Martin Jay
We can assume that half of this money is going to get swallowed up by Zelensky and his cabal.
There is no question that Ukraine's drone use in the war against Russian forces has been impressive. On the front line itself, in key towns like Pokrovsk, it proved to be a real factor in slowing down Russian advances, given that the bigger the army, the greater its vulnerability from the air with such small devices.
Yet one has to ask what has the EU done recently when it signed off a 90bn euro 'loan' to Ukraine if this is a cash package which gets swallowed up by the Kiev regime ? It wasn't tabled as 'defence spending' but merely for Ukraine's 2-year budget and yet Zelensky himself had said before the December 18th EU summit that if there is no money, then Ukraine's own drone production facility would quickly grind to a halt.
What is Zelensky really expected to do with this money ? Based on my own investigations about embezzlement and corruption in Ukraine when it comes to western cash or arms shipments, we can assume that half of this money is going to get swallowed up by Zelensky and his cabal - and this group of people is widening now as he is looking now to MPs to keep him in power from all parties. It is inconceivable that some of this money would not be allocated to them, in exactly the same way that Israel pays cash directly to MPs in the UK and members of Congress each month to keep them on board.
Then there will be the kickbacks to those in the West who readers might be shocked to learn are not part of the racket. And then there will be Zelensky's emergency escape fund which he must be filling up each day for when the time comes to run. It's not that he needs money for private jets and extraction plans, it's more the millions that he has to stuff in lots of people's top pockets who would normally be given the task of arresting and holding him. At the last moment, in the panic, he may have to buy off an entire army unit or police division moving in for the arrest.
Corruption is everywhere in Ukraine. It is simple to understand. There are no bad or good guys like in American western movies. Everyone has his price and this was evident in the imminent arrest of Mindich who fled the country hours before his house was about to be raided and he was inevitably due to be slung in jail. Mindich obviously arranged with a few friends in the anti-corruption outfit NABU that in the case of him being arrested, he would be forewarned and the office who would give him the tip off would be handsomely rewarded. Zelensky will have the same checks and balances in place, but in his case the number of officials in key places will be much higher and the sums will be astronomical given that everyone knows that his net worth is in the billions, even by conservative estimates.
Zelensky will need possibly hundreds of millions for this fund alone to avoid the Ceausescu moment. And then there is the fund to pay off world leaders once he is living in exile to avoid The Hague. This could run into hundreds of millions.
For now, however, Western media provides little clarity on the specifics of how these funds will be spent - at least on paper. Annual defence spending in Ukraine stands at around €40 billion, which accounts for roughly half of its total public expenditure. If only €20 billion of that is actually allocated internally - primarily to drone manufacturing, with a portion reserved for the missiles its air defence batteries desperately lack - then we can expect the war's outcome to be delayed by only a few more months, especially now that winter has set in. Presumably, drone warfare will intensify as a result, though one must question the strategic wisdom of striking Russian oil tankers in the Mediterranean - ships forced into a so-called "shadow fleet" to evade sanctions, as Western commentators often describe them.
Such strikes certainly demonstrate Ukraine's ability to project force far beyond its own battlefields, but they also escalate the stakes and compel the Kremlin to think bigger, broadening its own theatre of operations. Choking the Black Sea is one possible strategy Putin may well be considering. Yet this raises a further question: why has Russia not yet targeted the drone factories inside Ukraine itself, or even the power infrastructure that supplies them?