CBS Deletes Documentary Revealing That Just ‘30%’ of West’s ‘Aid’ to Ukraine Reached Frontlines
11:18 GMT 08.08.2022 (Updated: 17:06 GMT 20.04.2023)
© AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
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The United States and its European allies have committed tens of billions of dollars in military and economic support for Kiev over the past five months. Moscow has warned repeatedly of the dangers of weapons falling into the hands of black marketeers and making their way onto the international arms black market.
CBS News has curiously deleted a bombshell documentary which uncovered that just “30%” of the military assistance sent to Ukraine by Western countries during the first months of the conflict with Russia actually reached the front lines.
Upon clicking on the link to the documentary, called “Arming Ukraine,” users are greeted with a “The page cannot be found” error.
"This page cannot be found" error on CBS News' website page on documentary detailing how just 30 percent of Western arms sent to Kiev were reaching their intended destination.
© Photo : Screenshot / CBS News website
CBS News announced Monday that it had “removed a tweet promoting” the doc, assuring that since it was filmed, control over deliveries had improved. “Additionally, the US military has confirmed that defense attache Brigadier General Garrick M. Harmon arrived in Kiev in August for arms control and monitoring. We are updating our documentary to reflect this new information and air at a later date,” the network explained.
We removed a tweet promoting our recent doc, "Arming Ukraine," which quoted the founder of the nonprofit Blue-Yellow, Jonas Ohman's assessment in late April that only around 30% of aid was reaching the front lines in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/EgA96BrD9O
— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 8, 2022
In the documentary, Jonas Ohman, CEO of Blue-Yellow, a Lithuania-based group involved in the delivery of military equipment to Ukraine, told CBS News correspondent Adam Yamaguchi that just one third of the tens of billions of dollars' worth of support sent to Ukraine by the US and its NATO allies was reaching the Ukrainian military.
“You know all this stuff goes to the border, and then kind of like something happens and kind of like, 30 percent maybe reaches its final destinations,” Ohman told CBS News in a preview of the documentary.
Ohman offered hints about what happens to the rest of the equipment, saying that “there are like power lords, oligarchs, political players” operating in the country. “The system itself, it’s like, ‘we are the armed forces of Ukraine. If security forces want it, well, the Americans gave it to us.’ It’s kind of like power games all day long, so eventually people need the stuff, and they go to us.”
The CEO also offered a novel explanation for why the West needs to ensure that Ukraine “wins” in the conflict with Russia. “If we lose the war, if we have this kind of gray zone, semi-failed state scenario or something like that. If you do this – you funnel lots of lethal resources into a place and you lose – then you will have to face the consequences,” he said.
Blue-Yellow has been funneling everything from body armor to night vision equipment and light drones into Ukraine since 2014, when the country was thrust into a civil war sparked by a US- and EU-backed coup in Kiev. The coup led to civil unrest in eastern Ukraine after the new authorities announced a crackdown on the Russian language and began pulling the country into EU and NATO orbit, ultimately culminating in the February 22, 2022 Russian recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as independent states and the launching of a special operation to “demilitarize” Ukraine two days later.
The United States has committed over $23 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since February, on top of billions delivered to the country between 2014 and 2021. The UK, Germany, Poland, and other NATO members have committed over $7 billion more.
Andy Milburn, a retired US Marine colonel and founder of the Mozart Group, a US private military company engaged in the training of Ukrainian troops, suggested the problem with supplies not reaching the front was organizational, and that the West should be more involved in putting “people in place” on the ground to “supervise the country” to prevent pilfering.
“If you provide supplies, or a logistics pipeline, there has got to be some organization to it, right? If the ability to which you’re willing to be involved in that stops at the Ukrainian border, the surprise isn’t that, oh, all this stuff isn’t getting to where it needs to go – the surprise is that people actually expected it to,” he said.
Last week, Sputnik Arabic got an inside look into the nitty-gritty details of the arms smuggling operations taking place in Ukraine, contacting a Ukrainian weapons merchant on the dark web who expressed readiness to sell US-made M4S assault rifles, ammunition, and frag grenades hidden in barrels of motor oil to a Sputnik correspondent posing as a Yemeni arms buyer. The weapons dealer referred to middlemen “allies” in Poland and Portugal ready to assist in the shipment.
Russia has spent months warning the US and its allies about the dangers posed by the shipment of weapons to Ukraine and the threat that they could wind up on the international arms black market thanks to the corruption and instability which have wracked the country.
Washington and Brussels have ignored these warnings, with Kiev assuring them that the arms would not be transferred to third parties or countries. Last month, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) announced that it was “working closely” with Kiev to prevent weapons smuggling after discovering that there was evidence of firearms and military equipment from Ukraine appearing in EU countries.
