Ukraine doesn’t account for donated weapons
The claim
Ukraine isn’t properly accounting for $1 billion out of $1.7 billion in weapons incorporating sensitive technology, according to a Senate memo sent by Vance in January that quotes a Pentagon watchdog report.
The reality
In 2022, Ukraine established a parliamentary commission to control donated Western weapons. “Ukraine files reports on how we use American weapons every quarter, which brigades have U.S. weapons and how many and of course what was lost in battle,” Oleksandra Ustinova, the head of the commission, told POLITICO.
The U.S. also keeps an eye on weapons. The report that Vance cited actually said that Americans, not Ukrainians, failed to adequately track roughly $1 billion of Javelin and Stinger missiles, night vision devices, and other monitoring devices.
“That report was painful to us and that number was caught and used by many Ukraine aid opposers,” she said, adding that the report by Pentagon-appointed Robert Storch “later explained everything.”
J.D. Vance’s isolationist position differentiates him from more conventional Republicans. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The West cannot outproduce Russia in weapons
The claim
“The amount of munitions that we can send to Ukraine right now is very limited not by American will, or money, but by American manufacturing capacity,” Vance said during the Munich Security Conference.
The reality
He has a point. Russia is producing about 3 million artillery shells a year, according to a NATO estimate. That’s about three times more than the West. However, Western production is ramping up. By 2026, the European Commission estimates the EU will be producing 2 million shells a year. The U.S. aims to produce about 80,000 a month by the end of this year.
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Publish date : 2024-07-16 16:39:00
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Author : info-blog
Publish date : 2024-07-20 06:33:09
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