The U.S. military and other aid package voted upon by the U.S. House of Representatives on April 20 was dismissed by Russia’s liberals as "not enough to win the war quickly" and thus an election cycle act.
Russian opposition leader Mikhael Khodorkovskyy’s YouTube channel featured a video at first titled, “Why Military Help from the USA Won’t Save Kyiv”. The premise of the interview show was that the $61 billion in aid voted for by the House of Representatives will only keep the Ukrainian government alive through the U.S. election so that neither side can be pointed to as having lost Ukraine.
In response to an outcry from commenters on YouTube, the video title was changed to “Why Military Help From the USA Isn’t What’s Needed”. The content remained the same, however. The interlocutors do some quick math to come to the assessment that “the decision makers” timed the vote in order to prosecute the war from roughly May 1 through the election.
...stupidly replenishing...
The interlocutors break down the $61 billion in aid and, among other things, $13-14 billion will be spent on “stupidly replenishing their own warehouses, which were slightly emptied when Ukraine was given weapons.” All told, after various deductions and payments for the costs of assistance, they think that Ukraine will end up with at most $30 billion.
On February 4, we reported that Ukraine would see about $34 billion in military assistance in total out of the $60 billion. The rest would be going to help Ukraine meet its budget needs, especially for social and health care.
At the time, we wrote that,” The aid already earmarked for military expenditures is further broken down into training, systems procurement and maintenance, and ammunition. The last is particularly important given the vital role artillery fills in this war.” This still stands. As for “stupidly replenishing”, the wisdom of replacing drawn down stocks with new material has not been doubted in Congress, even by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green.
For whom are they relevant?
With all the talk of “decision makers” trying to time the bill’s passage with the elections, or replenishment, the relevance of such commentators does come under question. As Ukrainian analyst Andrii Klemenko wrote in FaceBook with a screen shot of the original title of the YouTube session:
“if earlier this anti-war Russian political emigration was still interesting for Ukrainian analysts in the sense of understanding the processes in the Russian Federation, now it is not, that is, they no longer know anything interesting - too much time has passed, and this is an inalienable empire as traditional nostalgia.”
However, they still find thousands of viewers, and are the analysts on the social media of arguably the most famous Russian dissident today.
