Where Do Western Weapons Sent to Kiev Actually End Up?

Where Do Western Weapons Sent to Kiev Actually End Up?

Sputnik

The US and its allies have pledged over $84 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, sending everything from small arms and anti-tank missiles to armor, artillery and soon, cluster bombs. Russia has warned that the blowback from these deliveries could come back to haunt the West. Here’s what we know about the Ukrainian trade in arms aid to date.

In a press briefing on Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova announced, citing French media reports, that weapons which NATO countries had sent Ukraine were ending up in the hands of rioters and potentially being used against law enforcement in France amid the unrest which overwhelmed the Western European nation last week.

“I don’t know whether President Macron of France has mentioned this to his people, or is keeping it a secret, so we’ll talk about it. Yes, the very weapons supplied by the West, NATO and of course France…are not only returning like a boomerang, but targeting their own people,” Zakharova said

Amid this week’s unrest, independent French media commented on the dangers of NATO weapons sent to Ukraine trickling back to France and triggering a civil war amid reports that assault rifles sourced in “Eastern Europe” were being sold among the housing estates of Seine-Saint-Denis, Paris’s most notorious ghetto suburb.

Concerns that arms going into Ukraine and somehow ending up in the hands of European criminal groups emerged over a year ago, with Europol director Catherine De Bolle saying in May 2022 that the Yugoslav wars in the 90s showed the threat of NATO arms going to Kiev winding up in the hands of local organized crime. Interpol chief Juergen Stock issued a similar warning in June 2022, predicting that “the high availability of weapons during the current conflict will result in the proliferation in illicit arms in the post-conflict phase.”

Authorities in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands would eventually confirm the international and European law enforcement agencies’ worst fears, reporting beginning in the fall of 2022 onward that “huge quantities” of weapons shipped from Ukraine were making their way into the EU, and expressing concerns that essentially, ‘virtually any type of weapon’ sent to Ukraine may end up in their countries.

The European Union moved to tighten its gun trade laws last October specifically in response to Ukrainian arms trafficking fears, citing the need for clearer, systematized import, export and transit routes for guns and ammunition, along with an electronic licensing system, end user certificates and other measures. The impact of these measures remains unknown, since criminal groups and members of potential terror sleeper cells aren’t exactly known to be law-abiding citizens.

Thousands of kilometers away, in the Sahel region of Africa, officials including now former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said in late 2022 that Western arms destined to Ukraine were “beginning to filter” through to the Lake Chad basin, allowing local militant groups to “bolster” their ranks and capabilities.

In May, officials in Poland – whose government has been instrumental in facilitating the transfer of Western weapons to Kiev, reported a dramatic surge in illegal arms smuggling, with the Border Guard confiscating some 8,382 guns and caches of ammo in 2022 – up from just 1,438 a year earlier. Deputy Interior Minister Maciej Wasik noted that the Ukrainian crisis has resulted in the activation of dormant criminal groups, and the creation of new ones, to engage in the smuggling of guns, ammo, drugs, vehicles, cash, excise goods, and people.

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