The following is a news analysis.

No sooner did the US bring a scandalous and deadly end to the quagmire of the war in Afghanistan than did our leaders involve us in what is apparently another. Again, there is no announced endpoint or end game certain.

So far, the US has sent $113 billion in aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia. Early assurances from US officials and experts who claimed Ukraine would quickly end the war as long as we helped fund them– proved untrue, as have so many of their past claims.

Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine was widely regarded as “one of the most corrupt governments on the planet.” There has been little firmly established in the way of oversight of all that money going out the door.

Adding to the controversy is President Biden’s unique relationship to Ukraine. His son, Hunter, profited from a suspicious deal with a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, that was under investigation for corruption. Adding to the scandal, Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, as Obama’s vice president, managed to be named an official in charge of all matters related to Ukraine. In that capacity, Joe Biden admits visiting Ukraine and using the threat of withholding US aid to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired. The prosecutor happened to be investigating that company paying Hunter big bucks.

All the money being paid to Ukraine today could be seen as hush money (paid by President Biden at our expense) to keep Ukraine and its officials from telling more about the Hunter and Joe Biden controversies. To date, Ukraine has kept relatively silent on it all–at least in public.

Of course, maybe the Biden administration would be giving just as much aid to the corrupt Ukrainian government if there weren’t these scandalous ties. We’ll never know.

To date, Congress has passed four spending packages in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine— $113 billion in total. The $113 billion spans agencies and bureaus and provides for much-needed support in areas including military equipment, migration and refugee assistance, energy, and countering disinformation.

The Department of Defense (DOD) has received a majority—54.7 percent, or $61.8 billion—of the appropriations across the four supplemental packages, to date. The DOD has received the most funding in every supplemental cycle, ranging from 47 to 63 percent each time. The second-largest sum of funds went to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) at 32.3 percent of appropriated funds. Only 8.8 percent of the total funds appropriated have gone to the Department of State—primarily for refugee assistance and foreign military financing. The remaining funds appropriated to other U.S. government agencies makes up less than 5 percent of the total. The Department of Commerce and the U.S. Agency for Global Media are the only two agencies for which no funds were allocated after the first supplemental. 

Center for Strategic and International Studies

Read more about how much aid we’ve provided Ukraine here:

https://www.csis.org/analysis/past-present-and-future-us-assistance-ukraine-deep-dive-data

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