Heading towards World War III?

The US government is reportedly preparing its largest weapons transfer to Ukraine to date, with officials ready to authorize another $1 billion in military aid, including advanced rocket and missile platforms and additional ammunition.

The new aid package could be announced as soon as next week, Reuters reported on Friday, citing three unnamed officials. It would bring the total US security assistance to Kiev to nearly $10 billion since Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24.

While the officials said President Joe Biden has yet to formally sign off on the transfer, the current proposal would see $1 billion in arms shipped to Kiev, including additional munitions for the HIMARS rocket system, NASAMS surface-to-air missiles, and up to 50 M113 armored personnel carriers, allegedly the ‘medical’ variant.

A separate military aid package to Ukraine was announced on Monday, worth around $550 million, and also featured HIMARS rockets.

Western special ops vets training Ukrainians – The GuardianREAD MORE: Western special ops vets training Ukrainians – The Guardian
Washington has so far sent a total of 16 HIMARS systems to Ukraine, longer-range platforms capable of striking targets inside Russian territory. Though Moscow has claimed to have eliminated some of the weapons from the battlefield, US military officials have disputed the Russian account, insisting Kiev’s HIMARS remain intact.

The new massive arms transfer also comes after a Pentagon decision to allow US military personnel to treat wounded Ukrainian troops at a large US-run hospital in western Germany, though the logistics for that arrangement remain unclear, as the facility is more than 1,000 miles away from Ukraine’s capital and even further from active battle zones in the Donbass region.

www.rt.com/news/560341-us-ukraine-weapons-package

Ukraine has seized about $765 million worth of Russian assets in the country, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said on his Telegram channel on Saturday.

“Held a meeting today on sanctions policy, confiscation of Russian assets. As government officials reported, assets worth 28 billion hryvnias {about $765 million} have already been forcibly seized. This work continues. More than 900 more facilities belonging to the Russian state are proposed to be confiscated. And if we evaluate the property package not only of the [Russian] state, but also of its residents, we are talking about 36 thousand items to be seized,” he stated.

The seized assets will be used to compensate for the damages caused by the current military conflict in the country, according to Zelensky.

On August 5, Kiev approved a decree that enables 903 Russia-owned assets in the country to be transferred to the state and Ukrainian people. According to Prime Minister Denis Shmygal, the property that the Ukrainian authorities intend to confiscate is divided into three categories: assets belonging to the Russian state, to sanctioned citizens and companies from Russia, and to Russian banks.

“It is proposed to confiscate 903 items belonging specifically to the Russian state. 79 items are corporate rights, 824 items are property,” he explained.

According to Zelensky, this measure is only the first step in a government strategy for dealing with Russian assets. The next step will be the confiscation of Russian assets held in the West, allegedly for the same purpose of rebuilding Ukraine. Zelensky said the Ukrainian government and president’s office were working on this measure along with teams of international experts, partners and allies in the West.

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The Russian military has taken out a depot in southern Ukraine that stored NATO-supplied ammunition, the Defense Ministry claimed on Sunday.

"In the Voznesensk area of the Nikolaev region an arsenal that stored 45,000 tons of ammunition recently supplied to the Ukrainian Armed Forces by NATO countries has been destroyed,” the ministry stated, adding that Russian forces eliminated five other ammo depots.

Meanwhile, the Russian army conducted strikes on the deployment point of units of Ukraine's 72nd mechanized brigade at an agricultural facility in the Donetsk People’s Republic city of Artemovsk, wiping out up to 130 soldiers and eight transport and armored vehicles, the ministry’s statement read.

Strike destroys over 100 US-made HIMARS rockets – Russia
Read more Strike destroys over 100 US-made HIMARS rockets – Russia
Moscow’s forces, the ministry continued, also used high-precision air-based missiles to attack a howitzer battery of Ukraine’s 95th Air Assault Brigade in the village of Dzerzhinsk in the DPR. According to the statement, the strike killed up to 70 service members, destroyed three 2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled guns and four vehicles.

The Russian Defense Ministry noted that faced with high losses, “the regime of [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky is taking measures to make up for the shortage of military personnel” in Donbass. Kiev, the statement said, has decided to send to the frontline mobilized Ukrainian citizens from a training center, as well as wounded service members who did not have enough time to fully recover.

On Tuesday, Zelensky said that the fighting in Donbass was “hell,” claiming that Kiev’s military remained heavily outgunned and even outnumbered by Russia. He appealed to the US and its allies for even more weapons, in particular the HIMARS rocket launchers.

Moscow has repeatedly warned the West against sending weapons to Kiev, saying it only prolongs the conflict, increases the number of casualties, and will result in long-term consequences.

www.rt.com/russia/560405-russia-ukraine-depot-nato-strike

With the US and its allies pledging unprecedented levels of military support to Ukraine, a recent CBS News report suggested that only around 30% of the weapons sent by the West actually make it to the front lines. The report adds to ongoing rumors of waste, corruption, and black market profiteering.

The US has approved more than $54 billion of economic and military aid to Ukraine since February, while the UK has committed nearly $3 billion in military aid alone, and the EU has spent another $2.5 billion on arms for Kiev. An entire spectrum of equipment, from rifles and grenades to anti-tank missiles and multiple launch rocket systems have left the West’s armories for Ukraine, with most entering the country through Poland.

However, this rarely goes smoothly, CBS News revealed this week.

“All of this stuff goes across the border, and then something happens, kind of like 30% of it reaches its final destination,” Jonas Ohman, the founder of a Lithuania-based organization supplying the Ukrainian military, told the American network. Ohman said that getting the weapons to the troops involves navigating a complex network of “power lords, oligarchs [and] political players.”

The new CBS Reports documentary, "Arming Ukraine," explores why much of the billions of dollars of military aid that the U.S. is sending to Ukraine doesn't make it to the front lines: "Like 30% of it reaches its final destination."

“There is really no information as to where they’re going at all,” Donatella Rovera, a senior crisis adviser with Amnesty International, told CBS. “What is really worrying is that some countries that are sending weapons do not seem to think that it is their responsibility to put in place a very robust oversight mechanism.”

Ukraine insists that it tracks each and every weapon that crosses its borders, with Yuri Sak, an adviser to Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov, telling the Financial Times last month that reports to the contrary “could be part of Russia’s information war to discourage international partners from providing Ukraine with weaponry.”

However, some officials in the West have sounded alarm bells. A US intelligence source told CNN in April that Washington has “almost zero” idea what happens to these arms, describing the shipments as dropping “into a big black hole” once they enter Ukraine. Canadian sources said last month that they have “no idea” where their weapons deliveries actually end up.

Europol has claimed that some of these weapons have ended up in the hands of organized crime groups in the EU, while the Russian government has warned that they are showing up in the Middle East. An investigation by RT in June found online marketplaces where sophisticated Western hardware – such as Javelin and NLAW anti-tank systems or Phoenix Ghost and Switchblade explosive drones – was apparently being sold for pennies on the dollar.

Ukraine is consistently ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, scoring 122/180 on Transparency International’s 2021 ‘Corruption Perceptions Index’, where 180 represents the most corrupt and 0 the least.

In Washington, drawing attention to this corruption is frowned upon by both parties in Congress. Representative Victoria Spartz, a Ukrainian-born lawmaker, has reportedly been cautioned by her colleagues and the White House for suggesting that Congress should establish “proper oversight” of its weapons shipments due to the alleged corruption within Vladimir Zelensky’s government.

“If you provide supplies, or a logistics pipeline, there has got to be some organization to it, right?” Andy Milburn, a retired US Marine colonel, told CBS. “If the ability to which you’re willing to be involved in that stops at the Ukrainian border, the surprise isn’t ‘oh, all this stuff isn’t getting to where it needs to go’ – the surprise is that people actually expected it to.”

Similar scenarios have played out in the world’s war zones before, with devastating consequences. “We saw a lot of weapons come in 2003 with the US-led invasion of Iraq,” Rovera told CBS, “and then 2014 happened when ISIS took over large parts of the country and took over large stocks of weapons that had been meant for Iraqi forces.”

Similarly, US forces invading Afghanistan in 2001 faced fighters whose predecessors had been armed by the US in the 1980s. When the US finally withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban was left to claim billions of dollars worth of military equipment left behind. This gear had been intended for the Afghan military, although reports from more than a decade ago suggested that weapons, vehicles, and aid regularly disappeared in Afghanistan before ever reaching their end users.

In Syria, US weapons intended for use by so-called ‘moderate rebels’ ended up in the hands of ISIS and Al-Nusra jihadists, while arms sold to Saudi Arabia ended up seized by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Mikhail Podoliak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, said on Sunday that there is “no proof” that weapons entering his country are unaccounted for. “Russia seeks to discredit Ukraine in the eyes of Western societies with allegations about ‘black market of weapons,’” he added, in an apparent effort to accuse CBS and others of doing Moscow’s bidding.

www.rt.com/russia/560419-ukraine-weapons-lost-cbs

Jonas Ohman is founder and CEO of Blue-Yellow, a Lithuania-based organization that has been meeting with and supplying frontline units with non-lethal military aid in Ukraine since the start of the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in 2014. Back in April, he estimated that just "30-40%" of the supplies coming across the border reached its final destination. But he says the situation has significantly improved since then and a much larger quantity now gets where it's supposed to go.

www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-military-aid-weapons-front-lines

Republican lawmakers are feeling vindicated for opposing a $40 billion Ukraine aid package after a CBS News report showed that only 30% of the Western weapons flooding into the country are actually making it to the front lines in Kiev’s conflict with Russia.

“This [is] one of the reasons I voted ‘no,’” US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) said on Twitter in a retweet of the CBS News post. Greene was among 57 House Republicans who voted against the massive aid bill, which passed overwhelmingly in May with the support of all Democrats and most GOP lawmakers. Eleven Republicans opposed the bill in the Senate, where it passed by an 86-11 margin.

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US Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) delayed the Senate’s vote on the Ukraine aid bill by insisting on adding a provision appointing an inspector general to monitor how the money was being spent. His colleagues refused to include the oversight requirement and passed the massive package a few days later. A US intelligence official told CNN in April that arms shipments were dropping “into a big black hole” once they reached Ukraine.

Greene, Boebert and other lawmakers who voted against the aid bill were pilloried by critics for failing to support Ukraine. After Greene argued that the US government was focused on sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine at a time when American mothers couldn’t even buy formula for their babies, Democrats accused her of standing “with President Putin in the face of Russian aggression.” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) said she was “repeating Putin’s propaganda and disinformation” and “appeasing imperialist assaults on sovereign nations.”

www.rt.com/news/560429-us-lawmakers-claim-ukraine-aid-scam

Ukraine has apparently renewed its attempts to destroy the strategically important Antonovsky Bridge over the Dnepr River, according to sources on both sides of the conflict.

The latest overnight attack hit equipment brought to the site to repair damage from previous artillery strikes, including a temporary shack and a concrete mixer, the local government told TASS on Monday.

Kirill Stremousov, a Kherson administration deputy head, said the incident was “nothing terrible,” but would likely delay the planned reopening of the bridge for traffic, which was scheduled for Wednesday.

Ukrainian media reported overnight artillery attacks on the bridge by Kiev’s troops, with some suggesting that US-supplied HIMARS multiple-launch rocket systems were used. Images purported to be taken during the shelling show a large fire at the massive structure with smoke billowing into the sky.

The Antonovsky Bridge is a strategically important connection between the Russia-controlled city of Kherson and the rest of southern Ukraine. Kiev’s forces damaged it two weeks ago in a similar night attack, forcing the city authorities to close the bridge to all traffic. A ferry across the Dnepr was organized near the bridge to compensate for the suspension.

www.rt.com/russia/560435-kherson-bridge-attack-ukraine