Ukraine is Experiencing Record Setting Luxury Car Sales
It started with a reader’s comment on a story about Biden’s reckless escalation of the proxy war in Ukraine. I’m working from recollection because Yahoo quickly removed the post. It went something like this:
“Ukraine experienced record growth in luxury auto sales in 2023 and 2024.”
The remark was so distracting it took my focus away from the article’s original intent, which was to express alarm at the rapid and seemingly purposeful escalation of the Ukraine proxy war. Biden recently authorized $725 million more in new weapons with one aim. He wants to complicate peace negotiations for President Trump, whose strategy partially hinges on threats to cut off Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s seemingly endless money pit lifeline.
In the Yahoo article, Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan summed up the fake reasons behind the administration’s actions this way:
“We are going to do everything in our power for these 50 days to get Ukraine all the tools we possibly can to strengthen their position on the battlefield so that they’ll be stronger at the negotiating table. President Biden directed me to oversee a massive surge in the military equipment that we are delivering to Ukraine so that we have spent every dollar that Congress has appropriated to us by the time that President Biden leaves office.”
Remember the above quote because it provides context for the rest of the piece, but still, I digress.
The Money Keeps Pouring into Ukraine
Over the past two years, we have been inundated with news of the horrific tragedies in Ukraine, including the soulless brutality of Russian soldiers. Most recently, we’ve seen a growing number of stories relating to the hopelessness of the war from Ukraine’s perspective due to a manpower shortage. At rvivr.com, we have been sounding a warning about this issue for more than a year, yet more money keeps pouring into the Ukraine sinkhole. So far, the U.S. has provided $69 billion in military assistance, $33 billion in “budget support” and $2.8 billion in humanitarian aid.
Yet, behind the scenes, the military analysts know Ukraine is going to lose. In the end, all that money will have been pissed away for nothing, and we’ll have $100 billion plus added to the national debt.
Ukraine in Shambles?
Throughout the war, the media has bombarded us with horrific pictures of unimaginable destruction in Ukraine as typified in images like these.
As of January 2023, 14 million Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homes, with 6.5 million people totally displaced and 5 million having fled the country as refugees.
Ukraine currently owes $152 billion it can’t repay. Its bonds are in technical default, although it received a two-year debt repayment reprieve from creditors. The country’s GDP fell by 30% in 2022, and baseline scenarios indicate Ukraine will not reach prewar GDP levels until 2030, even if the war ends quickly. According to the world bank, Ukraine will need $486 billion in reconstruction costs over the next decade.
The point is that the snapshot picture we receive from Ukraine is bad, bad, bad. Whether it’s refugees, displaced people in the street, people lacking essential services or a completely broken economy, those across the world who are unaffected have been led to believe Ukraine to be in a state of stone-age anarchy.
Which brings me back to the deleted post on Yahoo…
Record Luxury Auto Sales in Ukraine
On a whim, and fully expecting the notion of record luxury auto sales in Ukraine to be fallacious, I did a simple search.
And I’ll be damned.
According to Global Euronews, sales of luxury cars in Ukraine broke all sales records for the 2023 calendar year and extended the sales bonanza into 2024. The Association of Automobile Manufacturers of Ukraine noted that five thousand new cars were sold in a one-month period between June-July 2023. But these were not pedestrian brands. The publication reported the increase mainly came from a surge in demand for premium models.
“The available data show that the recovery of sales this year is mainly due to the increase in registrations of premium segment cars: BMW X5, Mercedes-Benz and others. At the same time, there was a significant decline in car sales in the so-called budget (economic) segment.”
Another report indicates the vehicle sales boom isn’t just limited to luxury cars. In August 2024, more than eight thousand new passenger vehicles were registered in Ukraine. This is a 40% increase over 2023 levels. Ukrainians like Toyotas the best, but Renault and BMW were close behind.
A country that claims it is so war ravaged it can barely function is experiencing a windfall in luxury auto sales? We see daily images of people in tattered clothing standing in soup lines, emergency personnel dragging bodies from bombed-out buildings, and children wandering the streets with vague and frightened looks on their faces, but at the same time all this is going on, BMW sales are skyrocketing?
Are you shitting me?
The Ukraine publication “Ekonomicheskaya Pravda” has a possible answer to the contradiction. One of its writers, Polish Kresy, said this:
“The level of corruption, which has not decreased despite the assurances of President Volodymyr Zelensky, who said at the end of 2022 that all the corrupt had left the country.”
Remember, we have a $36 trillion national debt that cost us $1 trillion annually (and rising) to service. We have decaying infrastructure, substandard education, a military that is falling behind technologically, homeless people on the street, a fragile and vulnerable energy grid, veterans without care, a social security system that is running out of money, and we’re giving $100 billion to Ukraine while the ruling elites are buying new BMWs at record levels?
Let me say it again. Are you shitting me?
This is unbelievable and provides hard evidence that some Ukrainians are doing quite well while the rest of the country turns to rubble. Where are the people who are buying the BMWs getting the cash? Is the money we’re dumping into Ukraine for “budget support” being used for something other than fighting Russians? If prosperous Ukrainians are buying luxury cars, it raises the question of what else are they buying? Vacation homes in safe countries? Jewelry? Yachts?
Hopefully, this situation will draw the attention of the Trump administration on January 21st. We need a full and complete accounting for where the $100 billion we borrowed from China to fight this proxy war really went because I don’t think the American people ever considered it might be used to buy new BMWs for well-off Ukrainians.
