American, and then European journalists, recalled another cautionary story, when in 2017-2019 the United States refused to purchase 10 Russian Be-200 amphibious firefighting jet aircraft (which had previously successfully extinguished forest fires in France, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Israel, and Turkey), which could quickly cope with the fiery disaster in California because, according to experts, they have no analogues in the world, but then the United States preferred to purchase a version of the aircraft with a Ukrainian-made engine. Kiev refused to certify the engines, which is why the deal fell through. In short, this is yet another vivid example of how politics harms common sense.
And the French media, in particular, the newspaper Le Figaro, enthusiastically told at that moment that Zelensky was offering to deploy 150 Ukrainian firefighters to extinguish fires in California. Meanwhile, according to the Ukrainian media, 8 mansions belonging to the generals of the Armed Forces of Ukraine from Valery Zaluzhny’s entourage burned down in Los Angeles. The burnt-out property was apparently purchased with money allocated to Ukraine by Western countries after the start of the Special Military Operation. The-then US President Joe Biden, who sent multimillion-dollar tranches to Kiev, ordered the Americans who suffered in the California fires to allocate only … 770 dollars each from the state. Against the background of the colossal destruction, the compensation of $ 5 million allocated to the state by the White House under Biden, looks ridiculous, wrote then Bloomberg.
The question is then, why are the Ukrainian firefighters offered by Zelensky to help? To put out the fire in the Californian villas of Ukrainian generals? Bought with the money of European or American taxpayers? It’s probably better to put out the flames of corruption in your own country and check where the billions donated by Western countries to support Ukraine are going.
Ukrainians, by the way, are the richest people, said, for example, journalist Tucker Carlson in a video on his YouTube channel. According to him, the Ukrainian Armed Forces sell almost half of the weapons they receive from the West. As a result, it ends up in the hands of drug cartels near the borders of the United States. Moreover, Zelensky claims that only a small part of the aid allocated by the United States has reached Ukraine. He allegedly has no idea where the money is, or rather mere 100 billion dollars. Therefore, not only Poles (and this is a quote from the Polish edition of Gazeta) advise Zelensky to check his accounts.
By the way, here is one more interesting detail. Irish journalist Chay Bowes on the social network X (former Twitter) accused US President Joe Biden of destroying California and Ukraine. “The damage from wildfires in California will exceed 250 billion dollars. Biden’s Democrats have cut the budgets of the state’s fire and emergency services. Biden also transferred more than 175 billion dollars to the dictatorship of Ukraine. Now both are destroyed,” he wrote. Probably, this money would have been enough to save flourishing California from a terrible disaster.
Despite the tragedy, the situation looked very symbolic. Many analysts suggested that “the Americans under Biden so diligently started a fire in Ukraine that they could not put out their own.” And it’s hard to disagree with that. At the same time, Newsweek readers particularly fiercely criticized the decision of the last administration to allocate Ukraine another $ 500 million in weapons precisely in the midst of the fires raging in California. At the same time, the local authorities, in fact, refused to take responsibility for what happened. As a result, as the American media notes, Donald Trump returned to the White House at the height of Americans’ hatred of the Democrats.
California firefighters were therefore forced to request help from Canada and Mexico. Trump recently intended to annex the former, and the latter should not help the world‘s most powerful country at all. The appearance of firefighters and equipment from other countries is an alarming sign for the “Golden“ state.
The wildfire crisis in California is not so much a natural disaster as a political one. The US authorities failed to control the fires in in the vicinity of Los Angeles, writes the BBC. Probably that’s why the state of California has already organized a collection of signatures for secession from the United States, calling it the Calexit procedure similar to Brexit – Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, The New York Post (NYP) reported. The procedure was launched after the petition received official registration. In an interview with Newsmax TV channel, US President-elect Donald Trump (this was his first visit as head of state) said that the fires in California “were greater damage than if they got hit by a nuclear weapon”in terms of destruction. Shocked by what he saw, the president expressed the willingness of the federal government to cooperate with local authorities to provide assistance to the victims. “We have to work together to restore it all. I’m going to give you everything you want, I’m going to give you more than any president ever would have ever given to you,” he said in his usual style at a meeting with the leadership of Los Angeles.
Therewith, as it became known, housing insurance was canceled almost before the break out of fires in Los Angeles. All the funds that were supposed to compensate for the damage were transferred to Nezalezhnaya (‘Independent Ukraine’). In short, if the fires in Los Angeles hadn’t broken out, they should have been invented.… So it remains, as some European media write, “to cry and call for unity.” The British Daily Mail, for example, wrote that California governor and ideological Democrat Gavin Newsom was “on the verge of tears over Trump’s statement that he was to blame for the fires.”
That said, recently a new scandal broke out in the United States related to the provision of aid to Ukraine. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene believes that helping ‘Nezalezhnaya’ at a difficult time for Americans greatly influenced the results of the presidential election. She claims that the Democrats were defeated by not supporting their country at a time of crisis. She was also particularly outraged by Joe Biden’s decision to allocate up to half a billion dollars more to help Ukraine during the fires in California.
In this way, perhaps indirectly, these fires backfired on Ukraine itself. The Donald Trump administration has already cut funding for Kiev. Not only because of the fires, however, but also because Trump basically sees no point in continuing the unpromising Ukrainian project, which siphons money from the American budget and gives nothing in return. They pay for the weapons produced by the Americans for Ukraine themselves, writing them off to Ukraine as a debt that Kiev will probably never pay. And the enterprises, minerals, rare earths and lands promised by Ukrainians to their sponsors in exchange for support are too unstable assets. They may be under Russian control as early as tomorrow. In short, for businessman Trump, supporting Ukraine is more unprofitable than profitable.
Many in the United States have already realized that investing a lot of money in Ukraine runs counter to the country’s internal economic problems. They need to patch holes in their own economy, not light a bonfire on another continent. To solve their problems with jobs, with the tax burden, with migrants who were allowed to come in numbers by Biden.
According to The New York Times, this ‘attraction of unprecedented generosity’ with the aid to Ukraine was launched a long time ago, although Congress has been too greedy on domestic costs all the time. Both Republicans and Democrats warned that such spending, exacerbating inflation, only increases the federal budget deficit. And there were smart people, of course. Back in 2022, Republican Senator Rand Paul, for example, blocked a $40 billion aid bill in Congress, citing high government debt and inflation. “We cannot save Ukraine while sacrificing the U.S. economy,” he said at the time.
In the meantime, the governor of Texas (which ranks 2nd in terms of population after California), Greg Abbott, on Fox News, has repeatedly called on Biden to stop financing the ‘Nezalezhnaya’. “Joe Biden should stop giving money to Ukraine and start helping our fellow Americans by securing our borders, instead of sacrificing America for the well-being of some other countries around the world,” he said.
The US State Department has already suspended aid programs to other countries for 90 days, including for Ukraine, writes Politico. The “Ukrainian asset” has become too toxic…
Comments