Arms Flow From Eastern Europe to Kiev Gives US Plausible Deniability, Risks Blowback: Ex-CIA Officer

Arms makers in Poland and the Czech Republic have made a killing churning out small arms, artillery rounds and other equipment for Ukraine, fresh figures show. It’s at least the second time in a decade that NATO’s Eastern European flank has been tasked with producing vast amounts of arms for use in a global hot spot where US interests are at stake.

Weapons deliveries to Ukraine from Eastern Europe highlight the region’s strategic significance to the Pentagon, provide Washington with plausible deniability on the source of weapons, and shows that the planet is in the grip of a ‘World Hybrid War’, observers have told Sputnik.

According to the data compiled by the Kiel Institute for World Economy, NATO’s Eastern European members account for a significant share of weapons sent to Ukraine, with Poland ranking third overall, behind only the US and the UK, the Czech Republic ranking sixth, and Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, and Lithuania among the top twenty.

The deliveries have been good business for the region’s defense companies, with Polish state arms giant Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa reporting a bonanza of orders churning out artillery and mortars, howitzers, small arms, ammo, and bulletproof vests, and announcing plans to ramp up investment in new manufacturing capabilities to €1.75 billion over the next decade, over double its pre-Ukraine crisis expectations.

Czech arms makers have also reported hefty earnings, shipping €2 billion in arms and equipment, 95 percent of based on commercial deliveries, to Ukraine this year, with Prague posting its highest-ever weapons export figures since 1989.

Double Incentive

“The pressure to supply Ukraine with [weapons] from Eastern Europe reflects the inability of the United States to provide what Ukraine needs,” says Larry Johnson, a retired CIA intelligence analyst and former State Department official.

“There is an irony here,” the observer believes. “The United States has been pressuring NATO to ‘standardize’ firearms, ammunition, etc. in hopes of promoting the financial interests of US defense contractors.” But now, as the US and its Western European allies complain that they’re running out of war materiel for their own needs, Eastern Europe’s defense giants have been tasked with ramping up their own production to levels unseen since the end of the Cold War.

The Eastern Europeans didn’t need to be asked to churn out arms to sell to Ukraine, Johnson stresses. “The worsening [of] economic conditions in Europe is a strong incentive for the European arms manufacturers to step up production. This is not easy, however, given shortages in key supplies, including gas and electricity. That said, the arms manufacturers do not need any coercion from Washington to provide the weapons. It is an economic opportunity for them.”

Dr. Stevan Gajic, a research associate at the Belgrade-based Institute of European Studies, concurs with that assessment, saying that the Ukraine crisis, and its requirement for an endless supply of weapons, constitutes “a gift from the skies” for Eastern Europe’s military-industrial complex. “This is exactly what is happening now since the Eastern European countries have inherited a great military-industrial complex from Warsaw Pact times. Now it’s high time for them to boost the industry and make a lot of profits," he says.

Lt. Col. (ret) Karen Kwiatkowski, a former US DoD analyst-turned Pentagon whistleblower, agrees.

"The US proxy war in Ukraine is the biggest production opportunity, since the fall of the Soviet Union, for East European arms producers, especially the Polish state-owned defense conglomerate PGZ, and the Czech STV Group. When these countries were under Soviet control, arms manufacturing was a major employer -- but these factories and lines were not globally competitive, and subsequently lost market share. With Ukraine next door, and stockpiles in Europe and the US beginning to be depleted of a variety of battlefields weapons and supplies, these companies (already modernized and integrated with NATO as EU and NATO members) are in a position to both produce and upgrade capacity. Most are ensuring that they produce both NATO compatible arms, as well as Eastern compatible arms-- to fully ensure they grow market shares on both sides in a possibly long term Eastern European conflict," Kwiatkowski says.

Echoes of Syria

The Ukraine conflict isn’t the first time in recent years that NATO’s Eastern European flank has been implicated in shipping arms to a global hot spot in Washington’s interests. In the mid-2010s, at the height of the foreign-backed attempt to topple the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad, arms flooded into the country from the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and the Balkan countries. A 2016 study by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project calculated these deliveries to be worth over 1.2 billion euros. The weapons were reportedly delivered to countries in the region, and then smuggled into Syria, finding their way into the hands of rebels, foreign mercenaries and jihadist extremists.

Subsequent investigations uncovered these activities to have been coordinated by US intelligence, with the CIA running 'Operation Timber Sycamore', a classified weapons supply and training program. The program, coordinated with then-Vice President Biden’s assistance, was closed down in 2017.

“America was supporting the so-called rebels, basically Islamist extremists…from the beginning of the war,” Gajic recalls. In that regard, the observer says, it shouldn’t be surprising that Eastern European countries once again find themselves being used by Washington in the pursuit of its interests, this time in Ukraine.

“We are either in the Third World War or in the First World Hybrid War. And of course, in a war of these dimensions there are several fronts. So the Middle East is one of them. And the Syrian War never ended. Yes, it has been a war of much lower intensity in the last couple of years. Nevertheless, it is still going on,” Gajic says.

Kwiatkowski agrees.

"The Biden administration is completely populated with Obama era advisors and appointees. The Timber Sycamore model in all likelihood never completely ended, just shifted to different recipient armies and militias, from Syria to Ukraine. US government officials publicly admitted last spring that the Ukraine aid program would be conducted along the models used in Syria and Afghanistan, using some of the exact same networks and black market dealers. I don't see parallels, I see the same program continuing apace, with a shorter supply line," the retired officer stresses.

Plausible Deniability

The strategy of deploying Eastern European-sourced weapons in conflict zones provides the US with a sense of plausible deniability, Gajic notes, since “because the third party is providing weapons,” the US “can always say that they had nothing to do with a specific conflict or specific escalation of conflict.”

That can be important, Larry Johnson notes, particularly if it turns out that the weapons which have been delivered end up in the hands of terrorist or criminal groups, as they have had a habit of doing.

“In the past, the Pentagon and the CIA used arms manufactures in Poland and the Czech and Slovak Republics as a source of weapons for rebels/insurgents/terrorists supported by the US. Primarily because the Soviet-era rifles were reliable and held up in difficult environments. The biggest risk is that the lack of controls over the delivery of weapons makes it highly likely that groups opposed to the West will obtain them and use them. A perverse form of blowback,” Johnson says.

Ultimately, Dr. Gajic fears that just as weapons destined for Syria wound up in the hands of terrorists who used them in a campaign of terror in Europe, such as the infamous November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, in time it will very likely emerge that weapons sent to Ukraine end up in the hands of criminals.

"If tracking of weapons and material sent to Ukraine was an objective of the US, such tracking could and would have been built into the deliveries. But the system of arms trading around the world, particular small arms, ammo, man-portable air attack and defense systems, and a host of other useful war materials is actually built around the very untrackability of such aid," Kwiatkowski says.

"Pilferability is part of the incentive, and this goes far beyond the concept of ‘10% for the big guy.’ It's the very fungibility of arms in a conflict that sustain the system, which is a complex combination of official and unofficial transaction costs, among people that are not particularly trusted by each other, and in most cases, are looking to preserve and enrich their own positions," the retired officer stresses.

Moscow has spent months warning the US and its allies over the consequences of sending tens of billions of dollars’ worth of arms to Kiev, including the danger of these arms falling into the hands of arms dealers and criminal groups.

Last month, Finnish officials reported that weapons destined for Ukraine were found in the hands of motorcycle gangs and other criminals across Northern Europe and the Netherlands. Before that, Interpol chief Juergen Stock warned that the “high availability” of arms in Ukraine would inevitably “result in the proliferation in illicit arms in the post-conflict phase.” The Biden administration has responded to these concerns by deploying "small numbers" of US troops directly to Ukraine to try to account for the weapons deliveries, upping its involvement in the crisis and risking direct confrontation with Moscow.