Annals of derp: Is Obama after Ukraine?

Evidence of the crime: Senators Lugar and Obama inspecting a Donetsk arms dump, and I do mean dump, in August 2005. Photo by Reuters.

One of the odder bits of storyline floating around the World Wide Entertainment Web is that of young Senator Obama personally disarming the Ukrainian armed forces back in 2005, apparently so that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, when the time came, would be able to move in on those Ukrainians without meeting any resistance: it turned up in National Review, PJ Media, the Daily Mail, and so on, finally winding up yesterday at the digs of the dumbest man on the Internet, Jim Hoft:

What a surprise.
As a US Senator, Barack Obama pushed Ukraine to destroy thousands of tons of guns and ammunition that left them defenseless.

What is not a surprise, of course, is that they've got the story wrong again.

The main purpose of Obama's and Lugar's trip to Azerbaijan, Russia, and Ukraine was to assess the progress of the Nunn-Lugar program (Cooperative Threat Reduction) to get rid of weapons of mass destruction in the republics of the former Soviet Union, passed into US law in 1992 under President G.H.W. Bush, weapons that were of no use to the new countries, unwanted, and just lying around unsecured, as Obama himself noted in one Donetsk biological weapons facility:

So we enter into the building.  There are no discernible fences or security systems.  And once we are inside -- sort of a ramshackle building -- there were open windows, maybe a few padlocks that many of us might use to secure our own luggage.  And our guide, a young woman, takes us right up to what looked like a little mini-refrigerator.  And inside the refrigerator there were rows upon rows of test tubes.  She picked them up, and she's clanking them around, and we listened to the translator explain what she was saying.  And some of the tubes, he said, were filled with anthrax, and others with plague.  (Laughter.)  

And, you know, and I'm pretty close -- (laughter) -- and I start sort of backing off a little bit.  And I turn around and say, "Hey, where's Lugar?  Doesn't he want to see this?"  And I turn around -- do you remember this, Andy? -- and he's way in the back of the room, about 15 feet away and he looked at me and said, "Been there, done that."

Image unironically used at Tribulation Network.

But one thing they noticed particularly on the trip was that there was another problem with unwanted conventional weapons:

At a sprawling, run-down industrial complex in Donetsk, Ukraine, weeds grow along a rusty rail spur that winds among World War II-era warehouses and factories. Little security is evident, and the facility looks like a giant junkyard.

In a way, it is -- except the "junk" consists of thousands of tons of live military munitions. When we went there last summer, we saw mortar rounds, land mines and artillery shells of all sizes stacked in huge piles and strewn carelessly about.

Sold on the black market, these conventional weapons could end up in the hands of terrorists or militant extremists anywhere in the world. Donetsk is only one of several ill-secured stockpiles of conventional weapons in Ukraine, a major dumping ground for weapons, and there are perhaps scores more in dozens of countries around the world.

Ukraine especially didn't want these weapons because in 2005-06 it was engaged in a big program of military modernization, but there were places that did. As the Arms Control Association wrote at the time,

Stockpiles of surplus and obsolete small arms and light weapons are attractive targets for arms traffickers, who often acquire them from corrupt or unsuspecting government officials. The vast Cold War stockpiles in eastern Europe have been particularly exploited, as evidenced by recent transfers to countries under UN arms embargoes. For example, small arms shipments from Ukraine to western Africa in 1999 and 2000 added 180 tons of assault rifles, machine guns, MANPADS, anti-tank missiles, and ammunition to the arsenals of former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s rogue regime and the Revolutionary United Front, an insurgent group that gained control of Sierra Leone’s diamond mines through a campaign of rape and mutilation.

Since 2001, donor states have teamed up with several countries in eastern Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere to destroy surplus stockpiles of small arms and light weapons. These programs rank among today’s most important and cost effective aid programs. In the past five years alone, NATO countries have funded the destruction of more than 4.5 million small arms and light weapons. Similarly, a modestly funded State Department program has destroyed more than 800,000 surplus weapons, including 18,500 MANPADS, and 80 million rounds of ammunition. Despite its obvious importance, the program received only $8.6 million in funding for the current fiscal year, which is little more than “decimal dust,” to use the words of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

The Lugar-Obama bill, signed by President G.W. Bush in January 2007, was designed to deal with this problem, providing $48 million to destroy the weapons (worldwide, not as Daily Mail and the others claim for Ukraine alone). It has no effect whatsoever on Ukraine's combat readiness.

And why, you ask, haven't Ukrainian troops resisted Russian troops in Crimea? Probably because, unlike our rabid right, they're not insane.