by Joseph Kulve, American Thinker:
A year ago, Ukrainians were mocking Russia for forcing poorly trained and armed men into battle. Russia was supposedly running out of men and money.
In central Kyiv (I was there) the government displayed large maps of how Russia might fragment after its impending defeat. Victory was certain, as were the Western handouts to the future victor.
But lately the Ukrainian language blogosphere has been talking openly about Ukrainian front-line soldiers who do not have the weapons they need to fight (drones, 155m shells, guns, ammo, everything). Many are deserting. There is open talk about Russia winning.
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We (the collective West) would not have been surprised by all of this if we had really understood the Ukrainian government and the people.
Understanding them now is critical, because as things fall apart, things might get a lot crazier (especially if President Trump loses the vote count).
The Ukraine government is demanding American missiles for hitting targets deep in Russia. They justify their new demands by claiming that America’s refusal to meet their previous demands (financial and military) is why they are losing the war.
Call it the Ukrainian peace plan scam.
Fast forward to Pavlo Sebastianovich, a Ukrainian entrepreneur who became a blogger, who says that only a drastic reduction of an unreformable criminal Ukrainian government can save Ukraine.
His core ideas are very much like those of Argentina’s radical libertarian president, Javier Milei (Sebastianovich recently posted a YouTube video of Milei’s speech to the U.N.)
Pavlo’s audience are Ukrainians, but his description of the real situation in Ukraine, created in great part by the Biden-Harris regime, is a critical message that Americans are not getting.
The following is my summary of several of Pavlo’s recent video posts (he consistently focuses on the same issues). I reorganized and edited for brevity and my comments are in parentheses.
Ukraine is reducing war funding. Spending on weaponry (as shown in blue in this diagram) has shrunk (in dollars) in half from 2023 to 2025. During that same time Ukraine has increased funding for the bureaucracy, even though the population has decreased by several million (35 years ago the population was 50 million, and there are now probably less than 30 million living in Ukrainian government-controlled territory). Non-defense government spending has been increasing rapidly. Meanwhile Ukrainian government crime has skyrocketed (for example, recently $6m in bribe money was discovered in the apartment of a family of regional Ukrainian bureaucrats).
Worst of all, Zelensky’s so-called “peace plans” are a joke (and possibly deadly for America). The four demands (from Ukraine, not from the West) of the (most recent) Zelensky “peace” plan simply can not be implemented. The first demand is making Ukraine a part of the civilized world (NATO and the EU). But Soviet Ukraine meets none of the standards for NATO membership. Ukrainian tax and customs agencies alone steal $10 billion to $15 billion a year from the budget (the mafia tactics of the Ukrainian tax police and customs service are beyond the wildest imagination of Western taxpayers). Scams include fictional VAT, reduced prices during import, increased prices for export, and counterfeit products (cigarettes, alcohol, and fuel, all sold roadside). Do you really think they will let such a tax hole like Ukraine into the EU?
The second demand is giving Ukraine a lot of money. The West has been giving Ukraine $40 billion to $60 billion a year in aid. The Ukrainian national bank siphons $10 billion a year, most of that to buy gold reserves for stability of the banking system. $22 billion is spent annually on 1.5 million government workers. Higher level government officials get exorbitant (by Ukrainian standards) pay (on this chart the lowest pay is $3,300/month, in a country with a median salary of $530). The recent budget includes 10% to 75% increases for the funding of various Ukrainian non-war government ministries, even though the population has significantly decreased (by probably 10 million during the war).
Government ministries must approve grants and donations from Western organizations (for which they expect thanks later). They all have their own NGOs (ukrfreedomfund.org claims that 90% of charitable funds for Ukraine are donated to large international nonprofits, with 87% of that aid never making it near the front lines).
The third demand setting aside (a massive amount of) money for the post-war rebuilding of Ukraine would be a gold rush for Ukrainian government officials and their deputies who all have their own communal enterprises for building roads, manufacturing concrete, etc.
The fourth and final demand (the deadliest aspect of the “peace plan” for America) is giving Ukraine long range rockets to bomb Russia. Why would the Americans want to hit a nuclear power with their weapons?
Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, knows that Americans will be entering the coordinates and pressing the launch button for these weapons!
Why doesn’t Ukraine focus on freeing up the occupied territories? Every year Budanov (the intelligence chief) claims that Russia will soon no longer have the resources to continue fighting (Google “Budanov says the war will end”).
But Bloomberg predicts a constant rise in Russian defense spending (original article), up to $140 billion in 2025 (6.2% of GDP, 35% of gov spending), almost double from the 75$ billion spent in 2022. Even so, Ukraine should with $40 billion to $60 billion be able to destroy the invaders on Ukrainian territory, since Russia must finance not just the Ukraine war, but also a submarine fleet, nuclear missiles, and many other projects.
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