The sixth episode investigates weapons deliveries to Ukraine, the lack of oversight in their deliveries, and the malignant movements that have gotten a hold of them. It also expose Zelenskyy’s increasing demands for military aid and the difficulties NATO has encountered in delivering them.
The war in Ukraine has been on-going for two years. In that time, massive amounts of weapons have flowed into the country from the United States and Europe.
In fact, over those two years, United States has shipped 75 billion dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine. An incredible figure. But the big question is why? The answer… is not as obvious as you might think.
I’m investigative journalist Ben Swann. Look at this chart. It shows the military capability of Russia vs Ukraine. The reality… Ukraine is so outmatched they couldn’t possibly win, right?
Even with the arms that have been dedicated to Ukraine, many of which haven’t made it to the front lines, Russia has four times as many active soldiers as Ukraine, thirteen times as many aircraft, fifteen times the naval force, and nearly seven times as many tanks. This, according to estimates from last year.
So even the playing field by giving Ukraine enough weapons to compete? What if all that does is create more death for Ukrainians?
Ritter: I believe that sometimes there is a legitimate requirement to defend yourself, you need the right weapons. So on the surface, there’s no problem with providing weapons to people who need to defend themselves justly against aggression.
But in the case of Ukraine, when the United States set this whole conflict up, when NATO used the expansion of its organization as a deliberate strategy to provoke Russia to create the conditions for this proxy conflict, which Russia did not want it, then you get the war to provide weapons in that case is not helping people defend themselves.
It’s helping people create chaos, anarchy, death, destruction. And the irony in the horror of it is that by providing weapons to the Ukrainians as we are, we’re not helping Ukraine win. We’re not helping Ukraine survive. We’re killing Ukraine.
This is literally about continuing a conflict that will churn through a nation, slaughter its people, make millions of others suffer for the purpose not of preserving Ukraine, but sacrificing Ukraine for the single goal of harming Russia.
“I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need, economic support, they will fight until the last person.”
Ritter: You don’t support them by giving the weapons that allow them to die in larger numbers because that’s what’s happening. They are not winning this war. They are never going to win this war. All that’s happened is that they are going to fulfill Lindsey Graham’s vision of this conflict, going to the last Ukrainian.
It’s impossible to quantify how many losses have been suffered on either side of this conflict. This is because war propaganda tends to inflate losses of enemies and there isn’t any systematic, unbiased, accounting available to the public.
In November of 2022, General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chief of Staff stated that around one hundred thousand Russian troops and one hundred thousand Ukrainian troops had been killed or injured in the conflict. Since then, NATO and Ukrainian officials have bumped up their estimates of Russian losses while largely retaining their figure for Ukrainian losses.
On their end, Russia has not released official figures since the early months of the war.
So, we don’t know how many losses Ukraine has suffered. But, the independent experts we’ve spoken to, say that Ukraine’s losses have far outweighed Russian losses. This reality is even clearer now in light of Russian advances in the Donbass.
Credico: There’s 300,000 Dead Ukrainians, Douglas McGregor would say 350,000. All right, I’ll go into the conservative side there. And 30,000 Russians, I don’t know they see the figures tend to one whatever it is, it’s a 4000 500,000 all we got it, whatever it is, it all could have been avoided.
Morgues are filled there. Hospitals are full of wounded, probably 400,000 plus wounded at this point. And they have been losing on average about a battalion a day. That’s somewhere between six and 800 men and all through January and late December, the first part of this month, they’ve been losing about a thousand men a day. So very, very high casualties and very large numbers of dead.
Ukraine’s military is highly overmatched against Russia’s, but this fact is conveniently ignored by mainstream media outlets.
As of 2023, Russia’s military had over 1.3 million service people compared with Ukraine’s half a million. The discrepancy gets wider when you factor in active soldiers –Russia had over four times as many as Ukraine. Russia also had over 150 thousand armored vehicles, including over twelve thousand tanks. Ukraine had 37 thousand armored vehicles and less than two thousand tanks.
An army cannot be built almost from scratch in the middle of a war. And right now, that’s what you’re talking about doing. It just cannot be done. And the equipment that we use today is infinitely more complex and demanding than the equipment that was used 80 years ago during the Second World War.
So a week or two of familiarization with new weapons is not going to cut it, which is why they’ve been sending Ukrainians to the United States, to Germany, to Great Britain in order to be trained on these systems. But the problem is that even those training sessions, which may last a month or two, have not turned out to be enough for complex systems like patriot, like high mortars and so forth. And we know that there are Western contractors in many cases operating things like highmars. And we know that we have provided all of the intelligence support and targeting support to help the Ukrainians.
It’s still not enough because Russia is a real army.
The United States has committed over 75 billion dollars of military aid.
Compare that with the combined 35 billion that the other 25 military aid donor-countries are contributing.
But little is known about how these weapons are being supplied.
Ritter: You know, the interesting thing is when you take a look at how this war is funded and there’s different, you know, we put out a dollar amount, but the dollar amounts, they’re not the same dollars. They do different things. Some of the dollars involve what they called draw down.
So draw down is if I have 100 tanks and we want to give the Ukrainians 50, we will draw down from the stocks I currently have and give them those 50.
Generally, what happens when you draw down, you then will there’ll be contracts to replace if you need to replace. So the defense industry isn’t getting the money for the sale of the of the of the equipment that’s generally done through Lend-Lease and some complicated contractual mechanism. But the defense industry will be called upon to either replace or replace with newer stuff.
The military industrial complex has come up with many innovative ways to make money. And so, you know, we can there’s different variations of these themes, but that’s basically it. Draw down, make new. Either way, the military industrial complex defense contractors are making an awful lot of money. Now, some people say, well, that means they’re driving the show. No, they aren’t.
They don’t need to because they are the show. You don’t need to drive the show that you are. This is the military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about, that Jimmy Carter warned us about years later. It has taken over the controls, everything, because it’s not the military industrial complex.
It’s a military industrial congressional complex where the money that’s involved is used to power politics here in America.
EISENHOWER: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence –whether sought or unsought—by the military industrial complex.”
Ritter: You can’t be elected in certain districts unless you have Raytheon backing Northrop Grumman, backing Lockheed Martin backing. Why? Jobs, Jobs, the factories, the jobs, the tax base, the grift, the corruption, the payoffs, the schemes.
We have arms factories in America building weapons the military doesn’t want. Why? Because to shut it down, you lose the jobs and it can’t happen.
So the Pentagon will put forward a budget and then Congress will come and say, you know what? We’re going to we’re going to produce the minimum number to keep this production line going.
The military said we don’t want them. We’re still going to build them. I mean, this is so we’re actually weakening ourselves, not only financially, but militarily by producing weapons that we no longer want to use, can use, can maintain, maintain effectively.
Even though US arms companies wield extraordinary influence in the country, there are reasons to question their industrial strength. Here’s the late journalist, Gonzalo Lira, who died while imprisoned in Ukraine because of his reporting.
LIRA: One of the side effects of Western deindustrialization is that the United States, the West does not have the industrial capacity to match the the attrition rate of the conflict at this time. For instance, at this time, the United States is manufacturing something like 19,252 or 155 millimeter shells, it doesn’t matter the standard that they use their manufacturing 19,000 per month, the Russians are shelling at a rate of 40,000 a day. I mean, this is 60 to one, okay is so the ratio is just so incredibly lopsided. There’s simply no way for the West to supply the Ukraine regime with the weapons that would need.
Yet, they continue to try, even though many weapons aren’t ending up where they’re supposed to.
In August of 2022, CBS News put out a documentary called “Arming Ukraine,” in which they reported that only thirty percent of weapons shipments were getting to where they needed to go.
This followed a similar report by CNN, quoting an anonymous U.S. intelligence official who said that the weapons “drop into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time.”
The CBS documentary made waves… enough waves, that it was pulled from the air. CBS subsequently announced on Twitter that they were “updating the documentary to reflect” “new information” given by U.S. officials and that the film would “air at a later date.” But that never happened.
The CBS documentary made waves… perhaps enough waves, that it didn’t make it to air. CBS announced on Twitter that they were “updating the documentary to reflect” “new information” given by U.S. officials and that the film would “air at a later date.” But that never happened.
NIXON: I will guarantee you this, there are other parts of the world that the United States wants to traffic weapons to. The Ukraine is also used as a front for that. So they can say we’re giving $1,000,000,000 worth of small arms to Ukraine.
Well, that money goes to maybe terrorist in, you know, Central Africa or something like that. I don’t see what you’re doing illegal illegally and you don’t tell anybody that half of this stuff is going to the Middle East or going elsewhere.
It’s it kind of reminds me of the CIA’s work with cocaine and drug dealers and cartels in Mexico and in South America where, okay, I’m going to ship weapons in. I’m going to do things.
When you look at what’s happening in Ukraine recently, a number of African leaders have complained and they’ve complained that weapons from Ukraine is showing up with terrorist groups in various parts of Africa. So and these are group these are areas in Africa that the United States wants to destabilize because of the new Cold War.
The U.S. believes that Russia and China have great influence in Africa and they want to intervene with their with their influence.
Black: I think there is no doubt that a huge amount of money and resources are being diverted. We know that there are wars in Africa that are being supplied by by weapons that are bled off from these conflicts.
Arms that were supposed to end up in Ukraine have turned up in the hands of terrorist groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram, according to Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.
Buhari’s concerns have been echoed by Interpol as well as officials in the UK and Finland, who have stated that weapons that were supposed to go to Ukraine could have ended up in the possession of criminal organizations.
Russian officials have also claimed that weapons sent to Ukraine have ended up in the streets of Paris and were used in anti-government protests.
McGregor: Americans should be upset over that and they should be upset about the fact that there are now weapons in the hands of Islamist forces in the Middle East and elsewhere that were never there before because they’ve been repackaged and resold.
One of one of the interesting places where these weapons have shown up is in Kosovo. Hmm. Which is always been a hotbed of corruption. And the Muslim Albanians in Kosovo, or a very useful group of interlocutors with Islamist terrorists in the Middle East and with the Turks and moving everything from drugs and weapons through Kosovo into these places is a well-trodden path.
So I, I think we’ll see more of that that’s going on right now. That’s not the only place I think you’re going to see a lot of things move through Central Asia. You know, we’ve got Afghanistan out there and a number of these things will probably end up being repurposed out there. This is not surprising. It’s just what is surprising is that people ignored reality.
McAdams: Yeah, I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. We saw what happened in Libya after the US NATO overthrew Gaddafi. All of those weapons made a beeline to Syria to arm al Qaeda and ISIS, who, as you know, Jake Sullivan himself told Hillary Clinton, well, in Syria, al Qaeda is on our side. So they always fund the worst of the worst, just like they’re funding Nazis in Ukraine, because these are the people who are so ruthless.
Unaccounted weapons that were supposed to go to Ukraine but have shown up in other parts of the world is an enormous problem. But even if that were not the case, the Ukrainian military has little chance to retake the Donbass region claimed by Russia, because they are so heavily outmatched. So, why the war? U.S. arms companies scored big with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The country’s arms industry shrank by .8% in 2021, the year before the war. This was the first time the industry experienced a shortfall in years.
But this tendency did a 180 with the war. The stock price for the U.S.’s largest defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, jumped up from $330.93 on November 1, 2021 to $480.40 on February 24, 2023 –one year after Russia invaded. In other words, the company’s value shot up over 45% because of this conflict.
Raytheon, the defense contractor that current U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin worked for right before taking office,
had their stock value rise from $88.55 to $99.62 during the same period—a jump of 8%.
Then we also have oligarchs in the West, and the oligarchs own the financial system, the media, entertainment, not just in the United States, but in Europe. And they’ve uniformly signed up for this war, which they see as a critical necessity for the for the achievement of their eventual utopia.
So in a strange sort of way, for Russia, this is an existential fight because they know what they’re up against and they’ve got to deal with this problem in Ukraine. We, on the other hand, as Americans, we have no compelling strategic interest in eastern Ukraine.
Our only real strategic interest is in bringing the conflict to an end because conflicts destroy stability, Stability promotes commerce and prosperity. That’s historically what we have supported. So we should do everything in our power to stop this.
Paul: You know how many people have died by disobeying the Constitution and led to such tragedy? The wars are unconstitutional, they’re illegal and very expensive and very driven by special interests.
Weldon: We’re becoming more forceful, even considering giving nuclear weapons to countries right up on Russia’s border. We’re heading toward, excuse me, a confrontation that none of us want. How did that happen? Was it one person? No, I don’t know who did it. I can’t blame one person. But I can blame a lack of leadership, a lack of leadership on people who made money, who got access and used influence for other reasons. And to me, that’s disgusting.
Ritter: It’s all about making money. That’s the corruption of the military Industrial complex. It’s not in the business of making America safer. They’re in the business of making money and in the process they’re making America weaker.
If that is true, it appears that as America gets weaker, as a whole, the country’s most powerful people are getting stronger –thanks to the West’s arming of Ukraine.
Again, it is very difficult for most people to understand the situation in Ukraine because world-wide mainstream media outlets are not reporting on the war in Ukraine, they are pushing a narrative about it. But in the country of Ukraine itself, the control on media is unprecedented. In fact, for a country that claims it is defending democracy, Zelensky himself has led stunning attacks on journalism and media networks that step of out of line. In our next episode, we’ll take a look at the political reality on the ground in Ukraine, and the shutting down of media that dare to speak the truth. As we continue to leave Zelensky Unmasked.