What We’re Not Being Told About the War in Ukraine

“The war was never meant to be won; it was meant to be continuous.” — George Orwell, 1984

Among the verboten subjects Robert Kennedy, Jr. is willing to take on is the exorbitant cost of the war in Ukraine and how the money going there could be used instead for curing our societal ills and alleviating the suffering of so many who are barely hanging on in this country.  

But the government and its compliant media don’t want you to raise such concerns. Indeed, true to form, the media has been claiming, for example, that comparing the huge amount of money going to Ukraine to the paltry sums going to the victims of the fires in Maui is nothing but a right-wing “line of attack” that should be dismissed out of hand. 

Instead, this type of comparison is simply common sense and seems to be on the minds of the majority of Americans who, as polls show, now oppose further assistance to Ukraine. To write off all of these Americans as right-wing, or as Putin pawns, as I’ve seen others claim, is not only inaccurate; it’s downright insulting.

A recent analysis argues that, even if the Ukraine war ended today, the US bill for the war would be at least $600 billion. And that’s on top of the billions of dollars already spent on the war.  

In his article entitled, “Ukraine to cost half-trillion more if war ends now,” Stephen Bryen, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy, writes “Ukraine will end up being the most costly and perhaps corrupt foreign operation ever carried out by the United States.”    

Bryen argues that, even after the cessation of the conflict, the bill due and owed will include   “continuation of military assistance, budget support for the Ukrainian government and reconstruction assistance.” Bryen cites a World Bank estimate that reconstruction alone will cost $411 billion over a ten-year period. And this estimate only covers the destruction between February 2022 and February 2023, and not the damage done in the six months since. Simple math: the cost of reconstruction for the destruction to date is around $600 billion. Bryen compares this to the $173 billion (in present-day dollars) the US spent on the entire Marshall Plan after WWII.

Bryen estimates that the US will give Ukraine $60 billion a year for 10 years––and that’s if the war were to end now, which it most certainly will not. Further, he writes that given the lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should “expect that a lot of that will be stolen.” Of course this is true; Ukraine is well-known to be the most corrupt country in Europe.  

Bryen, who gives props to Kennedy for speaking out against the Ukraine war, explains:

It has long been understood that Ukraine is a corrupt country. Ukrainian politicians, including Zelensky, have offshored some of their wealth (Zelelensky has a villa in Tuscany on the seashore in Forte dei Marmi which he bought before he entered politics and now rents to Russian clients at 12,000 euros a month). 

President Biden’s son Hunter is embroiled in an investigation of payments and other activities centered partly on Ukraine’s Burisma energy holding company and in part on transactions in China. . . .

When the big reconstruction money starts flowing, assuming that happens, political and military officials in Ukraine will enthusiastically help the United States line their pockets.

Ukraine’s corruption was highly visible this month as President Zelensky fired all the military recruiters in the country because they were selling recruitment passes to young men seeking to avoid the war.

Ukraine is not only a sieve for monetary aid, it is also unreliable in handling the military hardware that the US sends it. Thus, as a report in The Hill noted at the end of 2022, “American-made weapons originally sent to Ukraine may be dispersed to other countries, a problem endemic in U.S. arms sales that has allowed adversaries and terrorist organizations to acquire advanced U.S. weaponry.” 

The report further notes that the President of Nigeria has warned  that weapons from Ukraine are ending up in Nigeria. And Finnish media says criminal organizations may be trafficking weapons from Ukraine — including U.S. weapons — into European Union countries.  

What’s more, the Biden administration is quite aware of this problem as CNN reported in April of 2022, in an article entitled, “What happens to weapons sent to Ukraine? The US doesn’t really know.” As this article relates, “The US has few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft and other weaponry it has sent across the border into Ukraine . . . . It’s a conscious risk the Biden administration is willing to take.”  At the end of 2022, the Washington Post reported that the Biden administration was only able to track about 10 percent of the weapons sent to Ukraine.  

Aside from the issue of whether money and weapons are going to the right place, the other elephant in the living room is the fact that US officials are aware they are sponsoring an effort in Ukraine that is futile. It is only leading to a mounting death toll of Ukrainian forces without a chance of victory. Indeed, an August 17, 2023 article in the Washington Post explained that US intelligence knows that Ukraine will not and cannot achieve the goals of its much-touted “counter-offensive.” And this report followed the leaking of a document that showed the Pentagon is also fully aware that Ukraine cannot win the war.

But none of this knowledge has stopped the Biden administration from urging Ukraine to carry on its futile efforts or from spending hard-earned taxpayer money to support the war. 

Of course, US weapons manufacturers, who have so much influence over our foreign policy, profit from the war regardless of whether US aid or weapons land in the right hands or Ukraine is victorious. 

All this, and still no serious debate on Capitol Hill. Those who question the wisdom of endless war are vilified by the media—especially presidential candidate Kennedy. Hopefully voters can see through it.