DISINFO: Equipment sent to Ukraine would have been critical in fighting California fires
SUMMARY
As uncontained deadly wildfires ravage southern California, the Los Angeles County Fire Department has dug itself into a hole in its overzealous effort to support Ukraine. In 2022, the department donated “surplus” equipment to Ukraine. That gear could have been critical in addressing today’s crisis. Further compounding the issue, Mayor Karen Bass reduced the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget by $17.6 million for the 2024-2025 fiscal year, while earlier proposing a $23 million reduction. However, the outgoing Biden administration is fast-tracking as much aid to the Kyiv regime as it can.
RESPONSE
This is a disingenuous attempt to exploit the California wildfires to promote a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative against sending international aid to Ukraine, by portraying it as detrimental for the donor. Pro-Kremlin disinformation has a background of exploiting natural disasters with this aim, as happened before with wildfires in Hawaii in 2023 and Hurricane Helene in 2024.
While it is true that California has donated firefighting equipment in Ukraine since 2022, the allegation that this led to the state’s unpreparedness to fight the wave of fires of early 2025 is false. Experts have debunked the claim and stated that the reasons for this catastrophic situation are others, such as the lack of enough water.
Ukraine has offered to send firefighters to Los Angeles.
The allegation about a 17.6 million dollars cut in the LA Fire Department budget has also been fact-checked and labelled as taken out of necessary context.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that fuelling the proxy war in Ukraine only depletes the West’s own stocks of air defence systems, that Western military aid to Ukraine only will cause more suffering, that Western weapons supplies to Ukraine are exacerbating the conflict, that the West kills Ukrainians by sending them weapons they don’t know how to use, that the US is prolonging war in Ukraine to benefit from weapons sales or that the weapons supplied by the West to Ukraine are actually useless.