Did you miss it, buried in the 14th paragraph in a NY Times story, about the “lethal” missiles we sent Ukraine?
“Trump’s sale of those weapons prohibited the use of Javelins on the front lines..."
The missiles got warehoused 100s of miles away from the “contact line” in eastern Ukraine, where the fighters exchange gunfire and lives are lost every week. Another NY Times article says soldiers shape, and prop up, “dummy” missiles as a gambit to try to deter Russian-backed fighters:
soldiers stuff straw into empty uniforms to make dummies, and put logs on their shoulders to make it look like they are carrying American antitank missiles — as a scare tactic. ….
… there is a big catch. The Trump administration provided the missiles on the condition that they not be used in the war, Ukrainian officials and American diplomats have said, lest they provoke Russia to slip more powerful weaponry to the separatists.
“They are not to be on the front line,” Iryna Herashchenko, a former chief settlement negotiator, said of the missiles.
There’s something kinda wrong — isn’t there — with the favorite talking point that the US under the Trump administration shipped lethal Javelin missiles to Ukraine, but Obama was less ambitious (Obama’s W.H. sending Ukraine only armored humvees, night-vision devices, counter-mortar radar).
You would have had to read the European or Ukrainian press to find headlines about the dummy sale of the shoulder-launch “fire-and-forget” missiles. In Ukraine, the Javelin missiles have come out only for parades.
This is true, at least through October. Per a commenter below, all the attention on Ukraine now may finally lift the embargo that has persisted since the weapons were delivered in the spring of 2018. In a simmering war that has taken the lives of more than 13,000 Ukrainians caught in the Russian-Ukraine cross-fire.
May 7, 2018 [UA Wire]
“The U.S. imposed restrictions on the use of Javelin anti-tank missile systems in the Donbas, which Washington supplied to Ukraine, as stated by Georgiy Tuka, the deputy minister for the temporarily occupied territories and internally displaced persons of Ukraine, on the Pryamoy channel.
“According to him, one of the terms of the contract to supply the missile systems was‘ not to use these complexes directly on the contact line.’
“At the same time, Tuka stressed that the ban can be canceled ‘at any time,’
RadioFreeEurope also had interviewed US envoy Kurt Volker, and reported,
"The special U.S. envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, has said that the Javelins are being stored in a secure facility far from the front line of the conflict in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where government forces continue to
fight Russia-backed separatists."
Another RadioFreeEurope report:
.... Ukraine has showcased the Javelins in publicized drills but its armed forces have not used them in combat against Russia-backed forces in eastern battlefields.
The special U.S. envoy Ukraine, Kurt Volker, has said that the Javelins are being stored in a secure facility far from the front line. — June 11, 2019
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And:
"According to U.S. data, since 2014 the volume of U.S. military assistance to Ukraine has totaled about $1.3 billion. In March 2018, the U.S. approved the sale to Ukraine of 37 Javelin anti-tank missile launchers and 210 missiles worth $47 million. The shipment was made in April 2018 under the condition that the weapons would not be used on the front line in eastern Ukraine."
— April 10, 2019 Interfax Ukraine — UKRAINE NEWS AGENCY
An exuberant show of Javelin missiles and launchers ( we shipped 210 missiles, 37 launchers) are permitted to display in parades in the nation’s capital, however.
“Crowd excited to see U.S.-supplied Javelins at Independence Day parade dress rehearsal in Kyiv”
Academic research articles seem to pick up on the disconnect, but not a single congressman has asked any witness about the durable prohibition:
October 3, 2019
Far From the Front Lines, Javelin Missiles Go Unused in Ukraine
.... Under the conditions of the foreign military sale, the Trump administration stipulates that the Javelins must be stored in western Ukraine—hundreds of miles from the battlefield.
“I see these more as symbolic weapons than anything else,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. Experts say the conditions of the sale render them useless in the event of a sustained low-level assault—the kind of attack Ukraine is most likely to face from Russia.
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There is of course more to say about information missed in the impeachment Trump-Russia-v-Ukraine story.
So I’m going to hit a second topic for an impeachment talking point.
The effort by Trump and his DoJ to aim to exonerate Paul Manafort — by impugning Ukraine instead of Russia — is laughable.
The evidence collected shows why.
I will let these screenshots, excerpted from the Mueller investigation (and replicated in the @280Report twitter-stream text batches) shine the light:
Collaboration (if not provable conspiracy) between Manafort and Russian surrogates was documented from May through August 2016, and continuing past the transition and first year of the presidency. The May-to-August period is interesting — including the cigar-lounge meeting in the (NYC) Grand Havana Room (Manafort-Gates-Konstantin Kilimnik meeting Aug 2).
Wondering if there is more, so much more, about Russian (not Ukrainian) hackers attacking a candidate directly, and targeting the U.S. election infrastructure?
There is this, from a U.S. indictment (look at the intrusions into SBOE (State Board of Elections):
So whether the talking point is Trump’s Javelin shipment, or it’s Ukraine, not Russia, that undercut November 8, 2016, there seems to be contrary info.
Well, that’s for starters. 2020 is ahead. And our President is inviting other nations’ presidents to go after his potential opponents, starting with Biden.
Buckle up, as they say.