Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Moon of Alabama— U.S. Pushes For Escalation, Arms Kiev By Laundering Weapons Through Abu Dhabi

The United Arab Emirates is not known as arms producer. But it buys lots of U.S. weapons. It will now forward those to Ukraine while the U.S. will claim that it does not arm Ukraine. Who do they think will believe them?
Moon of Alabama
U.S. Pushes For Escalation, Arms Kiev By Laundering Weapons Through Abu Dhabi

Ukrainian companies signed several contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, funding the acceleration of its military's modernization, Poroshenko later said in a news release.
Defense News
Ukraine Signs Defense Deal With UAE
ht Chuck Spinney at The Blaster

The advisor to the head of the MIA of Ukraine, member of Verkhovnaya Rada Anton Gerashenko wrote about this in his page on Facebook
According to him, the agreements were achieved during the meeting between the Ukrainian leader and the deputy supreme commander of the UAE Armed Forces, the Crown Prince of the Abu Dhabi emirate Mohammed al-Nahayan. The negotiations occurred in the capital of the Arab state, where Poroshenko came to participate in the international weapon show IDEX-2015.
Gerashenko noted, that volumes of the shipments and types of weapons that is planned to be imported are not subject to disclosure.
«Arabs, unlike europeans and americans, are not afraid of Putin's threats of unleashing a third world war in the case of shipping weapons and materiel to Ukraine. Apparently, they have their own issues with Putin due to the decrease of oil prices by almost a factor of two and the worldwide instability, which impedes long-term development of the UAE. So this will be their small revenge», — wrote the advisor to the Minister of Internal Affairs.
Colonel Cassad
Weapon shipments from the UAE to Ukraine

5 comments:

Jonathan Larson said...

Yippie, more weapons! Oh now Kiev must be sure they are winners! Just look at the stunning successes our warmongering have achieved lately—Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc.

Militaries, by their very nature, can only wreck things. The last thing the Ukraine needs is more wrecking.

And after things are thoroughly wrecked, Ukraine will still have the same problems mostly because of where it is located on planet earth.

Ryan Harris said...

The US is smart to back Ukraine quietly. It worked well to contain Russia by arming opposition in Afghanistan. It will probably work well in Ukraine too. When Russia employed the tactic in Vietnam, an area outside its sphere of influence, it worked very well by helping Vietnam to fight the US and China without costing Soviets hardly anything. The downside was that it drew the US and China closer together ultimately. If the US can help Merkel without getting directly involved in the conflict, it helps cement relations with European expansionist regimes that control the EU and it keeps Russia prioritizing the strengthening of her military which helps to balance the dominance of China in the region. China has a long and violent history of expansionism and meddling in neighbors politics with military aggression. Overall a Win-win as Obama likes to say. The US and Russia don't really have any direct contact, economic or political so proxy wars risk little. And think of all the jobs producing weapons systems. This war could fester for a decade and we could ship billions in weapons. It's good middle class jobs with high quality deficit spending and no US blood, what's not to like?

Tom Hickey said...

The US is smart ….

What could possibly go wrong here?

Jonathan Larson said...

In what possible way is US "backing" the Ukraine. We have encouraged / instructed them to blow up some of the more important economic assets they have.

The trouble with people who believe in "backing" like this is that they are literally too stupid to know the difference between up and down.

Magpie said...

There was a time when a rifle was a rifle was a rifle. You had a rifle, you sort of knew how to shoot, and you were a soldier.

I was about 19 yo when I fixed a VW Beetle, four cylinders, 1600 cc (basically, the same vehicle the Wehrmacht knew as the Kuebelwagen) with an old leather belt, a sharp knife, and a couple of paper clips, plus some general purpose tools you can find in any household.

In today's military, to buy a tank or an artillery piece means nothing if you lack trained staff to operate it, trained technicians to maintain and repair it, and spare parts and tools to do the job.

If Poroshenko thinks he can fight a war against the Russkies on that basis, either he is crazy or has really deep pockets (in which case, he better start hiring mercenaries).