Where Do Western Weapons Sent to Kiev Actually End Up?

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.

EU Were Warned

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.

Across the Atlantic, US officials have publicly dismissed the smuggling and proliferation threat, claiming there is “no evidence” of American weapons assistance being misused by Kiev, even amid US media reports that as little as “30 percent” of the West’s aid to Ukraine was actually reaching the front.

Privately, officials have provided more frank assessments. In 2020, a year after large-scale US military assistance to Ukraine began, and two years before the Donbass crisis escalated into the NATO-Russia proxy war it is today, the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General expressed concerns about the lack of controls in place to prevent US weapons sent to Ukraine from ending up in the hands of a third party.

For instance, in a discussion on military-grade night vision devices, the Inspector General report “found that information in the DoD’s database about the quantity, location, and condition of night vision devices was inaccurate because the Armed Forces of Ukraine did not always report the loss, theft or destruction of these devices, as required.” Furthermore, “serial number stickers on some US-supplied night vision devices became illegible or fell off, especially during operational deployments or combat, making it difficult to conduct serialized inventories of these articles.”

In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March, the Inspector General’s Office revealed that the US military is no longer in a position to effectively provide almost any end-use monitoring, given the lack of US personnel on the ground, with American weapons essentially being transported to the Polish-Ukrainian border and handed over, with oversight effectively ending there.

Acting-Inspector General Sean O’Donnell told US business media last summer that once equipment crosses the border, tracking it can become a nightmare, because Kiev’s accounting is done using paper receipts and documents. A QR code-based inventory system designed to track US weapons systems was proposed in mid-2022, but reportedly never implemented.

Dark Web Bonanza

Over the past year, a small handful of journalists have waded into the shady arms markets of the dark web in search of listings of weapons sent to Ukraine, discovering that everything from small arms and Javelin anti-tank missiles to Switchblade kamikaze drones and Phoenix Ghost loitering munitions can be found online, sometimes shipped to clients via intermediaries in European countries. A Sputnik Arabic investigation conducted last August revealed that Ukrainian smugglers were ready to ship US-made M4S assault rifles to Yemen via Poland and Portugal for a cool $2,400 apiece, plus ammunition and grenades.

Good Business is Where You Find It

A detailed independent audit of US assistance to Ukraine conducted by the Grayzone last week shed light on just how easy it is to divert “aid for Ukraine” for other purposes, from cash to foreign think tanks and media to private equity firms.

Russian observers believe a similar principle applies to military assistance, with veteran international affairs observer Yuri Svetov pointing out last year that by using Ukraine as a proxy, Washington can send weapons to any country or rebel/terrorist group in the world, including those officially prohibited under US laws.

Veteran US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh echoed this line of thinking in an interview with Russian media in April, saying Washington knows perfectly well that weapons being delivered to Ukraine are being resold on the black market, with lower level Ukrainian commanders often thought to be personally involved in the reselling of arms on the black market.

Can't Say You Weren't Told

“The issue of controlling the supply of conventional arms and military equipment has become particularly relevant…The risks associated with their undisclosed proliferation and their infiltration through black markets into the hands of criminals and terrorists are growing exponentially,” Vassily Nebenzya, Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations, said in an address in April.

“These weapons…are spreading all over the world and are already being used by militants, in particular in Africa,” the diplomat added.

“Russia has long drawn attention to the fact that pumping the Kiev regime up with weapons will lead to their fall into black markets and into the hands of organized crime and terrorists. This is now confirmed by the facts,” Nebenzya said.