Authored by Kyle Anzalone via The Libertarian Institute,

A US official said the White House has “almost zero” ability to track the weapons it is sending to Ukraine. So far, President Joe Biden has approved over $3 billion in arms shipments to Kiev. 

Speaking with CNN about the weapons, one source said, “we have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero. It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time.

The source said the US lacked personnel “on the ground,” making it nearly impossible to track the movement of weapons. Another source told CNN Ukraine was incentivized to lie to get access to more weapons, saying “It’s a war – every statement is an information operation, every interview. Every Zelensky appearance broadcast is an information operation.”

The US infamously armed the resistance to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, only to have many of those weapons fall into the hand of the Islamic State and other al-Qaeda affiliate groups. The consequence was an Islamic Caliphate that took over large swaths of Iraq and Syria.

Neo-Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion have been incorporated into Ukraine’s armed forces. In a recent interview, President Volodymyr Zelensky was asked about the presence of these extremist groups within Ukraine’s military. Zelensky insisted they are “defending our country,” saying “they are what they are.” 

The inability to track the arms is not deterring the US from sending weapons to Ukraine. Last week, Biden approved an $800 million weapons package. On Tuesday, White House official Matt Miller said, “we are always preparing the next package of security assistance.”

The US claims the arms transfers have been successful with little interference from Moscow., and a third source speaking with CNN says Russia is not threatening the weapons shipments.

The outlet also reported that “it does not appear that Russia has been actively attacking western weapons shipments entering Ukraine – although it is unclear exactly why, especially since the US has intelligence that the Russians want to and have discussed doing so both publicly and privately.”

Advertisement

8 Comments

  1. John M. says:

    In unrelated news, Water would certainly wet us and Fire would certainly burn.

    Like

  2. Rocketguy says:

    Dumping piles of high end anti-armor into a region with a thriving black market. What could go wrong? Odds on US citizens dying on the wrong end of US/NATO weapons?

    Like

    1. Shawn says:

      well thats been happening since Vietnam, so no sense worrying about it now!

      Like

      1. Rocketguy says:

        Good point. Your accelerationist mindset is becoming more and more attractive.

        Like

        1. Shawn says:

          come on over, there is plenty of room brother

          Like

    2. John M. says:

      I’d be a lot more worried about it if I were Germany or France. There’s one chaotic border between Ukraine and those countries, while there’s a pretty huge ocean between Ukraine and the US.

      The instability in Eastern Europe in the 90s, including the Balkan War, supplied arms to criminal and terrorist groups in Western Europe for quite some time.

      Like

Leave a Reply to John M. Cancel reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s