Sputnik
Despite repeated pledges to audit the use of American money and weapons being sent to Kiev, the tens of billions’ worth of equipment still has few accounting processes in place.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that Western weapons previously sent to Ukraine are turning up in the hands of militants on Israel’s borders.
Speaking to a prominent Israeli newspaper on Friday, Netanyahu said he had “concerns” about Western weapons being funneled into Ukraine and explained why his government has so far abstained from the proxy conflict.
"Israel is in a peculiar situation, different from, say, Poland or Germany or France or any of the Western countries that are assisting Ukraine,” Netanyahu said.
"First of all, we have a close military border with Russia. Our pilots are flying right next to Russian pilots over the skies of Syria," he continued. "And I think it’s important that we maintain our freedom of action against Iran’s attempts to place itself militarily on our northern border."
Indeed, last October, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, warned Jerusalem that sending weapons to Ukraine would “destroy all interstate relations between our nations.”
"Second, we also have concerns that any systems that we give to Ukraine would be used against us because they could fall into Iranian hands and be used against us," Netanyahu added. "And by the way, that’s not a theoretical possibility. It actually happened with the Western anti-tank weapons that we now find at our borders. So we have to be very careful here."
In response to Netanyahu’s recent remarks, the Kremlin said on Friday: "We assess the threat [of Ukraine selling NATO equipment to the third parties] as very, very urgent.”
“We spoke earlier about such a danger and that Western weapons supplied to Ukraine are already being sold by various criminal groups in Europe. This is an inevitable process, and the more such weapons are supplied to Ukraine, where they can neither ensure normal accounting nor safety, nor security - all this, of course, is fraught with great threats to regional and, in a broader context, global security," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
The Likud-led government of Netanyahu has faced both internal and external pressure to send its more advanced weapons to Ukraine, especially its Iron Dome short-range air defense system, for several months, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, has made extensive efforts to court Jerusalem’s support. For the most part, Israel has only sent humanitarian aid to Kiev, but reports in Marchindicated Israel had also sold them anti-drone jamming systems.
Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst in the US Office of the Secretary of Defense, told Sputnik that Netanyahu had broken ranks and criticized NATO’s Ukraine policy because he’s “very alarmed” about the blowback, but also because it presents an opportunity to score political points against the Biden administration, which has been increasingly critical of Likud’s alliance with several far-right parties.
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