JIM GERAGHTY
What You Need to Know about American Aid to Ukraine
Yesterday, Ohio Republican senator J. D. Vance spoke at the Heritage Foundation, and a healthy portion of his remarks dealt with foreign policy.
There are fair arguments for caution or wariness about expanding the U.S. commitment to helping Ukraine. At the beginning of the year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a report about which munitions the U.S. military was running low on, and how long it would take to restock the supplies of those munitions to normal, pre-invasion levels.
According to CSIS estimates — and it cautions that these figures are only estimates, based upon the best information currently available — at the “surge” or prioritized production rate, it will take two and a half years to restock the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) mobile-artillery system and vehicles, four years to restock at least one category of 155 millimeter shells, five and a half years to restock the Javelin anti-tank-missile stockpile, and six and a half years to restock the Stinger air-defense-missile stockpile.*
Yesterday, I published the most updated, and quite long, list of military aid that the U.S. has sent to Ukraine. So far, the U.S. has sent Ukraine 38 HIMARS and ammunition; 160 155mm Howitzers, and more than 1,500,000 155mm artillery rounds; more than 7,000 precision-guided 155mm artillery rounds; more than 14,000 155mm rounds of Remote Anti-Armor Mine Systems; 10,000 Javelin anti-armor systems; and more than 1,600 Stinger anti-aircraft systems.
CSIS was quick to note, “Most inventories are okay. . . . The U.S. has provided 108 million rounds of small arms ammunition, but U.S. production is about 8.6 billion rounds per year, so this transfer is easy to accommodate. The U.S. provided 300 M113 armored personnel carriers but has thousands available because the Army is moving to a different system. The U.S. has provided 276 tactical vehicles to tow weapons but has tens of thousands in inventory. For most categories of weapons and munitions, the U.S. can provide support indefinitely.” (Note that those numbers represent arms transfers as of January.)
You don’t have to be a Putin apologist, an isolationist, or an ardent anti-interventionist to look at this and conclude that the U.S. needs to go on a long-overdue defense-production binge, and that any additional military aid to Ukraine in those particular systems must be dependent upon there being enough left to protect U.S. interests in other parts of the world. The U.S. military can only supply weapons and equipment it can afford to spare.
The problem is that opponents of additional aid to Ukraine often use arguments that are misleading or outright false.
Yesterday at the Heritage Foundation, Vance said, “We’re learning that maybe apparently America already has troops on the ground in Ukraine,” and urged, “Get Americans out of Ukraine,” and was greeted with applause.
This is presumably a reference to that leak of a classified document, dated March 23, that indicated that the United Kingdom had 50 special-forces operators in Ukraine, Latvia had 17, France had 15, the U.S. had 14, and the Netherlands had one.
As this newsletter has noted previously, we’ve seen stories like this several times during the war. The U.S. and its NATO allies are still operating embassies in Kyiv. The U.S. closed its embassy in February 2022 and reopened it in May. For obvious reasons, those embassies need a lot more than the usual security, and these Western governments need to be able to evacuate their diplomatic personnel at a moment’s notice in extremely dangerous circumstances.
Back on April 12, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told Fox News, “There is a small U.S. military presence at the embassy in conjunction with the Defense Attachés office to help us work on accountability of the material that is going in and out of Ukraine,” Kirby said, referencing the weapons and other support the U.S. has been sending to Kyiv. “So they’re attached to that embassy and to that the defense attache.”
Kirby added that those troops “are not fighting on the battlefield.” In addition, Fox News reported that those U.S. forces in Kyiv also provide security services.
“There has been no change to the president’s mandate that there will not be American troops in Ukraine fighting in this war,” Kirby told the network.
(If you count U.S. Marine guards at American embassies, then American has “troops on the ground” in just about every country on earth. Note that the host country has the primary responsibility for the protection of the American embassy, and that while Marines often play a role in the protection of U.S. diplomatic staff, their primary duty is to protect — and if necessary destroy — any classified information so it doesn’t fall into enemy hands.)
Does Vance want to remove those 14 or so special operators in Ukraine? Would the senator prefer to entirely rely on the Ukrainians for the security of U.S. diplomats and all that classified information within the embassy? Does he want the U.S. embassy to move back to Lviv or Poland, as it did for a few months last year?
Vance also said at Heritage, “Let’s not mistake the courage of Ukrainian troops on the ground with the fact that they have the most corrupt leadership and corrupt government in Europe and maybe the most corrupt leadership anywhere in the world.”
Ukraine has the “most corrupt leadership anywhere in the world”? Really? Because in Transparency International’s 2021 ranking of nations by corruption, Ukraine ranked 123 out of 180 countries. I’m not saying that’s a good ranking, but it’s a far cry from those at the bottom like Venezuela, Somalia, Syria, and South Sudan. Yes, Ukraine did rank lowest in Europe, but it scored a 32 out of a possible 100, while Bosnia and Albania scored 35, Moldova scored 36, Turkey and Serbia scored 38, Macedonia and Kosovo scored 39, Belarus scored a 41, Bulgaria hit 42, and Hungary — one of Vance’s favorites! — scored a 43. Corruption in pre-war Ukraine was a little worse than the generally bad level found in most of southeastern Europe.
Oh, and Russia scored a 29. I guess it depends upon how you define “Europe.”
(Since I know you’re wondering, the U.S. scored a 67. The highest-rated, and least-corrupt countries were Denmark, Finland, and New Zealand, which all scored an 88.)
But let’s say you do deem Zelensky and the Ukrainian government intolerably corrupt. Is the right answer to let the Russian military run roughshod over the Ukrainians, right up to the borders of the NATO alliance? Do the Ukrainian people deserve that? According to the United Nations, 8,534 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and 14,370 have been injured in the war so far. Is America’s policy to be, “Tough luck. We think your leadership is too corrupt to offer you any help”?
Note that one of the reasons we have those 14 special operators on the ground is “accountability of the material that is going in and out of Ukraine,” as Kirby put it. In other words, the Pentagon knows there’s the potential for corruption in the Ukrainian government and is taking steps to mitigate it. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the risk of Ukraine reselling U.S. arms on the black market is particularly high, as Ukraine needs all those weapons to fight the ongoing Russian invasion. Starving men rarely resell food.
I don’t disagree with everything Vance said; I think the Ohio senator was completely right when he declared, “The thing that we need to prevent more than anything is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan; it would be catastrophic for this country, it would decimate our entire economy . . . it would [pull] this country into a great depression.” And you can find indisputable experts on China, such as Elbridge Colby, who argue that the U.S. can’t keep helping Ukraine at the current pace and provide a serious defense of Taiwan at the same time.
But I think Ukraine-aid skeptics undermine their more plausible and coherent arguments when they mislead people into believing U.S. military forces are on the ground fighting the Russians in Ukraine or contend that corruption in the Ukrainian government abrogates any U.S. interest in helping other countries stand up against the territorial aggression and brutality of Vladimir Putin.
*Do you notice I put in links there, so that if you want to know more about those weapons systems, you can quickly and easily read more about them and what they do? When you’re evaluating who’s right in an argument, think about who gives you the most information, with links to sources, and who just asserts things and expects you to nod along and believe them.
ADDENDUM: I find myself with conflicted feelings about the end of BuzzFeed News. No doubt, the outlet’s leadership attempted to build a serious news organization, and good reporters worked there over the years. The Pulitzer it won was for using satellite images to expose China’s mass detention of Muslims is a testament to the extraordinary, groundbreaking reporting that more news organizations should embrace.
But when you heard the name “BuzzFeed,” you probably thought of silly cat videos, listicles of pop-culture gifs, and inane quizzes such as, “Which Hogwarts house would you end up in?” The site was always this awkward arranged marriage between real news, like breaking the news about the allegations surrounding actor Kevin Spacey, and the silliest, lightest, fluffiest, and sometimes dumbest content on the Internet.
I’m surprised so many folks on the right seethe about BuzzFeed publishing the Steele dossier, as the publication of the dossier is what allowed the general public to develop its own (largely skeptical) assessment of it, rather than relying on other publications’ reporting that described it and alluded to it, but did not show it. In a book excerpt published yesterday, Ben Smith wrote, “Publishing the dossier wasn’t, in the end, a dagger to Trump’s heart. If anything, it muddied the less sensational revelations of his business dealings and his campaign manager’s ties to Russia.”
BuzzFeed was not quite “grand opening, grand closing,” but in a bit more than a decade, the site went from a joke to the employer of several big-name political journalists to a Pulitzer winner to back to being a joke, and now, to being defunct. Sometimes, the publication or website that is touted as the Next Big Thing genuinely turns into the Next Big Thing. And yet the story of BuzzFeed is that you can earn your status as the Next Big Thing and still, within a few years, turn into That Thing That Isn’t Around Anymore.
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