>Merkel and Macron admitting the Minsk agreements were used to buy time for CIA and British to arm rebels since 2014 was big story.
You don't mean "rebels" (who were/are in fact simply Russia proxies), you mean the other side, Ukraine.
Not sure what percentage of all arms delivered to Ukraine has come after February 2022, but it must be well north of 90%. So apparently all these plans to secretly and slowly arm Ukraine amounted to nothing, and it was the invasion itself that triggered the flow of arms. Some dastardly plan.
BTW always love the not-at-all-loaded use of "admitted".
>Large amounts of money the US has supplied Ukraine and lack of oversight to where this is going
These are the kind of fact-free notions that seem to start their life in the TuckerCarlsonVerse and spread outward from there. Just saying there's "lack of oversight" does not make it so, particularly when there's plenty of oversight by the US gov't. In fact, oversight is one reason why the buildup of weapons supplies (in terms of quantity and weapons systems types) has been so gradual. The US wanted to make sure Ukraine's army knows what to do with the stuff and won't leave on the field of battle so that it ends up arming the enemy, like the Afghans did.
>(the total US aid now surpasses Russia’s entire military budget per year).
That's completely meaningless. Russia's military budget pays for many times more personnel and weapons systems than the equivalent number as part of the US military budget, because the purchasing power of, say, $1 million is vastly different when it's spent by the Pentagon in the US, paying US prices and employing Americans, or by the Russian MOD, paying Russian prices and employing Russians.
>>(the total US aid now surpasses Russia’s entire military budget per year).
> That's completely meaningless. Russia's military budget pays for many times more personnel and weapons systems than the equivalent number as part of the US military budget, because the purchasing power of, say, $1 million is vastly different when it's spent by the Pentagon in the US, paying US prices and employing Americans, or by the Russian MOD, paying Russian prices and employing Russians.
It also seems misleading in the sense that, for example, we have a ton of Abrams tanks that the US military didn’t want, but that Congress has over time decided to buy. So if we send them to Ukraine, how should that be accounted for financially? I guess the cost of a gently used Abrams is pretty high but we already bought it and the value to us is pretty low.
You don't mean "rebels" (who were/are in fact simply Russia proxies), you mean the other side, Ukraine.
Not sure what percentage of all arms delivered to Ukraine has come after February 2022, but it must be well north of 90%. So apparently all these plans to secretly and slowly arm Ukraine amounted to nothing, and it was the invasion itself that triggered the flow of arms. Some dastardly plan.
BTW always love the not-at-all-loaded use of "admitted".
>Large amounts of money the US has supplied Ukraine and lack of oversight to where this is going
These are the kind of fact-free notions that seem to start their life in the TuckerCarlsonVerse and spread outward from there. Just saying there's "lack of oversight" does not make it so, particularly when there's plenty of oversight by the US gov't. In fact, oversight is one reason why the buildup of weapons supplies (in terms of quantity and weapons systems types) has been so gradual. The US wanted to make sure Ukraine's army knows what to do with the stuff and won't leave on the field of battle so that it ends up arming the enemy, like the Afghans did.
>(the total US aid now surpasses Russia’s entire military budget per year).
That's completely meaningless. Russia's military budget pays for many times more personnel and weapons systems than the equivalent number as part of the US military budget, because the purchasing power of, say, $1 million is vastly different when it's spent by the Pentagon in the US, paying US prices and employing Americans, or by the Russian MOD, paying Russian prices and employing Russians.