Where Did the Billions Sent to Ukraine End Up?

According to the latest figures from Brussels, the EU has given Kyiv €72 billion in economic, military, and humanitarian aid since February 2022, draining its coffers. Nonetheless, the European Commission announced in June that it would offer Kyiv an additional €50 billion in loans and grants. That move has been opposed by Hungary, whose Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on June 30 that he would not approve the funds until it’s clear what Kyiv did with the €70 already made available.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Grayzone website conducted its own independent audit of U.S. funding for the Kyiv regime, publishing the results June 27. The authors of the report “discovered a series of wasteful, highly unusual expenditures the Biden Administration has yet to explain”, a finding which Grayzone’s editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal touched on in his testimony to the UN Security Council on June 29. Many Americans, the report says, probably believe that all of the taxpayer dollars being allocated to Ukraine are actually going there, but this is far from the case.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, has spent $21.4 billion for Ukraine, but some of that money ended up in places like Kenya and Ethiopia via other agencies. An amount of $4.5 billion, sent to Ukraine via the World Bank, was used to pay off Kyiv’s debt and to fund various social programs, including government pensions. However, the bulk of Ukraine’s sovereign debt is held by private equity funds, such as BlackRock.

Moreover, since February 2020, USAID has sent $30.9 million to Chemonics International, Inc. for the “Ukraine confidence building initiative (UCBI)” A private, for-profit aid contractor, Chemonics was founded in 1975 by a businessman who said he launched the company to “have my own CIA”. (The Grayzone has documented Chemonics’ earlier role in delivering U.S. government funding and supplies to the Syrian White Helmets, which served as the propaganda wing of the Al Qaeda-linked armed opposition. The contractor had also reaped a massive windfall from the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, raking in as much as $600 million from USAID.)

Another shady recipient of money, this time from the Department of Defense, is a firm called Atlantic Diving Supply, Inc (ADS), which got $4.75 million for explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) equipment and “Marine Lifesaving and Diving Equipment.” Luke Hillier, the founder of Atlantic Diving Supply, had paid a $20 million settlement in 2019 to resolve charges that he defrauded the Pentagon. In 2021, Hillier obtained a massive $33 billion contract under the same program, prompting fresh accusations of fraud.

In his testimony to the UNSC, Max Blumenthal denounced “a disturbing dynamic at the heart of the Ukraine conflict: an international Ponzi scheme that enables Western elites to seize hard-earned wealth out of the hands of average U.S. citizens and funnel it into the coffers of a foreign government that even the Western-sponsored Transparency International ranks as one of the most corrupt in Europe”. And they are doing so at the risk of provoking nuclear war!