A Day Late And $113 Billion Short, New York Times Acknowledges Ukraine As A Broken And Corrupt Nation

Eddie Scarry reporting for The Federalist

It’s apparently safe now to make the obvious point that Ukraine is run by fiends and so maybe dumping American taxpayer dollars on the corrupt little nation without any strings attached was a little hasty.

Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but The New York Times on Tuesday did take time to report the slew of firings and forced resignations of top Ukrainian government officials, a push by President Volodymyr Zelensky(yyy), for the purpose of “reassuring Ukraine’s allies — which are sending billions of dollars in military aid — that his government would show zero tolerance for graft…”

Well, that was kind of him. Maybe now Democrats and even idiot Republicans will stop countering every question about our involvement with Ukraine by declaring their critics to be Pervs for Putin.

The war-loving romantics of Congress haven’t seen a dollar they wouldn’t like to send to Ukraine, even as it’s been rated by foreign aid nonprofits and humanitarian organizations as one of Europe’s most crooked countries for years, over and over.

The firings and resignations substantively mean very little. Zelensky’s administration released no explanation for them, nor are there any official details about specific evidence of corruption, other than that one of Zelensky’s deputies rode around town in a General Motors-donated SUV that was supposed to be for “humanitarian missions” (rather than, say, for attending a Vogue cover photoshoot). There’s also something about using government funds — that is to say, U.S. taxpayer dollars — to buy eggs at an inflated price, raising the grave question: Why were they shopping for eggs in America?

Over the course of nearly a year, the U.S. has spent $113 billion on Ukraine and counting. Every step of the way, anyone with a question about why or for whom or to what end has been shouted down as a Putin sympathizer or dismissed as anti-democracy. And then Zelensky shows up to tell us we’re not doing enough.

At least the Times has come around to acknowledging that Ukraine isn’t the squeaky clean operation that the White House, most of Congress, and all of the corporate media insist that it is. Maybe next we’ll be allowed to openly state that Ukraine and NATO were antagonizers of this war, and funding it indefinitely is probably doing more harm than good.