County Hall Corner: Straight Talk About the Russia/Ukraine War

By Larry Stout

The recent almost-but-not-quite coup that popped up in Russia brings this conflict back on the public screen in America, but we should be more focused on it for other reasons. Our country is deep in the Ukrainian conflict, and yet what we really know about what is happening is quite sketchy.

Our country has poured many billions of dollars into Ukraine, and that is the first big question— how much money? There are a number of different reports, and they vary greatly. The reports of funds allocated since 2022 range from $30 billion (USA Facts) to $54 billion (New York Times) to $200 billion (Newsweek). And this did not include the recently discovered “accounting error” that provided an extra $6.2 billion. To put these figures in some perspective, the entire budget for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in fiscal year 2022 was $119.1 billion. Even splitting the difference between these figures, Ukraine has received more than twice as much as any country since the Vietnam War days. As taxpayers, we deserve to know how much money really is going to Ukraine and for what purpose. How did all this get started anyway?

After the fall of the USSR, Ukraine struggled from 1991 to January 1995 until they finally established a new constitution. Like many parliamentary governments, there are coalitions of individual parties (132 parties at last count), and it all falls into essentially two distinct political camps; a pro-Russian group generally occupying the east and southern sections of the country and a pro-West group occupying the west and northern parts of Ukraine.

These two dominant factions of Ukrainian political parties have not played well together in the same sandbox. Initially, it was the pro-West coalition that governed through the late 1990s, but when the pro-Russians took over the government in 2004, they substantially changed the constitution to-

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