training system in place,” the officer continued, adding that Ukraine needs its instructors to be taught by NATO trainers to condense the standard two-month basic training into one month.

A current priority for Ukraine’s General Staff is securing more training for recruits abroad — at facilities that can’t be targeted by Russian bombardment, unlike those in Ukraine. Britain so far has provided the most basic training for Ukrainians. In a potential boost, France is considering sending instructors to Ukraine to help prepare draftees, Syrsky said in a post on social media.
The prospect of being sent to dangerous front-line positions without adequate training is a main reason many Ukrainian men fear conscription. As part of a recruitment effort, the National Guard’s Khartia Brigade has billboards across the country promising “60 days of preparation.”

More at link

quote:

The prospect of being sent to dangerous front-line positions without adequate training is a main reason many Ukrainian men fear conscription. As part of a recruitment effort, the National Guard’s Khartia Brigade has billboards across the country promising “60 days of preparation.”

And in the small print below: “and then into the meat grinder you go.”

https://x.com/Project_Veritas/.../1800526005255262263

quote:

Originally posted by wcb6092:
https://x.com/Project_Veritas/.../1800526005255262263

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Another soon to be former federal official, Dan Fitzgerald just fucked himself out of a career.

Ukraine has a month to avoid default

https://archive.ph/vctWv

War is still exacting a heavy toll on Ukraine’s economy. The country’s gdp is a quarter smaller than on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, the central bank is tearing through foreign reserves and Russia’s recent attacks on critical infrastructure have depressed growth forecasts. “Strong armies,” warned Sergii Marchenko, Ukraine’s finance minister, on June 17th, “must be underpinned by strong economies.”

Following American lawmakers’ decision in April to belatedly approve a funding package worth $60bn, Ukraine is not about to run out of weapons. In time, the state’s finances will also be bolstered by g7 plans, announced on June 13th, to use Russian central-bank assets frozen in Western financial institutions to lend another $50bn. The problem is that Ukraine faces a cash crunch—and soon.

War is still exacting a heavy toll on Ukraine’s economy. The country’s gdp is a quarter smaller than on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, the central bank is tearing through foreign reserves and Russia’s recent attacks on critical infrastructure have depressed growth forecasts. “Strong armies,” warned Sergii Marchenko, Ukraine’s finance minister, on June 17th, “must be underpinned by strong economies.”

Following American lawmakers’ decision in April to belatedly approve a funding package worth $60bn, Ukraine is not about to run out of weapons. In time, the state’s finances will also be bolstered by g7 plans, announced on June 13th, to use Russian central-bank assets frozen in Western financial institutions to lend another $50bn. The problem is that Ukraine faces a cash crunch—and soon.
Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

For the past two years, Ukraine’s creditors have agreed to suspend debt-service payments. The let-off—from both government and private lenders—is worth 15% of gdp a year. Indeed, if payments had been required, they would have been the state’s second-biggest expenditure, behind defence. Now, however, the moratorium from private foreign bondholders, including Amundi, a French asset manager, and pimco, an American one, is set to expire on August 1st.

Thus Ukraine has a month to avoid default. The imf is keen for Mr Marchenko to negotiate a write-down, but a deal seems unlikely in the time available. If Ukraine does default, it would reflect a troubling lack of faith among private investors concerning the West’s commitment. In the long run, that could spell disaster for the country’s recovery.

Few restructurings have been undertaken in the heat of war. Countries do so to ensure access to financial markets, which requires manageable debts. A quick restructuring takes months, a difficult one years—creditors are never eager to give up claims. But Ukraine has been shut out of capital markets since the war began, meaning there is little urgency to proceedings. In June Mr Marchenko offered creditors a deal that cut 60% from the present value of its debts. The creditors coolly replied that they thought 22% was more reasonable.

Ukraine is in desperate need of fiscal room. At the end of the year, its debt-to-gdp ratio will approach 94%—high for an economy with its rocky financial history and of its size. The sums that allies provide are impressive, but come in the form of artillery, tanks and earmarked funds, rather than cash. Only $8bn of America’s recent package will go directly to Ukraine’s government, an amount equivalent to just over a quarter of Ukraine’s annual spending on social benefits, and even this is in the form of a loan. The eu is planning to offer a little more, but still only $38bn over three years.

Although the let-off Ukraine wants is modest—$12bn from 2024 to 2027—the country has no spare cash to stump up if it is not granted. Under a restructuring deal as drastic as the one Ukraine proposed, and bondholders rejected, the country would only just be able to make ends meet, according to the imf. For their part, bondholders question how the fund can be so sure, especially since its analysis is now a few months out of date.

In the absence of a deal, Ukraine has two options. One is to negotiate an extension on its debt-service freeze, as it has already with official creditors, who will forgo payments until 2027. The other is to default. That may sound drastic, but in reality there is little difference between the scenarios. Either way, Ukrainian payments will not resume.

The reticence of private-sector investors does not just reflect Ukraine’s financial outlook. In a normal restructuring, creditors gamble on a country’s economic prospects. Lending to a borrower at war also entails a second gamble: that it will win. “There has to be a country in existence to repay at the end of this,” as a bondholder notes. A lot depends on the extent of Western support. Taxpayers may tire of handing over billions. Donald Trump, who has been sceptical of the amounts disbursed, looks increasingly likely to return to the White House in November. The imf’s usual models struggle to take such factors into account.

Bondholders are also sceptical about plans for Ukraine’s long-term reconstruction in the case of victory. Although allies and the imf have argued that restructuring now will enable Ukraine to re-enter financial markets as soon as the war ends and its allies forgive debts, investors are not convinced that such a day will ever materialise. Rather, they think a restructuring would be the first of many attempts by Ukraine’s allies to push the financial burden of war, and the cost of reconstruction, away from governments and on to the private sector.

Much of Ukraine’s recovery—including the construction of basic infrastructure, civic buildings, as well as training people to rebuild the country—will never turn a profit, and will thus need to be shouldered by the country’s allies. The current impasse raises a worrying prospect: that distrust between them and private investors will slow down progress. Mr Marchenko was right to remind Ukraine’s commercial creditors that a country’s army is only as strong as the economy behind it. He could also have reminded Ukraine’s allies that an economy is only as strong as the army keeping it in existence. ■