Donald Trump has been working furiously to keep all those promises he made, but one of them so far has escaped him: ending the war in Ukraine.

“They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians,” Trump said during a May 2023 CNN town hall. “I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done — I’ll have that done in 24 hours.” During his Q&A at the World Economic Forum a couple of weeks ago, he offered this grim assessment of the carnage: “When you see pictures of the fields that I see? Nobody wants to see it. You’ll never be the same.”

Later this month, we Americans will mostly skip over the three-year anniversary of this war — a costly and ruinous proxy war that Vladimir Putin would never have started had Donald Trump been president, but a war that nonetheless became unavoidable with the weakly provocative Joe Biden in office.

European land wars tend to be both long and awful, and this one is no exception. The gene pool of a generation of both Ukrainian and Russian men has been irrevocably altered, and one Ukrainian city after another is in ruins. If you think it’ll cost a lot to rebuild from the rubble of Gaza, take a look at this interactive map of destruction, which The New York Times describes as “a vast area with some 210,000 buildings leveled across a jagged, 800-mile frontline and beyond.” The map was produced eight months ago, but even then, the toll was staggering:

The scale is hard to comprehend. More buildings have been destroyed in Ukraine than if every building in Manhattan were to be leveled four times over. Parts of Ukraine hundreds of miles apart look like Dresden or London after World War II, or Gaza after half a year of bombardment.

Of course, this is the way Russians do war: remorselessly, and without regard for human life. In his magisterial work on the worst battle of history’s worst war, Stalingrad, historian Antony Beevor notes that the Soviet authorities executed some 13,500 of their own soldiers at Stalingrad. That’s more than a whole division of troops. Put another way, that’s nearly twice the number of American warriors who died in eight years of war in Iraq and 20 years in Afghanistan.

On the “bright” side for the Ukrainians, they’ve become remarkably adept at drone warfare — much more so than we Americans. As Blackwater founder and geopolitical strategist Erik Prince told Tucker Carlson in a fascinating podcast last summer: “The Ukrainians can take a cheap racing drone … and you put a beer-can-size charge that you can 3-D print the casing for in the field, with a little copper disk on the front of it, and drive that into the back of a tank, and for $1,500 you destroy a $2 million tank.”

Again, it’s an awful war, and Trump and his team have been working hard behind the scenes to put an end to it. This past weekend, however, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Associated Press that “excluding his country from talks between the U.S. and Russia about the war in Ukraine would be ‘very dangerous’ and asked for more discussions between Kyiv and Washington to develop a plan for a ceasefire.”

That’s fair enough. But Zelensky should be doing a much better job of bookkeeping if he’s going to be critical of the American president about how he’s conducting peace talks. We say this in response to some comments Zelensky made during that interview about the cost of the war, and about the tens of billions in funding he’s received from the United States. Here’s the translation:

When I hear — both in the past and even now — from the U.S. that America has provided Ukraine with hundreds of billions [of dollars], $177 billion, to be more precise, based on what Congress approved, as the president of a nation at war, I can tell you — we’ve received just over $75 billion. …

But when it’s said that Ukraine received $200 billion to support the army during the war — that’s not true. I don’t know where all that money went. Perhaps it’s true on paper with hundreds of different programs — I won’t argue, and we’re immensely grateful for everything. But in reality, we received about $76 billion. It’s significant aid, but it’s not $200 billion.

Zelensky claims $100 billion out of the $177 billion we gave them is somehow missing: I don’t know what happened

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— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 2, 2025

Again, the key sentence in all that: “I don’t know where all that money went.”

This is infuriating, especially if you’re an American taxpayer. But what’s perhaps equally infuriating is that these comments came from an exclusive interview with the Associated Press, but somehow the AP didn’t think it was worth mentioning — didn’t think that the inability of the president of one of the world’s most corrupt countries to account for around $100 billion in American taxpayer dollars was worth reporting.

Maybe there’s a language barrier here with Zelensky, and maybe some additional context is needed. Heck, maybe it’s just a clerical or accounting error. Maybe the $100 billion he’s talking about was committed by the Biden administration but hasn’t yet been disbursed to Ukraine. But $100 billion here and $100 billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. Even if you work for the pro-war Associated Press.

Is it too much to ask that we get a good accounting for the many billions that our elected representatives have committed on our behalf to this terrible war?