“Before we started sending them weapons they were killing Russians with things you could find around the house,” Dave Chappelle joked, during a November monologue on Saturday Night Live.
“That whole country, Ukraine, is littered with traps like Home Alone,” he went on, to laughter. “Russians were steppin’ on rakes and touchin’ hot doorknobs.”
If you’re old enough to remember Home Alone (and its sequel, which featured a cameo from Donald Trump), Chappelle’s analogy was brilliant. There’s nothing funny about the conflict in Ukraine, of course, but the Russian military’s well-documented struggles on the ground do look, at times, like macabre slapstick. Vladimir Putin’s army was a paper tiger, and you could imagine one of his drunken conscripts striding into an abandoned house in the countryside only to get hit in the face with a paint can tied to a string, swinging down from a ceiling beam.
Soon enough, Putin’s motley crew of teenagers, convicts and mercenaries will have to watch out for Leopards. That’s Leopards, capitalized. So, not large predatory cats, although at this point, nearly a year into a hopelessly confused, Tarantino-bloody melee, Russia’s beleaguered ground troops probably wouldn’t be too surprised if they ended up mauled by a literal Panthera while trying to loot a dark basement.
Amid relentless pressure, and reportedly after securing a commitment from the US to send its own advanced tanks, Germany agreed to send Leopard 2s to Ukraine and will permit other nations to send theirs. “This decision follows our well-known line of supporting Ukraine to the best of our ability,” Olaf Scholz said Wednesday. “We are acting internationally in a closely-coordinated and concerted fashion.”
Scholz was presumably referring to an imminent announcement from the US, which was set to green light delivery of M1 Abrams tanks, marking a policy reversal. Germany had resisted the idea of sending Leopards to prowl Ukraine. Scholz wanted political cover from the White House first. The Abrams is that cover.
I’m not an expert on the logistics of tank delivery, maintenance and training (and neither is anyone writing about Scholz’s relent on Wednesday, by the way), but common sense seems to dictate that the Abrams decision is less immediately relevant for the war than the Leopards.
There are thousands of Leopards across Europe, and while Ukraine surely won’t get all 300 Western tanks it wants, it might get dozens, and they’ll clearly be an improvement from the Soviet-era tanks the country has relied on so far.
“The Leopards are in Europe, they are easy to get to Ukraine and several European countries use them, so they are readily available,” a research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs told The New York Times. “Logistics and maintenance would be easier. Spare parts and know-how are here in Europe, so the training of Ukrainians would be easier.”
There were two main worries for Germany. First, the country is reluctant to project militarily due to the psychological trauma associated with an extremely unfortunate series of events which transpired eight decades ago.
Second, there’s some risk that sending the tanks will be seen by the Kremlin as an escalation. Moscow has repeatedly suggested that if Russia is defeated by conventional weapons in a conflict that threatens the state’s existence, the Kremlin would be justified in using nuclear weapons.
Putin reserves for himself the sole right to determine what constitutes an existential threat. His characterization of the conflict is entirely divorced from reality, and at various intervals, Russian officials and state propaganda have alluded to the idea that Western sanctions are akin to economic genocide. It’s not terribly difficult to imagine a scenario in which the Kremlin endeavors to construct a victimhood narrative to justify an outlandish act of desperation from the Russian bear.
Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelensky is busy firing top officials for corruption, raising concerns about possible misappropriation of foreign aid. During his enraptured speech to Congress last month, Zelensky made a show of insisting that US financial assistance wouldn’t be squandered. Several House GOPers boycotted the address.
At the risk of downplaying a serious issue, I feel obligated to speak plainly to readers. Corruption is endemic in Ukraine. No one in Washington who’s any semblance of familiar with the country is surprised by it, Republican or Democrat. America’s last president was impeached for trying to leverage Ukraine’s reputation for mischief via a clumsy scheme to trade anti-tank weapons for an investigation into America’s current president and his family. Republicans, having narrowly secured the House in November, will probably try to launch a version of that investigation themselves. And on, and on.
The point is that although plenty of US politicians and lawmakers will feign incredulity and outrage at alleged corruption in Ukraine, nobody, save perhaps a few newcomers to Capitol Hill, is genuinely surprised by it. If assistance for Ukraine’s war effort was contingent on the US being absolutely certain that every penny of America’s “investment” (as Zelensky described foreign aid last month) was safe from malfeasance, then no US money would go to Ukraine.
So, if the question is whether it’s possible that some American tax dollars will disappear into the wild blue yonder, the answer is “Yes. Absolutely yes.” If the next question is whether it’s worth it, the answer is the same.
Yet another great article…
I’d respond to your comment on corruption with this; if Americans care about corruption anywhere, they should demonstrate that by caring about corruption here, first. Corruption is growing and accountability decreasing as we speak in the US. Nobody should be judging corruption anywhere else in the world, from the purview of the United States, while that happens.
I know that this will be a right wing “crises” because they are all crises actors representing the perpetually aggrieved while their preferred party is continually investigated and prosecuted for corrupt acts that are called corrupt because whomever’s favorite populist is the target. But that’s America, the land of truth is whatever you decide and, everyone else should just agree with you because you saw it on Tik Tok.
Well said. I’m anticipating the launch of the House’s Ukrainian Corruption Investigation Committee, chaired by George Santos, any day now.
For a few years after I retired from international banking, I would participate in Foreign Policy Association discussions at the local library. Occasionally, I would present on various Middle Eastern or East European countries. There would inevitably be a question on corruption , which I would try to answer as best I could. But I would always conclude my comments with “Thank God we don’t have to worry about that here in New Jersey!”
This is always the best response when people complain about how ponderous and inefficient government services in the US are, too. Sure, democratic institutions are often painful to watch in operation… but is there a reasonable alternative? Do I want FDA food inspections outsourced to companies themselves, based on the honor system, because it’ll save some money? No way. Do I want Boeing to be able to self-certify its systems, because I trust that the invisible hand will guide them just as well as the FAA? Ha. Do I want to get rid of pork barrel spending by enabling a concentration of political power into fewer hands? No thanks!
A little bit of inefficiency is the price you pay for the guardrails that enable political stability. Get rid of the guardrails and you get a race to the bottom — anyone who wants to see what capitalism without the guardrails looks like just needs to spend 5 minutes reading about the Triangle Trade.
Absolutely adore this comment!
I wonder how much the Leopards will matter.
On the one hand Javelins and NLAWs have seemingly shown in this war that the age of the tank’s dominance has passed. On the other hand the Russian answer, the Kornet, doesn’t seem to have gotten nearly as much press and there aren’t copious social media postings of Ukrainian tanks being destroyed by them.
Leopards are supposed to be the best of the best, hopefully this plays out positively for Kiev.
It seems evident that the so-called “domino theory” of the mid twentieth century may have some validity. First Crimea, next Ukraine, and then Taiwan.
Corruption is as old as mankind. No one should be surprised. It’s not “right” but it’s merely a distraction.
The only thing that truly matters is that Putin is not successful.
The war has not been a very good advertisement for Russia’s arms export industry. “Come buy our tanks / planes / missiles, that are getting blown up right and left in Ukraine, we use only the finest semiconductors that looted washing machines can supply.”
Does anyone remember the pallets of cash that were sent to Iraq during that war under George Bush? Literally pallets of it, tons of it. I think I remember videos showing some of the pallets of cash with parachutes being pushed out the back of helicopters. It’s fairly understood that when you run a cash business some goes missing.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-usa-cash/u-s-sent-pallets-of-cash-to-baghdad-idUSN0631295120070207
In the US we politely call corruption “campaign contributions”. That’s like saying “martini” to class up the idea you’re drinking straight alcohol.
Yes there will be some “slippage” helping Ukraine, but H says it’ll be worth it. I agree.