Real Talk About Ukraine Funding

Who to be mad at for Ukraine's ammo shortage

I woke up this morning trying to figure out exactly what the new immigration bill does, discovered that it’s mostly just a bill funding foreign wars, heard rumor that Ukraine may lose ground because of low ammunition, and saw everyone blaming Republicans for Ukraine’s impending loss unless they vote for the bill. This curious chain of reasoning demands further inspection.

Let’s set aside that the total outlay for US border security in the immigration bill is less than what’s earmarked for funding both sides of the Gaza war, shelve the immigration side of the bill entirely, and look specifically at this contention that Republicans are evil and will cause Ukraine to lose their war with Russia by not giving them enough free bullets. We can easily test that contention with mathematics.

The Kiel Institute for the World Economy maintains a pretty amazing Ukraine Support Tracker, with humanitarian, financial, and military aid tracked by every country who’s thrown into the pot. Many of their visualizations are superb, and interactive, and you can have quite a bit of fun on their website, but they don’t quite give us the visualizations we need to truly understand the claim that Republicans will cause Ukraine to lose. This claim is a claim about bullets and such, so we begin by stripping out all forms of aid other than military hardware and compare countries within the data set.

As of today, we’ve given Ukraine half the bullets. (and other stuff) Germany’s given them two tenths, UK less than a tenth, and everyone else clocks in at a very small number of bullets. But that’s not fair because the USA is far bigger than Malta so we should at least adjust this by economy size.

There are some small countries in this chart that are throwing a lot of their GDP into the Ukraine effort, and the reason why becomes very clear when you look at a map. Green bars in the above chart are countries adjacent to Russia, who probably fear they’re next on the chopping block. Notably absent from this chart are Belarus, which shares a border with both countries and is bending towards Russia, Georgia which was already invaded by the Russians (and nobody cared), and Moldova which is probably saving their bullets for next year’s invasion of them. Here’s a map of the same data:

What stands out here? First, France, Italy, and Spain don’t give one flying ferret fart about giving bullets to Ukraine. Very few countries below a line of latitude south of Ukraine’s border do. In fact, there’s a box of geographic concern, drawn in orange above, outside which almost nobody cares. The line of “countries who don’t care” begins with Hungary, Austria, and Switzerland. These southern countries don’t think Russia can get through the Alps, and France doesn’t think Russia can get through Germany. They are all making strategic decisions about whether to send bullets based on their own national defense interests. Germany’s worried, France isn’t, and Switzerland is yodeling into their beer steins. The difference in how worried these countries are is tremendous:

If you’re a European country inside the box of regional interest, you’re giving around 29 times more bullets to Ukraine than if you’re a European outside the box. And if you’re the USA or the United Kingdom, you’re already giving around 11 times more bullets to Ukraine than the European countries outside the box. Curiously, Canada (not shown) is giving over 5 times more bullets to Ukraine than the European countries outside the box.

What do the USA, UK, and Canada have in common? Among other things, they all speak English so they share the same media feeds and have been at least partially captured by the same “Ukrainian Flag Brainworm,” a thing HWFO calls an Egregore:

In short, a disproportionate number of the people in English speaking countries are supporting Ukraine because they can signal virtue to their social media environment by doing so. And perhaps that’s fine, and we’ll set that on a shelf for a moment, judgment free.

Let’s pretend you’re one of these English speaking people extracting social virtue by supporting Ukraine. Or perhaps you truly have a firm and inflexible moral stance on the Russian invasion and were out in the cold alone protesting when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. Let’s pretend you also hate U.S. Republicans, which seems to be a running theme with these two groups, which is fine. If you want to at least be intellectually consistent with your anger, you should be angrier at the following countries than you are at Republicans for relative Ukrainian bullet supply:

• Twice as mad at the Greeks,

• Four times as mad at the Belgians,

• Five times as mad at the Portuguese,

• Six times as mad at the Italians,

• Eight times as mad at the Spaniards,

• Ten times as mad at the French,

• Twenty four times as mad at the Turks,

• 128 times as mad at the Romanians,

• 246 times as mad at the Irish,

• 266 times as mad at the Austrians,

• and infinitely more mad at the Swiss, which have to date bought zero bullets for Ukraine.

It’s a free country and we can all be mad at whoever we like, for whatever reason we like, including the Republicans. But if you’re mad at them for this, and not also equally mad at half of Europe within a few thousand klicks of the war zone, I question your intellectual consistency.