Netanyahu: US Weapons Sent to Ukraine Spotted on Israel's Borders
© AP Photo / Efrem Lukatsky
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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. Those that do make their way to the front are being quickly consumed by the stalled counteroffensive along the "Surovkin Line" defenses.
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 March indicated 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.
“I think he's sending a message to the US,” Maloof said. “His relationship these days with the Biden administration is not all that great, so any time he can get in a jab, I think he'll take that opportunity. That said, he's also sending the message that these weapons are not under control and that they are threatening - potentially threatening to his own homeland and to his people. It's just another demonstration of how these weapons sent to Ukraine get into the wrong hands and they get around the world very, very quickly.”
“There's no control over their dispersal. This became an issue here and then it quietly died, but the Pentagon is saying, ‘Well, we're going to send some people to the US embassy in Kiev to keep track.’ Well, that's nonsense,” Maloof said.
“So there's no effective control whatsoever over the dispersal of those weapons, and the United States is delusional when they say they've got control over this stuff. It's just like any other war, in Afghanistan or Iraq: billions and billions of dollars are lost - unaccounted for, cannot account for them. Then they wind up in the arsenals or in the hands of other countries and individuals and groups that only have ill will toward humanity. So it's not anything surprising, but it really demonstrates and underscores just the total lack of accountability by the United States on the dispersal of its weapons.”
Maloof said he expected no meaningful response from Washington to Netanyahu’s concerns.
“They've been totally irresponsible. They will remain that way, and I don't see any ability or desire on their part to try to correct the situation,” he told Sputnik. “It's so out of hand and so out of control that there's no way at this point for them to get their hands around this problem and curb it and put an end to it. If they stopped sending weapons [to Ukraine,] that would be the answer, frankly.”
