Has Trump Seen Proof that Funds For Ukraine Were Stolen?

Have ill-equipped Ukrainian soldiers been sent to die while fat cats siphon money and sell weapons on the international market?

Yesterday I watched two videos. The first was President Trump’s interview with Maria Bartiromo in which he declared that Zelensky took money from Biden like “candy from a baby.”

The second video I watched was of what appeared to be a Ukrainian soldier crying as hard as I have ever seen a grown man cry. And he wasn’t just any grown man, but an extremely tough looking one.

With so much propaganda being slung around on the internet, I hesitate to share it. I believe he was speaking Ukrainian and not Russian, and amid sobs, he was raging at the men who run his country, including Zelensky. His grief-stricken rant did not include much exposition. He seemed to assume that his audience would understand precisely what he was talking about. His overall lament was that he and his friends had been screwed.

Have the ordinary soldiers of Ukraine been screwed—that is, sent ill-equipped to the front while the oligarchs who run their country and their senior officers have siphoned much of the money and sold many of the sophisticated weapons on the international market?

The crying soldier reminded me of Siegfried Sassoon’s World War I poem, “Base Details.”

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath, ...
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You'd see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. "Poor young chap,"
I'd say—"I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap."
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

It’s an ancient soldier’s lament. The senior officer class, the lords, and their banker friends live exceedingly well while the “glum heroes”—i.e., ordinary soldiers, get run into the meat grinder.

I don’t have proof, but I have a strong hunch that a great deal of the money and weapons that our Glorious U.S. Government has sent to Ukraine have been stolen. Multiple international watchdog organizations have long characterized the country as one of the most corrupt on earth. For years, a small number of billionaire oligarchs have owned all of the assets in a nation in which the median household income is about $1,000 per annum.

I get the impression that President Trump has been presented with documentary proof of what has, for me, been a mere hunch. Someone has shown him evidence that billions of American funds have been siphoned off by shady players in Ukraine.

The gigantic flow of weapons from the U.S. to Ukraine raises the suspicion that the country has become a supply depot for international arms dealers. Years ago, when I lived in Vienna, I used to go to a place called the Broadway Bar owned by a Hungarian pianist named Bela Koreny, and there I would occasionally bump into a glamorous Israeli who once told me after a few drinks that he was an arms dealer. I didn’t really believe him—I figured it was just a cool-sounding thing to say to impress girls. On the other hand, I’m not a girl, and he seemed to know a lot about international arms dealing. Curious to learn more, I read a few books about the trade.

Some of the most notable arms dealers in history were Iranians such as Adnan Khashoggi, Manucher Ghorbanifar, and Cyrus Hashemi. Most Americans today probably don’t remember the Iran Contra Affair that involved U.S. arms trafficking to Iran between 1981-1986. The harebrained reasoning—both in Washington and in Tel Aviv—was that it was a good thing to maintain the war that was then raging between Iraq and Iran.

Thus, while at the exact same time the Reagan Administration was publicly declaring that no one should sell arms to Iran, it was secretly working with Israeli agents to sell arms to Iran — about $2 billion per annum worth between 1980 and 1985.

This shady traffic culminated in 1985, when National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane—a typically naive Washington knucklehead—was talked into a deal whereby the Iranians would get Hezbollah to release U.S. hostages being held in Lebanon in exchange for 100 U.S. TOW missiles.

Wikipedia provides a pretty good summary of the Affair.

The idea behind the plan was for Israel to ship weapons through an intermediary (identified as Manucher Ghorbanifar) to the Islamic Republic as a way of aiding a supposedly moderate, politically influential faction within the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini who was believed to be seeking a rapprochement with the US; after the transaction, the US would reimburse Israel with the same weapons, while receiving monetary benefits.

Secret Israeli arms sales and shipments to Iran began in that year, even as, in public, "the Reagan Administration" presented a different face, and "aggressively promoted a public campaign [...] to stop worldwide transfers of military goods to Iran". The New York Times explained: "Iran at that time was in dire need of arms and spare parts for its American-made arsenal to defend itself against Iraq, which had attacked it in September 1980", while "Israel [a US ally] was interested in keeping the war between Iran and Iraq going to ensure that these two potential enemies remained preoccupied with each other".

I fear that this is the kind of shady deal that has been going on in Ukraine, only on a much bigger scale. What is especially terrifying about it is the possibility that many people in the U.S. government will work hard to conceal the reality of what has been going on with U.S. money and weapons.

To make matters even more complex, I suspect that the Russians could provide Trump with good intelligence about the fate of U.S. arms and money in Ukraine. The trouble with this is that the Americans have been heavily conditioned by our corrupt and lying intelligence agencies to believe that any intelligence coming from the Russians is necessarily disinformation.

We saw this in the case of the Wikileaks Clinton-DNC-Podesta emails and in the case of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Whenever corrupt U.S. intelligence agencies want to cover for Washington’s corrupt political establishment, they claim that the evidence thereof is “Russian Disinformation.”

It’s possible that President Trump is now in a position to end this corrupt horror show, but he faces enormous resistance to doing so.