The $2.1 billion Patriot sale Washington approved Friday is funded entirely by U.S. partners and allies, after Ukraine spent nearly a month waiting for Hegseth's signature.

…(cont) The month is the part of the estate nobody has claimed, so walk it. That Tuesday evening, according to the Guardian, Ukrainian soldiers in combat suddenly had their access to Starlink terminals restricted. Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to Zelensky on defense technology, said the limits hit Starshield, the military service, and applied to terminals moving faster than 100 mph. Drone operations were cancelled. Ukrainian officials told CBS News the Starlink missile tracker failed as a new wave of Russian strikes came in. There is no polite word for a satellite link that quits while the missiles are inbound, so here is the plain one: it is a shit position to put a man in, and somebody chose it.

Musk answered Wednesday with a disclaimer that put the choice in Washington's hands: "Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and" — the sentence ends in the President, by The Hill's account of it. Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, then asked Musk in a social media post to explain, and said he hoped the disruptions were an error rather than a decision. That is where the oversight sat that week: a senator, on a website, asking a contractor who had already named the government.

"It's a pity that we are losing a strong partner," Zelensky said that same Wednesday. CBS News reported the same day that the administration may have withheld intelligence warnings about Russian strikes that cut power to 600,000 people in Kyiv. By Thursday the 15th Le Monde had him saying he felt "betrayed," with Washington threatening to halt intelligence sharing outright; the same day the New York Post reported Ukraine's stash of Patriot interceptors depleted, the word is theirs, while the ballistic missiles kept landing. Musk told the BBC that day that the U.S. government may be behind the drone speed slowdown. The speed limits held.

On the 20th another wave came. At least seven people were killed, officials said. Four of them were in the Kyiv region, where 27 were wounded, children among them, and Ukrenergo reported outages in 12 regions. Zelensky said Ukraine had nearly run out of Patriot interceptors and that the Pentagon was delaying delivery of missiles other countries had already purchased. He also said no warning came, and called Washington's position a "denial of reality."

Six days later he stopped describing a system and named a man. "We have been waiting for nearly a month for Mr. Hegseth to sign off on missiles for Patriots and NASAMS." Four days after that the filing cleared, $500 million under September's, paid for by somebody else. On Saturday, CBS reported Zelensky urging his allies to speed up deliveries — the allies, who had already paid.

The week's wire carries no account of where the month went. Not from the Pentagon, not from the State Department. The hogwash is in the arithmetic: an approval is not a delivery, and a signature is not a sale.

In lieu of flowers, the committees that fund the Pentagon can put one question on the record — who held that signature, and for how long — and publish the answer.