As the Republican Party’s blockade of aid to Ukraine drags on, Pres. Joe Biden has found a new way to give Ukraine’s forces the weapons they need to defend their country.

As the Republican Party’s blockade of aid to Ukraine drags into its fourth month, the U.S. government under Pres. Joe Biden has found a clever new way to give Ukraine’s forces the weapons and ammunition they need to defend their country.

It is, in essence, an American version of Germany’s circular weapons trade—the so-called Ringtausch. The United States is gifting older surplus weapons to Greece with the understanding that Greece donates to Ukraine some of its own surplus weapons.

Greek media broke the news last week. According to the newspaper Kathimerini and other media, the Biden administration offered the Greek government three 87-foot Protector-class patrol boats, two Lockheed Martin C-130H airlifters, 10 Allison T56 turboprop engines for Lockheed P-3 patrol planes plus 60 M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles and a consignment of transport trucks.

All this hardware is U.S. military surplus—and is available to Greece, free of charge, under a U.S. legal authority called “excess defense articles.” Federal law allows an American president to declare military systems surplus to need, assign them a value—potentially zero dollars—and give them away on the condition that the recipient transport them.

  • @CableMonster@lemmy.ml
    -2•5 months ago

    If I am responding to people that are responding to me how is that a problem? Maybe the people claiming I am a troll are the problem not me.

    • davel [he/him]English
      2•5 months ago

      Maybe you don’t know how to take a hint and want your account to be temporarily banned.

      • @CableMonster@lemmy.ml
        -2•5 months ago

        I suppose you can do what you want, but I would think it would be fair to directly tell me what I did that was wrong if you expect my behavior to change.

        • davel [he/him]English
          1•5 months ago

          It is not, as you said, that you’re dissenting from the standard narrative, at least not to me. It is threadsitting and making rather rude comments.

          You may or may not have noticed that lemmy.world mods/admins have removed some of your comments already: https://lemmy.ml/u/CableMonster That is often a precursor to them banning you from the !News@lemmy.world community or even the entire lemmy.world instance.

          As an aside, most Lemmy instances consist predominantly of imperial core liberals, and lemmy.world is no exception. It’s a tough crowd over there in terms of this proxy war.

          • @JonsJava@lemmy.worldMEnglish
            3•5 months ago

            Much appreciated. The mods here at !news@lemmy.world prefer civil discourse. If we see someone not displaying civility (attacking the person, not the argument), trolling, being racist, sexist, or being a bigot, we will remove a comment.

            We try not to let our views skew our moderation, and will reverse removals if we feel we or other mods were acting heavy-handed.

            With that said, we appreciate admins of other members of the Lemmy federation stepping in to police users of their instance.

            With that said, yes, we have received other complaints about this user, but did not find all the complaints warranted. Some were, and we handled those comments as they were brought to our attention.

            We may not agree with all the comments here, but if they follow our rules, they stay.

          • @CableMonster@lemmy.ml
            -1•5 months ago

            I respond flippantly in comments in response to rude comments, I am ALWAYS respectful to people that are not rude.

            I dont mind taking direct action and following rules, but I need to know what is expected. What am I supposed to do about an unprovoked comment such as “Then I’d call you a complete liar with a weak grasp on reality, and a poor understanding of where and when you ought to open your ill-informed mouth, before I walked off and continued with my day, secure in the knowledge that you’re as wrong about something as it’s physically possible to be.” ? A comment that I would note is not deleted (unless I am using this site incorrectly).