Thread by @michaeldweiss

This is an excellent and timely factsheet on Ukraine, U.S. v. European security assistance, and other misunderstood or lied about aspects of the war, by our friends at @TheStudyofWar. I'll summarize a few main points below, with additional sources of my own: understandingwar.org/backgrounder/u…

Russia's advances have slowed considerably in the last few months. It was taking, on average, 28 sq km per day in November; it took 16 sq km in January. Why is this? Russians are suffering severe manpower and equipment losses and Ukraine is causing them greater pain with its fleet of domestically sourced FPV drones, which now include fiber-optic wire-guided drones to evade electronic warfare. (Drones increasingly compensate for artillery shortages on the Ukrainian side.) Such is the state of Russia's army, its soldiers are now using donkeys to transport ammunition to the frontlines: independent.co.uk/news/world/eur…

Of course, Russia still has its own formidable capabilities and advantages on the battlefield, especially in glide bombs and drones: it, too, deploys fiber-optic wire-guided FPVs. But, as @Jack_Watling, one of the best military analysts of the war has noted, the "Russian military is massively underperforming, largely because of the poor quality of its [third big advantage] infantry and a lack of lower-level command and control." theguardian.com/world/2025/feb…

It is one thing to devastate Ukrainian positions with bombs and drones; it is another to exploit that devastation by capturing and holding evacuated terrain. At the current pace of advance, as per ISW, it would take Russia 83 years to capture the remaining 80% of Ukraine it does not occupy. (I doubt even Donald Trump will be president in 83 years, although Elon Musk's follicular unit transplants may well become self-aware by then, in which case we're all fucked anyway.)

As for dictatorial theater kid Volodymyr Zelensky... Ukraine cannot hold elections under martial law, as a matter of constitutionality. The main rivals to Zelensky in any hypothetical contest include former Commander-in-Chief (and now Ukrainian ambassador to the UK) Valerii Zaluzhzny and former President Petro Poroshenko. They affirm this fact. Now perhaps Viktor Medvedchuk or whomever the Kremlin has in mind to run as their preferred candidate for president does not care, but this is a sovereign Ukrainian matter. It is not up to the United States or Russia or South African oligarchs to decide.

Europe, which will be tasked with sustaining most if not all of Ukraine's security assistance if the U.S. cuts and runs, *already* spends more than the U.S. does on Ukraine. ISW: "Europe has provided and pledged approximately $204.1 billion in all — over $174 billion from the EU, $13.9 billion from Norway, and $16.2 billion from the UK — compared to America's $183 billion."

On the matter of what the U.S. spends...

ISW: "The majority of the funds the United States has allocated for Ukraine stays in the United States to fund domestic defense industrial base and replenish US stockpiles."

Indeed. The best analysis of where U.S. taxpayer money is going (and not going) has been conducted by @AEI, not quite what you would call a bastion of liberal Democratic Party agitprop. Tl;dr: Most of the money gets spent at home creating new arsenals for the U.S. military (to compensate for the aged or expired-but still-viable stockpiles of kit donated to Ukraine), building weapons factories and employing thousands of American workers. Here's a helpful graph by AEI: aei.org/ukraine-assist…

In other words, Donald Trump's wholly imaginary claim that "half" of what the U.S. has spent on Ukraine since the full-scale invasion has been stolen would, if true, mean that the real den of thieves was operating right here in the United States.

Regarding actual Ukrainian corruption, this is a problem no one in Ukraine denies and everyone talks about almost as much as they do the war. Much of what we know and what gets reported about Ukrainian corruption in the international press is the spadework of... Ukrainian civil society groups and law enforcement bodies. Case in point: "Ukraine’s intelligence agency said it had exposed a defense company’s $40 million embezzlement scheme, money that had been intended to procure mortar rounds." nytimes.com/2024/01/28/wor…

One might even argue that the exigencies of a war for national survival have accelerated efforts at weeding out or at least anathematizing corruption (stealing what is needed at the front is treason, not just fraud). So have the requirements for Ukraine's candidature to join the European Union.

As for America's own Ukraine oversight protocols, there exists an entire section of the U.S. Government Accountability Office dedicated to... Ukraine oversight. All its reports are publicly available until DOGE discovers this bureaucracy exists and a 19 year-old 4chan incel decides its staff should be fired. You can start here: gao.gov/ukraine-oversi…

Let's say, however, that you mistrust the Deep State Globalist Gorgon's capacity or willingness to tell the truth about Ukraine aid. Fear not: private enterprise is here to help. International accounting firms are contracted to audit where Ukraine aid money goes. PricewaterhouseCoopers, for instance, reviews how the Ukrainian government compiles its regular expenditure reports to the World Bank (information shared with the relevant U.S. project donors).

Deloitte and KPMG does (or did) the same for a certain U.S. agency of cursed name said to specialize in communist terrorism overseas: gao.gov/assets/gao-24-…

As it stands, there are very real inefficiencies and delinquencies in U.S. security assistance to Ukraine, as you'd expect there would be in such a mammoth program. But these, too, are regularly examined by the U.S. Department of Defense's Inspector General, which marks where progress has been made on both the American and Ukrainian side. Here's a good report. It contains recommendations for further improvements in the monitoring of military assistance to Ukraine and it does not recommend doing away with military assistance in its entirety because Ukraine isn't ready to part with enough of its natural resources: media.defense.gov/2024/Jan/11/20…