Both chambers of Congress, including the Republican-led and disarrayed House of Representatives, just passed a supplemental foreign aid bill that includes $61 billion for Ukraine. Passage of the bill came after months of Republican stalling on aid for the besieged nation, largely at the behest of House Republicans’ Dear Leader, Donald Trump. The immediate media analysis is already questioning if the aid will be enough for Ukraine to stave off an expected offensive push by Russia expected to begin sometime in June.
That is equation number one: Take the sum total of the U.S. aid bound for Ukraine and divide it by the per-unit cost of weapons such as ammunition for 155 mm howitzers that has been in short supply since last fall. That equation is intended to produce the number of shells Ukraine will reap from the aid package, at which point there will be yet another spate of news analysis asking if that number is enough.
In war, the bodies of soldiers are exchanged for land. How much that costs cannot be calculated back in Washington D.C.
The same sort of equation will be done with the rest of the weapons in Ukraine’s wish-basket – Patriot missiles to replace those that have been fired over the past two years in defense of Kyiv and Ukraine’s other population centers, as well as its energy infrastructure which has been underdefended since new anti-aircraft munitions and anti-missile missiles stopped being shipped over due to Republicans stalling aid funding. A massive drone and missile attack heavily damaged the Trypilska power plant on April 12, one of Ukraine’s largest. Trypilska serves the Kyiv, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr regions. The Associated Press quoted Andrii Gota, chairman of Centrenergo, one of the largest of Ukraine’s state energy companies, as saying, “there’s nothing left to shoot down” incoming missiles.
So there’s another equation: If Ukraine........