Posted on 09/25/2024 1:09:00 PM PDT by JonPreston
WASHINGTON, Sept 25 (Reuters) - The United States plans to announce more than $8 billion worth of military assistance for Ukraine on Thursday during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's visit to Washington, two U.S. officials said on Wednesday.
President Joe Biden's administration has been engaged in urgent discussions with Congress to allow it to use up $5.6 billion in military aid for Ukraine before Sept. 30 - the end of the federal fiscal year - when the authority was set to expire.
Congress has approved nearly $175 billion of aid and military assistance for Ukraine and allied nations in the 2-1/2 years since Russia's full-scale invasion, and many lawmakers say they expect Washington will need to approve more money to help the government in Kyiv in the next several months.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Money down a rat hole. Bankruptcy here we come!
Mo’ money… mo’ money. Gibs me MO’ BILLIONS!
Lots of cluster shells landed in Poland today and on their way to Ukraine.
Always just enough to keep the killing and infrastructure destruction happening, never enough to win because that’s not the plan.
Cant wait until we throw all these bastards out.
Maybe the Polish will join The Putin?
Absolutely.
Is this Zelenskiy’s reward for bashing Trump the other day? As stated, money down the rat hole.
More money printing to add to the $36 Trillion Debt, with no end in sight to this war. But don’t worry, once they hit many targets inside Russia with our missiles and World War 3 begins, there won’t be much left of the U.S. or Russia after the many nuclear exchanges. No need to worry about the debt then...or anything for that matter.
This is sheer madness. The human race has a built-in fatal flaw.
More like money up the azzhole.
$8,000,000,000.00 That’s EIGHT THOUSAND million dollars.
Eight billion for the Professional Clown (look it up) Zelensky.
Zero for our battered and broken Veterans.
The Blob is showing you their priorities
It’s over for Putin.
Never conquered a single regional capital in Ukraine.
Only has a few bombed out villages in Donbas that he didn’t have at the start of his invasion.
Total strategic and operational failure.
Ukrainians fight and defend their borders, language and culture against a foreign invader that is fully intent on genocidally erasing their nation. And that’s why armchair populists hate them so much.
wsj.com
WSJ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
By Jared Malsin and Nancy A. Youssef
Dec. 1, 2023 1:34 pm ET
U.S. has published regular updates on some of the weapons it has provided Ukraine,
Washington has disclosed little about how many and what types of weapons it has sent to Israel.
Biden Sends Israel Hundreds of Millions of Dollars of Arms. Includes 100 powerful 2000-Pound Bunker Buster Bombs, 15,000 smaller bombs, 57,000 artillery shells, 1,000 GBU-39 small diameter bombs.
This is in addition to tens of billion of US foreign aid tax dollars to both Ukraine and Israel.
pic-—Bombs undergoing maintenance at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho in 2020. PHOTO: U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO BY AIRMAN 1ST CLASS AKEEM K. CAMPBELL
Biden has provided Israel with tens of thousands of weapons and artillery shells. The surge of arms, including roughly 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells, began shortly after the Oct. 7 attack and has continued in recent days, the officials said. The U.S. hasn’t previously disclosed the total number of weapons sent nor has it mentioned the transfer of 100 BLU-109, 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs.
The airlift of hundreds of millions of dollars in US munitions, primarily on C-17 military cargo planes flying from the U.S. to Tel Aviv, as the Biden administration urges them to consider preventing large-scale civilian casualties while supplying many of the munitions deployed.
Some security analysts say the US weapons giveaways could undercut Biden’s pressure on Israel to protect civilians. “It seems inconsistent with reported exhortations to use smaller-diameter bombs,” said a senior adviser at the nonprofit International Crisis Group, and a former attorney-advisor at the State Department.
Unlike US arms to Ukraine where the U.S. has published regular updates on some of the weapons it has provided, Washington has disclosed little about how many and what types of weapons it has sent to Israel.
Biden officials say the lack of disclosure is partly b/c US weapons to Israel come through different mechanisms, including military sales. U.S. military aid to Israel amounts to some $3.8 billion every year.
The US arsenal of artillery, bombs, other weapons and military gear have been used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and Libya, to target large groups of gathered enemy forces. By contrast, the tiny state of Israel is making ground incursions, battling militants who are among civilians in dense urban environments.
“They are kind of the weapons of choice for the fights we had in Afghanistan and Syria in open, non-urban areas,” said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and officer in the Marine Corps and C.I.A. “The U.S. may use them in more urban areas, but first it would do a lot of target analysis to make sure the attack was proportional and based on military necessity.”
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Defense didn’t respond to a request for comment on the weapons transfers. The White House National Security Council didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
On one hand, Israel’s military says it takes precautions to protect civilians, but has also said its air force trikes were causing “maximum damage.”
According to an internal US govt list of the weapons described to The WSJ, among the arms the U.S. has handed over to Israel include:
<><>more than 5,000 Mk82 unguided or “dumb” bombs,
<><>more than 5,400 Mk84 2,000 pound warhead bombs,
<><>around 1,000 GBU-39 small diameter bombs,
<><>approximately 3,000 JDAMs, which turn unguided bombs into guided “smart” bombs,
<><>BLU-109 bunker busters w/ 2,000 pound warheads designed to penetrate concrete shelters.
Military analysts say the transfer of large bombs to Israel illustrates the choices facing the Israeli military as it attempts to wipe out Hamas in Gaza, a tiny, densely populated ribbon of land that is home to more than two million Palestinians. Israel urged more than a million civilians to leave the northern part of the Gaza Strip to give its military a freer hand there, but tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilians have remained in the area.
The U.S. has transferred about 1,000 GBU-39 small diameter bombs to Israel to help dislodge Hamas from Gaza.
pic a U.S. Air Force senior airman guides a bomb rack unit equipped with GBU-39s, as seen in 2020. PHOTO: 379TH AIR EXPEDITIONARY WING PUBLIC AFFAIRS
In Gaza, Hamas’s military wing also uses a vast network of underground tunnels, which Israel could attempt to strike with the bunker busters, analysts say. The tunnels however lie beneath Gaza’s urban landscape of apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, and other civilian buildings.
U.S. officials say Israel used an American-provided bomb with a large payload in one of the deadliest strikes of the entire war, an attack that leveled an apartment block in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, killing more than 100 people. Israel said the strike killed a Hamas leader.
“There is potentially a legitimate use for these things, to bust underground bunkers,” said Finucane, the former attorney-advisor at the State Department. “The problem is there’s a massive refugee camp with hundreds of thousands of civilians on top of those tunnels when you drop the bomb. You need to factor in the harm to civilians.”
The U.S. has also sent Israel roughly 57,000 155mm artillery shells—a key munition the U.S. has also provided Ukraine since the 2022 Russian invasion—along with thousands of other artillery shells and various small arms.
Even before the US armed the war in Gaza, the nation’s 155mm artillery rounds were in such short supply that the U.S. was forced to reach deep into its global stockpiles and turned to allies South Korea and Japan, among other countries, to provide more arms to Ukraine.
Vivian Salama in Dubai contributed to this article.
WTH, do they need even more taxpayers money ??
According to the zeepers THE Ukraine is winning this war and kicking arse.
(Look at the Nitwits post #15.
How about the little perverted, traveling grifter cuts his U.S. vacation short and take his arse back home.
Millions of the smart Ukranian men have fled, and those unlucky ones are being dragged by the collar to the front where they are dying. But thanks for the stirring story. You sound like Zelensky!
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