How exactly would accounting for where all the money goes prevent us from giving aid to Ukraine? As Captain X said, they're not mutually exclusive things; so stop acting like they are, and stop brushing aside twenty billion unaccounted for dollars like it doesn't matter.
This is dishonest. He's said directly that he'd like both, but he prioritizes Ukraine being able to win the war.
What will satisfy you that corruption is being minimized as much as it can, while not impacting the combat effectiveness of what is being sent/sold/lend-leased to Ukraine?
We know that this isn't the case too, since Congress has actively resisted building in methods for pro-active anti-corruption work.
But then, the root problem is the corruption in congress and the federal bureaucracy in and of itself. Part of what annoys me about this argument, is how people who claim to be anti-corruption here, act like the corrupt people wouldn't find another way to shuffle money around if they weren't using Ukraine as an excuse.
At least this way we get some measurable benefits out of it, those being Ukraine remaining an independent nation, and the Russian war machine getting smashed.
How the heck is a war supposed to purge corruption? Wars are a breeding ground for it; and so far, I've seen nothing to suggest that Ukraine is an exception to the rule. Moreover, if you actually give a crap about helping Ukraine drive Russia out of it's borders, accountability should be your highest priority; because otherwise, you're essentially saying that you don't care if any of the money actually goes to fighting Russia.
Wars are not a 'breeding ground for corruption,' they're a furnace that melts things down, corrupt or uncorrupt.
It's very common in wars for peripheral corruption to be an ongoing issue. Some expense account padding, a few crates of supplies being 'creatively re-allocated' by soldiers who think they have a better idea than the quartermaster what they need, and some of that stuff ends up on the black market too. In wars that only exert a small portion of a nation's military, like what Russia was doing in Syria and Georgia, you can also have larger-scale problems, because the amount of resources available vs the resources needed is so different.
Existential wars, wars for the survival of a nation, those burn away
serious corruption
really damn quickly.
When your capital almost falls in the opening day of the attack, people stop tolerating corruption, and those corrupt beyond working with flee the nation because they're too self-serving to risk their necks.
When your capital is still under threat weeks in, the soldiers who are fighting on the front lines, have fought on the front lines, or will be fighting there soon, have
damn strong incentives to make sure ammunition and supplies are actually getting to where they are needed. If some bureaucrat or supply officer takes a drive with an entire truck of ammo, and it comes back empty, he might just be shot on the spot when he returns
If he comes back one case shy he might get away with it, but not the kind of gross corruption that rots an army out from the inside like Russia has been facing.
We know Ukraine's military isn't corrupt to that level, because if they were, they would have collapsed almost immediately,
like they did back in 2014.
We know that they aren't even
close to that level, because they've been fighting damn effectively against a far larger opponent that has much more heavy equipment, even if they've been using it incompetently.
We know that there's going to be at least
some level of corruption, because Ukraine has a long history of corruption, and that doesn't
completely disappear overnight, even in the fires of war.
We
won't know the full scale of how bad things are, until after the war, when there's time and space to look into things in more detail. Personally, that's when I expect the
serious corruption to set in, as tons of money earmarked for rebuilding and given to NGOs who will do 'aid' and 'charity work' in Ukraine siphon away large amounts of cash into their own wallets.
What keeps getting me about your posting though, is that you keep pretending that all the aid sent either has or may have all gone to waste, when that is
visibly untrue.
Again,
victory on the field of battle is proof that significant portions of aid is being used as intended.
Why do you keep ignoring that?