Record-Setting Arms Exports. Waste, Fraud, and Abuse. Secrecy and Lies. The Pile of Military Aid the Biden Administration Allocated to Kiev Generated Riches For US Companies and Rags for Ukraine

Part I: How to spend $183 billion to support Ukraine and help Russia win the war.

Biden visits Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Too bad that girl doesn’t work for Lockheed Martin, she’d be rich by now. White House photo via Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

Following a “highly productive” conversation yesterday with Vladimir Putin yesterday, President Donald Trump announced he and his Russian counterpart had agreed to “start negotiations immediately” to end the three-year-old war between Moscow and Kiev. Soon afterwards, Trump spoke to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and said their discussion also “went very well,” writing in a post on Truth Social that “He, like President Putin, wants to make PEACE.”

Joe Biden, Trump’s predecessor at the White House, promised to stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes” and approved $183 billion in aid for Zelensky’s government, of which about two-thirds weapons shipments and other military-related assistance. The total exceeded the price tag of any US war in history and was $15 billion more than the combined expenditures of the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, including “reconstruction” costs through 2010.

With Biden out of the way, the prevailing conventional wisdom in Washington political and media circles is that no matter what Trump says in public, he intends to quietly cut a sweetheart deal with Putin that throws Zelensky under the bus. That viewpoint is most commonly held by Democrats who believe the nation’s current president is a Russian intelligence sleeper agent, but a less extreme version is prevalent in less lunatic quarters, as was reflected in the New York Times coverage of Trump’s phone calls with Putin and Zelensky.

Trump’s discussion with Putin “was a major milestone” for the Russian president and “signified the collapse of Western efforts to isolate him” after he launched the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine that triggered the war, the newspaper reported. Their conversation exemplified “the Kremlin’s hope that the new American leader…[would] back away from supporting Ukraine.”

The Times noted that after he spoke to Zelensky, Trump remarked “I’m backing Ukraine” and intended to continue sending the country financial support, but the newspaper’s account suggested there were strong grounds to be dubious about his sincerity. “Trump has long been skeptical of Ukraine” and “never warmed” to Zelensky,” read the story, which emphasized that earlier in the day Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had said it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to think a peace deal with Moscow would pave the way for it to join NATO or restore its border to where it was before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

I’m not a fan of Hegseth but his view is not uncommon among Kiev’s supporters in the US and Europe, and could just as easily be seen as recognizing reality rather than evidence that Trump is in cahoots with Putin. Even Zelensky has acknowledged Ukraine may need to give up territory that’s currently occupied by Russia at least temporarily, which is the only way to make the idea politically palatable in Ukraine.

The entire framework of the Times story, and the broader idea that Biden was a far better guardian of Kiev’s interests than Trump, obscures a significant and obvious fact. Despite Biden’s eagerness to serve as Zelensky’s ATM card, the situation on the military front is far from rosy at the moment for Ukraine’s army or its citizens.

As theTimes reported in a story just a few weeks ago, the Russia-Ukraine war is “killing soldiers at a pace unseen in Europe since World War II.” It estimated battlefield deaths on Kiev’s side at 62,000 and put the body bag count for Moscow at about 150,000, but Russia, which has a bigger army that’s better equipped and financed, is winning the war on the battlefield and “the trends favor the Kremlin,” the story concluded.

Meanwhile, 12 million Ukrainian citizens, about a third of the population the year the war started, are internally displaced or refugees, and a quarter live in poverty, according to recent reports. The cost to rebuild the country steadily rises upward and is currently calculated at between $411 billion and $1 trillion.

All of which raises a number of important questions, such as:

–-What happened to all the cash Biden allotted for Ukraine’s army and how did it help or hinder its battlefield capacity?

–-How did the mammoth broader flow of US assistance impact political and economic developments in Ukraine?

—Is Trump in a hurry to end the war for hidden, nefarious reasons?

—Whatever the answer to the last question, if Trump was able to broker a peace agreement that forced both sides to make roughly equivalent concessions, wouldn’t that be better and more realistic than Biden’s stated goal of helping Ukraine win a military victory “for as long as it takes”?

Over the past few months, I’ve seen and heard a lot that’s relevant to those questions, including previously unreported information shared by sources who were recently in Ukraine or Russia and with few exceptions supported Kiev in the war. Putting aside the relative merits and feasibility of a military versus a diplomatic solution to the conflict, which I only directly discussed with a few of the sources, their collective opinion was that Biden’s strategy in Ukraine had been a less evident but similarly colossal failure as President George W. Bush’s military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq during the glory days of the “Global War on Terror.”

Baghdad, 2004. Those were the days. Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

The largest and most important share of military assistance Biden allocated for Ukraine – roughly $66.5 billion – went for armaments, and the Pentagon helped rustle up at least the same amount for its armed forces through the US-led Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which musters defense officials from 50 countries.

The price of the US weapons was paid for from two different government accounts. The first was the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which provided Zelinsky with a pile of cash to buy new equipment directly from arms manufacturers.

The second tranche was the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which Biden tapped to pull weapons from existing Pentagon stockpiles. Biden invoked PDA at least 55 times to send a combined $27.7 billion in arms to Ukraine, which were freebies to its government because US taxpayers footed the tab for the deals, which were a two-fer for manufacturers because all the old equipment shipped to Kiev had to be replaced with new materiel so it would be available to the US military in the event of an emergency.

The list of US-supplied weapons to Zelensky’s military forces includes, aircraft, air defense systems, anti-aircraft missiles, ballistic missiles, gun trucks, laser-guided rockets, patrol boats, radars, tanks, and a mountain of military munitions. A similarly long list of companies sold weapons to Ukraine, with the top five firms General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX (formerly Raytheon) predictably racking up the biggest share of sales. All those companies have representatives on the US-Ukraine Business Council’s board of directors, as are a number of other defense and aerospace firms whose fortunes have benefitted from the war and collectively represent the largest industry contingent in the organization’s membership ranks.

The weapons sales pipeline arrangement had a few serious drawbacks from the Ukrainian perspective. First, the money in the US government’s benevolent military assistance program for Kiev never moved beyond US shores, but swelled the domestic bank accounts of American arms manufacturers. Second, what Ukraine most urgently needed wasn’t wildly overpriced equipment manufactured by US companies, but cheaper, more practical materiel it could have easily obtained from other countries. Third, a lot of the weapons the Biden administration shipped to Ukraine didn’t work well or at all.

As a report published last November by Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank, put it, a variety of the armaments shipped to Ukraine, in particular the big ticket items, didn’t produce the expected results and “led to operational failures…[and] wasted resources.” A US weapons vendor who operates in Ukraine, put things more starkly, saying, “A lot of the shit Ukraine got from Biden weakened the war effort and increased the chances of Russia winning. The defense ministry paid a lot more than it needed to for US equipment but troops routinely ran out of ammunition while their field commanders were begging American nonprofit groups for socks and soldiers’ families were buying a lot of gear at Amazon.com.”

Drones offer a perfect case study here because they were a key weapon in the arsenals of both Kiev and Moscow, and so important to Ukraine that Zelensky created a new branch of the Armed Forces called the “Unmanned Systems Force.” Both warring parties employed drones for multiple purposes, including intelligence gathering, surveillance, attack operations, target support for other systems, decoys, laying mines, and to detect, jam, and destroy enemy drones. Unmanned Aerial Systems, to use the term generally employed by the Pentagon and industry vendors, aren’t one of the top-priced items on a per unit basis, but Zelensky put several billion dollars in last year’s defense budget for drones, which are reportedly responsible for at least 80 percent of Russia’s frontline losses and the country’s military burns through its stockpiles at a furious pace.

A Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, which has been deployed in Ukraine. Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

Ukraine has bought a wide assortment of drones, along with munitions, radar systems and other related items, from US companies. The beneficiaries include brand name firms like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and L3Harris; start up Shield AI, which recently opened an office in Kiev after Ukraine requested 200 of its V-BAT drones, which “typically cost about $1 million each, though they are cheaper when bought in bulk,” but even at a discounted price could double the country’s annual revenue of $163 million last year; and little known firms such as Fortem Technologies, which sold a small a small package of products to Ukraine that were paid for with money the government crowd-funded; and Aevex Aerospace, which was founded in 2017 and has received at least $582 million worth of contracts for sales to Ukraine, which reportedly is more than any other US drone manufacturer.

Headquartered in California, Aevex’s current customer list includes the Pentagon, the Special Forces Command, the “intelligence community,” US “allies and partners” like Ukraine, and other arms companies such as Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, and BAE Systems. In April of 2022, two months after the war started, the Pentagon announced that Aevex – which had “no prior experience in making unmanned aerial systems on its own before developing its family of Phoenix Ghost drones, according to Forbes – had produced a 121-item package designed “specifically to Ukrainian requirements” that was fast-tracked through “Big Safari,” an Air Force program that seeks to “marry talent and technology from private industry” to respond quickly to “emerging threats and operational requirements.”

By June 2023, Aevex had already expanded its manufacturing facility in Florida for the second time and had enough capacity to “overwhelm Russian air defenses and...knock out Russian air bases used for attacks on Ukraine – or help burn down vital strategic oil and gas facilities and bring down the war economy” and force Moscow to end the invasion,” the Forbes story said. That prediction obviously proved to be extremely optimistic, but Aevex expanded its Florida facility again in July of 2024 to keep up with demand, and reported total sales of more than 5,000 drones at the end of the year, at prices ranging from $49,000 apiece for the company’s Dagger to $69,000 for the Disruptor, with an upgraded version of the latter with a secret price tag.

The total value of drone sales to Ukraine by US companies isn’t known, but based on press releases issued by the Pentagon and State Department, the manufacturers, and news accounts, it appears to reach a minimum of several billion dollars. The bang has rarely been worth the buck. In addition to their wildly inflated price compared to options available from other countries, “most US drones brought to Ukraine have flown off course, fallen out of the sky or struggled even to take off,” said an October 2024 story in the Wall Street Journal.

“Our drones have been defeated in Ukraine by everything from Russian electronic warfare to bad weather,” a knowledgeable US source who regularly visits the region told me.

That led Kiev to first turn to China for drones, which it purchased for approximately $3,200 to $4,900 apiece, including extra batteries and chargers, and by last year it was meeting the overwhelming share of its needs by buying from its rapidly expanding domestic industry, which the Biden administration helped finance.

Drone sales to Ukraine have dropped sharply, but US companies continue to cut deals with Zelensky’s government and new contenders, at least a few that have intimate connections to the Trump administration, which will become more pertinent in Part II, have been trying to break into the market. Fed by steady sales of other defense goods to Ukraine – which Trump has given no indication thus far he intends to cut off until and unless a peace deal is reached, and US firms would also be well-positioned in a post-war setting – helped American weapons exports reach new records annually since 2021, the year before the war started. The total volume rose to $319 billion in 2024, more than doubling in value over three years.

Since 2019, the US share of the global arms market climbed from 34 percent to about 42 percent, which exports to Ukraine also played a primary role in, as did war-related exports to European allies. So, too, did sales to countries that previously relied on weapons from Russia, but with its foreign sales dropping due to increasing domestic demand caused by the war and sanctions imposed by the Biden administration, the Pentagon helped American companies snatch a valuable slice of business from Moscow’s traditional client base. “By transitioning countries off Russian equipment, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” Assistant Secretary of State Jessica Lewis said in November of 2023. “This goes beyond arms — it includes maintenance, parts, training, military exercises and more.”

The combination of vast piles of US government outlays to support Ukraine’s armed forces, the Biden administration’s virtually nonexistent oversight of that money, and its preference to hide as much information as possible about the cost and scope of US involvement, has generated several additional lucrative profit streams for American companies and budding entrepreneurs. As invariably happens when so much money is sloshing around and a single score could net once-in-a-lifetime financial rewards, a stampede of wartime profiteers hoping to win Ukraine-related business, including some with no previous experience in military-related deals, and among that group, an assemblage of the usual grifters and con artists.

One of the potential routes to riches is the private arms market, which is far murkier than the official one and of unknown size, but clearly much smaller too. I’ve spoken to four sources familiar with the private side of the market, including two people who traveled to the country and met with Ukrainian defense officials. The deals I heard about, which weren’t concluded as far as I know, were highly confidential but not illegal – at least technically – as the would-be arms dealers involved obtained the proper licenses and paperwork from the US government to sell to Ukraine, typically material from military and law enforcement surplus stocks.

However, the business wasn’t strictly on the up-and-up either. One of the hopeful salesmen had a license to market Armored Personnel Carriers, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle, and Humvees. The ministry of defense in Kiev would have been the official buyer of the items, but private arms sales into active war zones are restricted, potentially illegal depending on the products, and embarrassing to the home countries of buyer and seller if exposed. Hence, the equipment would have been delivered to arms bases in Poland near the border with Ukraine and transported from there to their final destination, but rung up as sales to Poland in the official accounting books.

I also spoke to a US citizen who had a few brushes with the law in his not-too-distant past and no relevant background, but had business associates with experience in the arms market who he teamed up with on attempted sales to Ukraine. I can’t disclose the key details, such as who was involved or what type of equipment was discussed, but had the transaction gone through all of the participants would have made a small fortune. The source said there were numerous hustlers traveling back and forth between the US and Kiev, where he described the environment as “a Ukrainian version of the Wild West.”

The weapons trade was merely one part of the Biden administration-financed self-licking ice cream cone that generated far greater rewards for US companies and independent profit-seekers than their counterparts in Ukraine or the country’s armed forces. Another sketchy, underreported, and highly profitable slice of business went to private arms companies who won US government contracts to work with the Ukrainian army.

In March of 2022, just a month after the war began, the demand for private contractors in Ukraine was “rising by the day” due to “a frenzy in the market,” according to a post to a Facebook group for industry veterans and employees by a recruiting agency that was already advertising jobs. At the time, US companies were barred from operating directly in Ukraine – Biden lifted the ban soon before he left office – so the job site was a US military base in Poland, where American firms were setting up shop and Ukrainian officers and soldiers would be brought for training.

Help Wanted ads posted by the companies or recruiters during the first 18 months of the war were looking to hire employees with public and private sector experience in military and intelligence operations to drill Ukrainian troops in combat tactics, disarming IEDs, battlefield medical care, and using and maintaining the hideously expensive prone-to-break US weapons systems supplied by the Biden administration. Other available positions involved providing security to the CIA and other US agencies who had boots on the ground in the neighborhood,

One listing posted by a recruiter had multiple openings with an unnamed US firm for combat veterans, preferably with Special Forces background, to conduct "covert extractions and evacuations" from “active warzone battlescapes” with little or no support other than assistance the employees were able to rustle up on their own from "friendly forces, local authorities, or resistance fighters.” The work paid up to $2,000 a day – about three times the rate for similar positions in the US, Asia, and Central America – plus bonuses.

The US firm that currently has the largest presence in the region is probably Virginia-based Triple Canopy, which in 2017 paid $2.6 million to settle allegations that the company submitted false claims to the Pentagon on contracts issued during the Iraq War era and is now a subsidiary of Constellis, which bought the remains of Blackwater after it imploded following the 2007 murders of 14 Iraqi civilians by its employees at Baghdad's Nisour Square. Trump pardoned four of the employees for Blackwater, which is owned by GOP megadonor Erik Prince, during the dog days of his first term at the behest of Hegseth.

A source familiar with Triple Canopy’s operations told me the company had hundreds of employees working on its Ukraine contracts, some from the US but mostly from low-wage countries in South America, including Colombia and Argentina. Their work included supporting Ukrainian troops involved in combat operations, he said, adding, “It’s misleading to describe the war as between Russia and Ukraine. Both sides are heavily backed by private companies

The flood of assistance Biden approved for Ukraine also lined the pockets of US lobbyists, foundations and nonprofits groups, and all sorts of other beltway bandits. It was a cornucopia of riches for one and all – excluding, of course, Ukraine’s citizens, other than the small number who were in positions that allowed them to profit from the business of war.

Coming in Part II: Sex, Lies, and Corruption, byproducts of US military assistance to Ukraine. Plus: A look at the Biden vs. Trump approach to the Russia-Ukraine war.