After Friday’s historic display of tension and disagreement between President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance on one side, and US-funded, US-armed, Ukrainian “President” Volodymyr Zelenskyy (whose term actually expired last May), on the other, many Americans might think it a logical outcome to see the US State Department halt funding for the repairs of Ukraine’s energy grid.
Some critics have called out the fact that the US Congress has not declared war, and, as a result, is constitutionally prohibited from sending money, weapons, agents, telemetry, or any other tax-provided item or service to Ukraine – they might mix in their relief that the “aid” arguably never should have been sent, in the first place.
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But HALT is the word from the State Department, and NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard reports:
“The State Department this week terminated a U.S. Agency for International Development initiative that has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to help restore Ukraine's energy grid from attacks by the Russian military, according to two USAID officials working on the agency’s Ukraine mission.
Power outages have been applied overnight in some regions of Ukraine due to the attacks on energy facilities. The country’s systems have sustained near-constant impact throughout the course of the three-year war.”
Which tells us a few things.
First, this likely is not tied to the Trump-Zelinskyy explosion. It’s tied to the exposure of USAID for its vast, decades-old, landscape of wasteful and corrupt cash handouts to people worldwide and to projects such as funding state media in Ukraine.
Second, NBC continues to shovel the horse manure of a story that the war began in 2022.
The 2022 expansion of the Ukraine-Russia conflict came after the coup and overthrow of the elected leader of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovich, that began in late 2013 and culminated in 2014 with Obama State Department officials Victoria Nuland and Jeffrey Pyatt working to put together a pro-NATO, pro-EU government.
The 2022 expansion of the Ukraine-Russia conflict came after the new government became involved in skirmishes for control of Crimean ports.
Of course, NBC avoided those facts.
As real information continues to trickle out, a far more complicated picture unfolds of US involvement. Thanks to leaks like the Nuland-Pyatt call, reporting from people like Tucker Carlson, Benjamin Abelow, and Scott Horton, and the recent revelations about USAID, one can reasonably ascertain that the war kicked off well before 2022, NBC.
Writes Mary Chastain, for Legal Insurrection about the US taxpayers’ involvement in the Ukraine energy grid:
“USAID funded the project. However, President Donald Trump’s administration has dismantled it after finding so much waste and fraud within the agency.
It’s really simple. Don’t waste your resources. Don’t commit fraud. The government is to the point where it needs to be burned down and rebuilt.
The U.S. had 64 employees and contractors in Ukraine. Now it only has eight.”
And she adds:
“The money is stopping. We have sent over $200 billion to Ukraine since 2022. We don’t even know where most of that money is going. Zelensky even said that the country hasn’t received all of that money.”
So no one knows where all the money went.
Only now with Trump’s pushback, are major questions starting to be asked, just not by NBC.
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