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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Tuesday that the U.S. will soon announce an additional $2.3 billion in security assistance for Ukraine, to include anti-tank weapons, interceptors and munitions for Patriot and other air defense systems. Austin’s remarks came as Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov met with him at the Pentagon. And they mark a strong response to pleas from Kyiv for help in battling Russian forces in the Donetsk region. Austin said the aid will come through presidential drawdown authority, which allows the Pentagon to take the weapons from its stocks and send them more quickly to Ukraine.

Trump says that the war in Ukraine started because of NATO expansion.

Los Angeles-based affiliates of the Sinaloa cartel, the organization once helmed by infamous drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, have partnered with underground banks in China to launder more than $50 million, authorities say.

President Joe Biden’s campaign aired an ad on Monday that capitalized on the weaponization of government against his political opponent, former President Donald Trump. The Biden campaign has mostly shied away from campaigning on Trump’s criminal conviction — until now. In a $50 million ad buy through the end of June, Biden will cast Trump as a criminal and himself as a protector of family values. The Associated Press described the ad: Besides Trump’s criminal conviction, the ad, titled “Character Matters,” notes the former president also was found liable for sexual assault and financial fraud in separate proceedings. Trump also...

“The investments that Russia had have matured. So Russia’s funds are sitting in cash, but they’re generating income for the institution which Russia has no claim on,” she concluded. The G7 agreed on the American proposal Thursday during a summit in Italy. The move allows the world leaders to tap into the interest being accumulated at European banking institutions from the frozen assets to the tune of $50 billion. Yellen added that the G7 has made it clear to Moscow that the actual assets will remain frozen until Russia agrees to pay for the damages Ukraine has sustained over the...

President Joe Biden publicly apologized to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday for a congressional holdup over $61 billion in military aid.Observers have said that the delay allowed Russia to make advances in Ukraine.Biden met Zelenskyy in Paris when the apology was made.“I apologize for those weeks of not knowing what’s going to happen in terms of funding,” Biden said, describing the roughly 6 months of debate in Congress over a $61 billion military aid package for Ukraine. “We’re still in. Completely. Thoroughly."Zelenskyy emphasized the importance of unity between the U.S. and Ukraine.“It’s very important that in this unity, United...

The commander stepped over boxes stacked full of plastic drones and opened the lid on a new delivery. Inside lay the light-gray fins of a mini plane, the latest addition to his arsenal of crewless aerial vehicles for fighting the Russian army. The 33-year-old leader of what an internal report declared Ukrainian army’s best-performing drone unit, Senior Lt. Yuriy Fedorenko — popularly known by his call sign, Achilles — has been the main constraint on the Russian attempt to seize the strategic town of Chasiv Yar on Ukraine’s teetering eastern front. For months, his drone teams, part of the 92nd...

Denys Yaroslavskyi is angry. ... “There was no first line of defence. We saw it. The Russians just walked in. They just walked in, without any mined fields” he says. He shows me video from a drone feed taken a few days ago of small columns of Russian troops simply walking across the border, unopposed. He says officials had claimed that defences were being built at huge cost, but in his view, those defences simply weren’t there. “Either it was an act of negligence, or corruption. It wasn’t a failure. It was a betrayal”. Everyone knew that this incursion was...

Volodymyr Zelensky recently released a statement revealing that his regime and the government of Washington D.C. were in continued contact, “working on a bilateral security agreement” that would see “monetary aid” sent to Ukraine for an agreed-upon time of ten years.###Despite an individual’s personal feelings on the Russia-Ukraine war, the facts of the matter are that Ukraine is not a NATO country—and at this point, the cost-benefit analysis of being a member of the NATO pact is definitely not worth it for the American people—and Zelensky is not a good guy. This isn’t to say that Vladimir Putin is…but between...

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US has seen evidence of Chinese attempts to “influence and arguably interfere” with the upcoming US elections, despite an earlier commitment from leader Xi Jinping not to do so. Blinken made the comments to CNN’s Kylie Atwood in an interview Friday at the close of a three-day to trip to China, where the top American diplomat spent hours meeting with top Chinese officials including Xi, as the two countries navigated a raft of contentious issues from US tech controls to Beijing’s support for Moscow. Blinken said he repeated a message President Joe...

President Biden argued that it never occurred to former President Trump to take a competitive stance against China, while rolling out a slew of actions Wednesday intended to protect the U.S. steel industry from Chinese exports. Biden was in Pittsburgh at the United Steelworkers headquarters touting the new actions, which involves him calling on the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to consider tripling the existing 7.5 percent tariff rate on Chinese steel and aluminum imports. The president also said to boost competition with China, he has revitalized partnerships in the Pacific with countries like India, Australia, South Korea, the...

One of the worst kept secrets in Washington is no one actually knows just how much money the United States has spent in support of Ukraine. Over the past year, however, conservatives in Congress have been pushing President Joe Biden and his administration for the real number, and they’re finally getting some answers.In a letter sent to Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young on Tuesday, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, along with Sens. Roger Marshall, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and twelve other members of Congress, chronicled the immense difficulty Congress has...

NATO is going to “build a bridge” towards Ukraine becoming a member state of the defensive alliance, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on the organisation’s 75th birthday. North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member states met in Brussels at the alliance’s headquarters on Thursday to toast the 75th anniversary of its founding, among them U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken who like others used the occasion to discuss renewed Russian aggression and the potential place of Ukraine among its members. He emphasised the view, already articulated multiple times by NATO leaders in recent years, that “Ukraine will become a member...

The Biden administration’s well-funded push to build out a national network of electric vehicle (EV) chargers has so far resulted in only a handful of installations, according to The Washington Post. The bipartisan infrastructure bill of 2021 allotted $7.5 billion to subsidize thousands of EV chargers to help the administration’s goal of having EVs constitute 50% of all new cars sold in 2030, but only seven stations in total have been built in four states to date, according to the Post. The slow rollout of the EV charger funding is unfolding as the Biden administration has recently issued stringent emissions...

Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West - and will likely lose - if the West mobilizes its resources to resist the Kremlin. The West’s existing and latent capability dwarfs that of Russia. The combined gross domestic product (GDP) of NATO countries, non-NATO European Union states, and our Asian allies is over $63 trillion.[1] The Russian GDP is on the close order of $1.9 trillion.[2] Iran and North Korea add little in terms of materiel support. China is enabling Russia, but it is not mobilized on behalf of Russia and is unlikely to do so.[3] If we lean in and...

"Donald Trump is weak and desperate-both as a man and a candidate for President. He spent the weekend golfing, the morning comparing himself to Jesus, and the afternoon lying about having money he definitely doesn't have. His campaign can't raise money, he is uninterested in campaigning outside his country club, and every time he opens his mouth, he pushes moderate and suburban voters away with his dangerous agenda. America deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump."

Deep State expert Michael Benz says Hunter Biden is untouchable because he was working on a CIA project in Ukraine. Is this also why President Trump was tied to Russia and impeached for looking into the Biden family’s actions and illicit deals with Ukraine? Michael Benz unloaded some incredible facts about the deep State recently in an interview with Tucker Carlson. https://joehoft.com/censorship-expert-benz-on-tucker-what-im-describing-is-military-rule-its-the-inversion-of-democracy/ Then, Mike Benz reported that the CIA was heavily involved in Ukraine. This was in response to a report from the New York Times showing that the CIA was all over Ukraine. https://joehoft.com/mike-benz-of-course-the-cia-is-assisting-ukraine-in-its-war-against-russia-video/ On Thursday night, Benz released...

He Xiaopeng, the CEO of XPeng Motors, predicts a “bloodbath” against America’s auto industry with the help of cheap China-made electric vehicles (EVs).Over the weekend, former President Donald Trump was campaigning in Andalia, Ohio, when he warned that without fierce new United States tariffs on China-made EVs, the American auto industry will face “a bloodbath for the country” with jobs lost and industry offshored.“We’re going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across the line and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected,” Trump said. “Now if I...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon will rush about $300 million in weapons to Ukraine after finding some cost savings in its contracts, even though the military remains deeply overdrawn and needs at least $10 billion to replenish all the weapons it has pulled from its stocks to help Kyiv in its desperate fight against Russia, the White House announced Tuesday. It's the Pentagon's first announced security package for Ukraine since December, when it acknowledged it was out of replenishment funds. It wasn't until recent days that officials publicly acknowledged they weren't just out of replenishment funds, but $10 billion overdrawn....

Post-war reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine is projected to cost $486 billion over the next decade, up from $411 billion estimated a year ago, a UN-backed study published on Thursday has revealed.