Who could have guessed??
The alliance will request "additional steps" from Kyiv before membership talks progress, a senior official in the US State Department said.
The position will be set out in writing in the Nato communique to be signed at the alliance's annual summit on July 9.
'We have to step back and applaud everything that Ukraine has done in the name of reforms over the last two-plus years,' the official told The Telegraph.
'As they continue to make those reforms, we want to commend them, we want to talk about additional steps that need to be taken, particularly in the area of anti-corruption. It is a priority for many of us around the table,' the source added.
The Telegraph reports that the United States has been putting the brakes on Ukraine joining NATO, which is odd because our secretary of state just adamantly said Ukraine "will" become part of NATO.
Apparently we're playing good cop, bad cop, and Joe Biden seems to be the bad cop:
'Peace,' [Biden] said, 'doesn't mean Nato. It means we have a relationship with them like we do with other countries, where we supply weapons so they can defend themselves in future.
'I am not prepared to support the Nato-isation of Ukraine,' adding he had seen 'significant corruption' in Ukraine when he visited as vice president.
I can only assume he is referring to that time that he threatened to withhold U.S. funding if they didn't fire the state prosecuting attorney investigating his son's involvement with Ukrainian gas giant Burisma.
Part of joining NATO involves complete transparency in budgets and financial records, which wouldn't look good for multiple U.S. officials!
A few reactions:
The U.S. has shipped nearly $200 billion in cash and arms to this nation too corrupt to join NATO, while the U.S. government assures us there are safeguards in place to make sure it's all going where it's supposed to.
Pentagon inspectors assure us there's no practical way to enforce any of those safeguards on the ground.
Despite little oversight and known corruption, both Europe and the U.S. have committed to sending more and more billions in money and weapons to Ukraine to fight Russia, so long as there's never any need for financial accountability or any reason to actually help them win that fight with something like NATO membership.
So where is all the money going?
Who knows?
But we need to disappear more money, quick!
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