This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 16, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How has Ukraine's crowd-funded territorial defense worked out?

As Russia continues its assault, much of the new

crowdfunding has flowed to the government rather than independent groups.

Researcher Garrett Wood has studied unconventional defense arrangements, most

especially the arrangement in Ukraine.

We spoke earlier this week.

You and I spoke for Cato Daily Podcast, just about a year ago, about defense in Ukraine and the unique way that Ukraine, which, let's be honest,

is a fairly corrupt government in a lot of ways and there's a lot of

leakage when it comes to monies that ought to be devoted to national defense, how they essentially crowd-funded defense of particular areas, trying

to meet particular needs to provide for their own common defense in an uncommon way.

How do you think that that defense has performed in beating back or attempting to beat back Russian aggression there.

So in 2014 it performed very well.

And you have sources from the Ukrainian government itself

talking about how the majority of the fighting

or the lion's share of the fighting was done by volunteer forces funded primarily through crowdfunding efforts.

Now obviously a lot has changed since 2014 and what we have now is a more robust though still corrupt Ukrainian

government that's made a lot of changes in terms of civilian oversight and

in terms of bringing on territorial defense battalions, so volunteers that had

previously served kind of independent of Ukraine's control.

And so what you're seeing then is that we've got kind of a distinction, not so much in the crowdfunding area.

...