EU to pay Ukraine’s budget
Samizdat | May 18, 2022
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday proposed an aid package of 9 billion euros ($9.5 billion) to keep Ukraine’s government running, and said that the EU would lead reconstruction efforts in Ukraine after hostilities cease. Her announcement came a day after the US called on Europe to open its coffers for Kiev.
Money for the aid package would be borrowed by the Commission on global financial markets and would be repayable by Kiev. As per the EU’s rules on macro-financial assistance, the Ukrainian government would be free to use the cash as it sees fit.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that Ukraine needs around $7 billion per month to pay its soldiers, civilians and pensioners, and to keep essential services running. The proposed EU package will therefore keep Ukraine functioning for just over a month.
Hours before von der Leyen’s announcement, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the Brussels Economic Forum that “the bilateral and multilateral support announced so far will not be sufficient to address Ukraine’s needs, even in the short term.”
“I sincerely ask all our partners to join us in increasing their financial support to Ukraine,” she continued, adding that aside from keeping the country afloat in the short term, “massive support” would be needed to rebuild Ukraine once the fighting ends.
Von der Leyen said on Wednesday that the EU will lead this reconstruction effort, but would not be the sole contributor.
“That is why we propose a reconstruction platform as part of this plan jointly led by Ukraine and the Commission and bringing together EU Member States, other bilateral or international donors, international financial institutions, and other like-minded partners,” she said.
While von der Leyen’s aid package is in line with what Yellen requested, it must still be approved by both the European Parliament and European Council. However, none of the Commission’s aid packages to Ukraine thus far – which include four consecutive €500 million ($520 million) packages of military aid and €1.2 billion ($1.26 billion) worth of emergency loans – have faced any resistance from either body.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused EU leaders of acting on behalf of their “American overlord” with regard to Ukraine, and committing economic “suicide” by cutting themselves off from Russian energy resources amid inflation and record high fuel costs.
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Book Review
Got His Gun: Lost His Legs, Arms, and Penis
By David Swanson | War is a Crime | October 27, 2013
Ann Jones’ new book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story, is devastating, and almost incomprehensibly so when one considers that virtually all of the death and destruction in U.S. wars is on the other side. Statistically, what happens to U.S. troops is almost nothing. In human terms, it’s overwhelming.
Know a young person considering joining the military? Give them this book.
Know a person not working to end war? Give them this book.
Jones presents the choice before us in the clearest terms in the introduction:
Contrary to common opinion in the United States, war is not inevitable. Nor has it always been with us. War is a human invention — an organized, deliberate action of an anti-social kind — and in the long span of human life on Earth, a fairly recent one. For more than 99 percent of the time that humans have lived on this planet, most of them have never made war. Many languages don’t even have a word for it. Turn off CNN and read anthropology. You’ll see.
What’s more, war is obsolete. Most nations don’t make war anymore, except when coerced by the United States to join some spurious ‘coalition.’ The earth is so small, and our time here so short. No other nation on the planet makes war as often, as long, as forcefully, as expensively, as destructively, as wastefully, as senselessly, or as unsuccessfully as the United States. No other nation makes war its business.
Jones begins her book with that distinguishing feature of war: death. The U.S. military assigns specialists in “Mortuary Affairs” to dispose of the dead. They dispose of their own sanity in the process. … continue
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Aletho News 
Are these Ukrainian leaders–Zelensky, in particular–and oligarchs working a scam on Europe? As well as on America? The money going into the Ukraine, it’s in the billions. They’re pleading to countries all over the world for money. And armament. And volunteer soldiers. To join in a glorious war, the propaganda of which is so well done as to be done by professional political operatives who know how to influence publics around the world.
Who benefits? Qui bono? Certainly the arms merchants and the banks that transact the business of buying and selling. War for profit? Qui bono? Besides the oligarchs, which will flee to safe havens, as much of the jewish male population (and families, of course) of the Ukraine was advised to do. And did.
What a ruinous, ever expanding war, expanding way beyond militarily.
For the United States, this war so far away, so unthreatening to America, continues to be dragged into it. A ruinous, economic price is being extracted upon America. The Ukrainian flag wavers in America, do they realize how they’re being used?
Qui bono, indeed? Who suffers, indeed?
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Just like in the USA, the European TAX PAYERS will ‘foot the bill’, while the European’s Tax avoiders will sail on regardless of the Cost.
The “People” get screwed every which way, every time, while the Oligarchs feel no pain at all…..It’s The Perfect Crime……
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Insanity rules…is anyone counting the billions upon billions this rat (with his big family in israel and us) has gained and just how much it goes to offshore accounts? Un-F-believable. The rat small hats are looting the world with their bs lies so in your face. After all the revelations of human trafficking, child trafficking, organ trafficking, black tar heroin smuggling, in short the zel-rat is the biggest underground crime lord in the world. Only Putin has had the guts to get it stopped…and he will God Willing.
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