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Comment by soligern | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but where are the Ukrainians going to get the electronic components? I’m sure some pieces of cardboard are not the limiting factor here.

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From their western allies, unlike russia who is limited to shady deals with iran, india and china.

FWIW the level of transparency between those "shady deals" is probably identical to presumably "not shady deals" of NATO.

I mean the US Democrats voted down even the mere notion that maybe the most surface-level audit of US aid to Ukraine could be allowed[1].

[1]https://theintercept.com/2023/08/02/ukraine-aid-special-insp...

It's already audited at several levels so it was voted down because it was a case of the Republicans wanting to add another layer. For the record almost all Republicans favor helping Ukraine just like the Democrats. What we are witnessing is Politics with Ukraine caught in the middle. Zelensky is putting a vote in front of the government that classifies any corruption as treason against the Nation and a minimum of 15 years in Prison with all assets seized.

> almost all Republicans favor helping Ukraine just like the Democrats

That's a bit overstatement, no? I mean we have Trump who is very visibly admirer of Putin and his practices and various other dictatorial murderers like MBL and strongly supports current apartheid in Israel, no change there since invasion. If he wins the next elections, which seems more and more probable, Ukraine is going to lose all western support overnight with corresponding results for war.

I don't get it at all, republicans should be as anti-russian as possible historically since current russia is much more Soviet russia rather than anything else, but they keep voting for him and he was very clear on the topic in the past. That says more about real opinions of republicans rather than anything else.

Or am I missing something as an US outsider?

If he wins the next elections... Ukraine is going to lose all western support overnight

I reckon Poland will still be pretty much in favour of helping Ukraine push Russia back. Probably a bunch of other European nations too.

Absolutely.

Yes, but without the US I doubt Western Europe can hold back the tide.

They can. The question is whether they would choose to or not.

What you're missing is that all aid packages have had more or less bipartisan support from mainstream members.

The issue with most of the news on the matter is that it's so deluded by partisan politics that even those reporting on their own poll results don't interpret them sanely.

For example, on the surface polls might say that Republicans generally oppose aid to Ukraine. However, if you plainly ask them if they support aiding Ukraine they might be in favor, but if you ask them if they support Biden's handling of the war in Ukraine, they'll be more likely to be opposed.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/americ...

The MAGA wing of the party is anti-war in general, much like the liberals of the early 2000s. At some point these positions flipped. It's not that these Republicans are "anti-Ukraine," or "pro-Russia" or even "not anti-Russia." It's that they don't want to send hundreds of billions of unaudited dollars to weapons manufacturers and highly corrupt foreign governments, especially given the glaring contrast with the lack of spending on problems much closer to home. From a geopolitical perspective, the position is simple: war is bad, we are prolonging the war in Ukraine by funding it, therefore funding it is bad. And further, it's a misdirection of resources when the real foreign threat is China, not Russia, and that's before considering the many domestic problems going unaddressed while the gang of neocons and neolibs ("the uniparty") redirects our tax dollars into the coffers of the Ukrainian military and Raytheon stockholders.

? Those dollars stay in the US? It's researched and manufactured there. And you can't sell that stuff on the open market anyway. Ukraine even adds value by showing it works.

Isolationism won't solve your problems. America was isolationistst before ww1 and poor as hell. The good times came when the sovjet union forced large companies to bargain with unions.

"Stay in the US" is not a great consolation when it really means "paid to a cartel of weapons manufacturers."

> It's not that these Republicans are "anti-Ukraine," or "pro-Russia" or even "not anti-Russia." It's that they don't want to send hundreds of billions of unaudited dollars to weapons manufacturers and highly corrupt foreign governments, especially given the glaring contrast with the lack of spending on problems much closer to home.

The vast majority of aid to Ukraine is in weapons that are either going to be scrapped or only a handful are purchased, it’s a bit hard to feed children on surplus DCPIM munitions.

> the position is simple: war is bad, we are prolonging the war in Ukraine by funding it, therefore funding it is bad.

Not funding Ukraine won’t stop the war it will only allow Russia to move the war in the direction that it wants.

If you’re anti war then you should want Ukraine to have all the weapons they need to end the war, so they can win the war as soon as possible and put an end to it.

If your for ending Ukrainian aid you’re not for ending the war or anti war you are for feeding Ukrainians into the wood chipper and giving Russia exactly what it wants.

> If he wins the next elections, which seems more and more probable, Ukraine is going to lose all western support overnight with corresponding results for war.

I'd bet that it will not. Because America can not afford to be dragged into the much larger war that will follow if that were the case. Ukraine is - cynically - the cheap option.

> It's already audited at several levels so it was voted down because it was a case of the Republicans wanting to add another layer.

Can you provide a source, because everything I've seen says otherwise.

Even Democrat-friendly media, has been essentially forced to reluctantly report that indeed, the US government has no idea where billions of dollars of weapons and aid are ending up[1]. And there is always a delay with these things, so we can only assume the amount is exponentially larger and will never be truly known.

Clearly, if the material and monetary aid is already being audited, it's not being done well or correctly, so an actual auditor was more than warranted.

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[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/14/us-ukraine-aid-cabl... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/11/27/...

https://www.dodig.mil/Ukraine/

The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG) is committed to conducting independent and objective audits, evaluations, and investigations to promote efficiency and prevent fraud, waste, and abuse in DoD support provided to Ukraine.

In addition, the DoD OIG coordinates closely with the OIGs of the Department of State (DoS) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and chairs a joint working group with representatives from multiple Federal oversight agencies to ensure a whole-of-government approach to Ukraine oversight.

A lot of the stuff we would send them comes from the same places.

digikey, mouser, aliexpress, amazon, banggood, ebay?

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