AP and WaPo: The US military has boots on the ground in Ukraine

And so it begins. Officially they're on the ground to "inspect" the weapons we gave Ukraine, but they're "advisors" by any other name. We all know what the next step is.

Pentagon confirms US boots are on the ground in Ukraine

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Two bombshell reports by the Associated Press and Washington Post Monday and Tuesday have confirmed that the United States has boots on the ground in the Ukraine conflict. Crucially, these troops are performing tasks separate from mere embassy security.

The American troops are said to be performing "inspections" of US weapon caches after last week the State Department and Pentagon unveiled a new plan to track US-supplied weapons in efforts to implement accountability for the billions of dollars worth of arms and ammunition transferred to Ukrainian forces since near the start of the war eight months ago.

"A small number of U.S. military forces inside Ukraine have recently begun doing onsite inspections to ensure that Ukrainian troops are properly accounting for the Western-provided weapons they receive, a senior U.S. defense official told Pentagon reporters Monday," the AP/WaPo reporting revealed.

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Oh, and you know all those stories about US-supplied arms being sold by Ukrainians on the black market?

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U.S. monitors have conducted in-person inspections for only about 10 percent of the 22,000 U.S.-provided weapons sent to Ukraine that require special oversight.

U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details that have not been made public previously, said they are racing to deploy new means for tracking weapons seen as having a heightened risk of diversion, including Stinger surface-to-air missiles and Javelin antitank missiles, amid what they describe as Ukraine’s "super hot conflict."

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So yeah... Zelensky's bunch has been selling Javelins and Stingers for Top Dollah, and now we're letting them know that that's a no-no. Not that I expect anything to change. It's inevitable that sooner or later, some Stinger or Javelin will blow something up, someone will find pieces of it, and someone will put two and two together and see that it was supposed to be in the Ukraine.

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This week Finland has been among the first European countries to document the spread of West-supplied weaponry outside of Ukraine's borders and into the hands of criminal elements, as we detailed previously. "Weapons shipped [by various countries] to Ukraine have also been found in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands," Finland's federal National Bureau of Investigation chief Christer Ahlgren was quoted by national broadcaster Yle as saying.

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