Tag: ukraine

US auditors arrive in Kyiv to check for corruption

American auditors have just landed in Kyiv, and their plan is simple – to dig out what is really happening with the billions of dollars that the US has already sent to Ukraine.

The West has poured an estimated $133bn into Ukraine since the start of the war over three years ago, but for much of that time there has been little accountability or reporting on where the money went and to whom.

Ukraine has been plagued by corruption since independence and as bne IntelliNews has reported, corruption is not a problem of the system; it is the system. Ukraine has long been dubbed one of the most corrupt countries in the Former Soviet Union (FSU). Part of the motivations behind the 2014 Euromaidan evolution was that former president Viktor Yanukovych is believed to have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the state.

Now that the US ardour for supporting Ukraine is beginning to cool, the Trump administration intends to hold the Zelenskiy administration to closer account. And the momentum for more transparency has been building. When the US ran out of money for Ukraine at the start of 2023, part of the $60bn emergency bailout package included several tens of millions of dollars in a special budget dedicated to accounting and audits.

Scandals have plagued the Defence Ministry, including one last year when the government was caught procuring eggs for four times the market value and heavily overpaying for dud winter jackets. Zelenskiy sacked Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov in September 2023 in a military shake-up to crack down on corruption, but it remains rife. Reznikov himself was not accused of any wrong-doing.

The arrival of the US audit team has been confirmed by US State Department of contracts worth $814,806. That amount will cover the hotel accommodation of the employees who will stay in the capital of Ukraine for a month in the luxurious Hilton Kyiv hotel.

The audit comes as Trump has been leaning on the Ukrainian presidential administration to cut a ceasefire deal with Russia, but Zelenskiy has proved reluctant to do so. Some experts have speculated that audit comes as part of the pressure Trump hopes will push Zelenskiy into cutting a “quick and dirty deal” with President Vladimir Putin.

A group of 80 to 100 people is in charge of a comprehensive audit, according to reports, checking how funds for military and humanitarian support, logistics, security and security were spent.

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NSC advisors urged ‘ISIS’-style drone attacks on Russian rail, leaked files show

A coterie of British and American academics advising the US National Security Council explicitly urged Ukraine adopt the tactics of ISIS in a detailed proposal for “anti-rail drone operations,” according to leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone.

The aggressive war plans recommended in the files eerily foreshadowed Ukraine’s Operation Spider Web, which consisted of a series of brazen drone attacks waged inside Russia between May 24 and June 1 – the eve of scheduled negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. A pair of Ukrainian bombings of Russian trains in Bryansk on May 31 and Kursk and the following day left seven dead, and injured more than 30 people, including two children.

The attacks on Russian rail infrastructure have continued since the launch of Operation Spiderweb, suggesting the British-born strategy has heavily influenced the thinking of Kiev’s increasingly desperate military.

The leaked plans reviewed by The Grayzone explore the use of “inexpensive drones” as “a low-cost means for disrupting Russian logistics,”  but also include blueprints for terror attacks composed by three “drone experts” before being passed to the Biden administration’s then-Director for Russia at the National Council, Col. Tim Wright.

Those experts belonged to a secret academic-intelligence cell called Project Alchemy, whose existence was first exposed by The Grayzone, and which was founded with a mission to “to keep Ukraine fighting” by imposing “strategic dilemmas, costs and frictions upon Russia.”

As previously reported here, Project Alchemy researchers called “to take a page from ISIS’ playbook,” presenting the jihadist group’s psychological operations as a model for Ukrainian attacks on Russian civilians. The Grayzone can now reveal that Alchemy’s team also urged US war planners to look to the Islamic State for inspiration in using commercial drones for attacks on Russian civilian targets.

One academic advising the Alchemy cell, Zachary Kallenborn of George Mason University, recommended Ukraine carry out “two-stage attacks like ISIS did frequently” on Russian-held railways, suggesting that Kiev first “break the track, and wait for the engineers to come to fix it, then use the drone to kill them.” In other words: double tap kamikaze drone strikes.

“Drones also could provide ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] in finding and tracking trains to support larger actions,” with satellite imagery exploited for targeting purposes, Kallenborn added.

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French Newspaper Le Monde FINALLY Discovers That the Ukrainian Army Is Rife With Neo-Nazis – Hundreds of Soldiers From 3rd Assault Brigade Openly Display 3rd Reich Symbols

It’s like they say: better late than never.

The western media has been willingly blind to one of the worst-kept geopolitical secrets of our times: that the heroic ‘defenders of democracy’ in Ukraine are, in many cases, a bunch of Neo-Nazis running around unchecked.

The French premier newspaper Le Monde has just released the result of a 10-day investigation on the 3rd assault brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and to their ‘surprise’ and dismay found out that the militants go around openly and proudly wearing neo-Nazi symbols.

Of course, no one needed the Le Monde deep dive, since the information is readily available about the Nazi Azov Brigades and their heirs of the 3rd assault brigade.

And, what’s more, no one is hiding the fact that the Nazi collaborator and war criminal Stephan Bandera has been turned into a Ukrainian national hero.

Just between us: they don’t make much of an effort to hide their extremist ideologies.

Slavyangrad reported:

“According to Le Monde, hundreds of servicemen of the 3rd Assault Brigade — the direct heirs of the Azov Regiment — continue to openly use Nazi symbols. The photo shows swastikas, greeting gestures, and SS emblems.

Despite the ‘reform’ and the formal inclusion of the brigade in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, radical symbols have not disappeared. Journalists note: this is not a matter of chance, but of a conscious choice – either based on ideological convictions or as a tool of intimidation.

On June 14, in Kiev, on the day of the ‘March of Equality’ [Gay Pride], radicals from the ‘Carpathian Sich’ held an alternative ‘March of Tradition’. Participants were captured on camera demonstrating a Nazi salute.”

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WHAT? Out-Of-Touch Zelensky Asks ALL Allies To Devote 0.25% of Their GDP to Finance Ukrainian War Effort

After more than 3 years having his regime be the focus of the Globalist establishment, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky now sees the world’s attention turning to the dangerous escalation in the Middle East – and is afraid funds for his war effort will become even harder to come by than they’ve already become.

So, Zelensky came up with a ‘brilliant’ idea: he is calling on Ukraine’s Western partners to allocate 0.25% of their GDP to help Kiev ramp up weapons production.

He also said Ukraine will start exporting weapon production technologies.

Reuters reported:

“In remarks released for publication by his office on Saturday, Zelensky said Ukraine was in talks with Denmark, Norway, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Lithuania to launch joint weapon production.

‘Ukraine is part of Europe’s security and we want 0.25% of the GDP of a particular partner country to be allocated for our defense industry and domestic production,” Zelensky said’.”

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Russia conducts heavy missile and drone strike on Ukrainian military airfield – MOD

The Russian military struck a military airfield and energy infrastructure in Ukraine in an overnight attack involving missiles and kamikaze drones, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has reported.

In a statement on Saturday, the ministry said that the attack, which was carried out with high-precision air-, land-, and sea-based weapons, as well as explosive-laden unmanned aerial vehicles, targeted the infrastructure of a military airfield and an energy facility that supplied Ukrainian forces in Donbass with fuel.

“The goal of the strike has been accomplished. All designated targets have been hit,” Russian military officials reported, without disclosing the location of the targets.

In a separate statement on Saturday, the ministry claimed that Russian warplanes, drones, missiles, and artillery had destroyed several UAV production workshops, as well as ammunition depots in Ukraine.

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President Trump Sends Warning to Lindsey Graham and Mike Pompeo For Going to Ukraine and Provoking Ukrainians to Keep Fighting Russia

President Trump warned Senator Lindsey Graham and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for going to Ukraine and encouraging them to continue fighting Russia.

“Lindsey Graham and Mike Pompeo were on the ground in Ukraine, trying to provoke Ukrainians to keep fighting. What do you think of that?” a reporter asked President Trump after he touched down in New Jersey.

Trump warned Lindsey Graham and Pompeo to be careful about what they say.

“People have to be very careful with what they say. Their mouth could get them into a lot of trouble.”

As TGP recently reported, Volodymyr Zelensky announced that 117 drones were used in the strike inside Russia that wiped out dozens of nuclear “doomsday” bombers and other aircraft.

President Trump WAS NOT NOTIFIED of the attack before it took place – because Trump wants peace and the globalists want World War and the destruction of Russia.

Senator Lindsey Graham, who was in Ukraine just two days before Zelensky’s drone strikes, cheered the news of the attack.

What did Lindsey Graham say to Zelensky during his visit to Ukraine last month?

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The Brits & Ukrainians Are Plotting To Manipulate Trump Into Escalating Against Russia

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Agency (SVR) warned that the Brits and Ukrainians are preparing two false flag scenarios in the Baltic Sea.

The first one would see Ukrainian-transferred Soviet/Russian torpedoes explode near a US ship there and a supposedly malfunctioning one will then be found to implicate Russia in the alleged attack

The second, meanwhile, will involve Ukrainian-transferred Soviet/Russian mines fished out of the Baltic Sea and presented as proof of a Kremlin plot to sabotage international shipping.

These perfidious provocations are being employed to manipulate Trump into escalating against Russia after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced in mid-February that the US won’t extend Article 5 mutual defense guarantees to NATO countries’ troops that might deploy to Ukraine. That scenario was the initial one that was planned for getting him to pull out of talks with Putin and then double down on support for Ukraine, but his team preemptively scuttled it through Hegseth’s announcement.

That’s why efforts are now underway to organize a false flag attack against a US ship in the Baltic and/or frame Russia as a threat to international shipping through the fishing out of its mines there. The Baltic has already been a so-called “NATO lake” since even before Finland and Sweden’s joined NATO given their prior shadow membership in the bloc, however, so it’s unrealistic that Russia could really carry out either of these two operations undetected even if it wanted to.

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Not So Fast, Netanyahu: Trump Assassination Plots Trace Back to Ukraine—Not Iran—While FBI Stonewalls on Crooks’ Encrypted Messages

On Sunday, June 15, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the explosive claim on Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier that Iran was behind the two assassination attempts on President Trump.

We beg to differ.

We, the American People, Invite the FBI & DOJ to Be Heroes of Transparency

Uncover the Explosive Ukrainian-Linked Patterns in the Trump Assassination Plots and Include the Butler Attempt by Thomas Matthew Crooks

Critical Data on Crooks’ Encrypted Communications Remains Hidden — Will the FBI & DOJ Step Up to Unveil Who Thomas Matthew Crooks Was Communicating With?

Bret Baier interviews President Trump and asks whether we will get transparency around Butler. POTUS responds, “It’s a little bit strange.”

BUTLER, PENNSYLVANIA — On July 13, 2024, at approximately 6:11 p.m. EDT, former President Donald Trump became the target of an assassination attempt during a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show Grounds in Pennsylvania. The assailant, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, opened fire from the roof of a nearby building, situated approximately 400 to 450 feet (about 133 to 150 yards) away from the stage.

Crooks took aim and had his target squarely in his sights, then squeezed the trigger. In a miraculous twist of fate, something caused President Trump to sharply turn his head at that precise moment the first bullet rocketed out of the chamber. It instantly pierced through his right ear and was immediately followed by a barrage of shots from his rifle — a near-fatal mark that, had he not turned at that exact instant, would almost certainly have ended his life and forever changed the course of American history.

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Russian Strikes Damage Boeing Building in Ukraine

A large Russian drone and missile barrage damaged a building in Ukraine where Boeing operates. Last year, the American company and Kiev signed a memorandum agreeing to step up arms production.

The Financial Times reported speaking with Ukrainian officials and reviewing images that confirmed the Boeing building sustained damage on Sunday night. The strike comes as the American arms maker has been building a relationship with Kiev that would see more weapons produced in Ukraine.

In February, Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov and Boeing president Steve Parker discussed joint “manufacturing ammunition and aerial strike systems.” A top Boeing official said the damage to the building did not cause “operational disruption.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha said the attack on a US firm should convince Washington to provide more support to Kiev. “Russian strikes on American companies in Ukraine are yet another example of Putin’s disregard for US peace efforts,” he told the outlet. “The fact that Russia targets American businesses emphasises the importance of continued US involvement – both in peace efforts and in the security of Ukraine and the rest of Europe.”

Russia has stepped up attacks in recent weeks following a Ukrainian operation in Russia that destroyed or damaged several of Moscow’s strategic bombers.

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Ukraine’s Infrastructure Damage Exceeds $175 Billion

More than three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war has already inflicted over $175 billion in direct damage to the country’s buildings and infrastructure, according to the latest estimates from the World Bank.

As Statista’s Ann Fleck reports, this marks a $23 billion increase in damage compared to the previous year’s assessment.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The data comes from the fourth Ukraine Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA4), which covers the period from February 24, 2022, to December 31, 2024.

The World Bank’s findings highlight the toll of the war on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.

Residential buildings alone account for 33 percent of all direct damage, while transport infrastructure – including roads and railways – makes up another 21 percent.

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