Fact Check: US Envoy Claims ‘Not One Piece of Equipment’ Sent to Ukraine Stolen
13:37 GMT 04.11.2023 (Updated: 10:27 GMT 30.01.2024)
© Sputnik / Vitaliy Belousov
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Kiev's Western partners have had long-held suspicions that not all of the tens of billions of dollars in military aid sent to Ukraine has been reaching its final destination. But the US ambassador in Kiev doesn't seem to think it's a problem. Sputnik got to the bottom of things.
US Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink has offered a novel explanation as to why the United States must continue to send tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to Kiev, assuring that there is no evidence of Ukrainian officials and military commanders pilfering American financial aid or war materiel.
“One of my core priorities as US ambassador is overseeing this assistance that we’re providing, and I take that very seriously and very solemnly,” Brink told US media earlier this week. “We have a third of our staff on the ground focused on oversight. We have the Office of the Inspector General from three different agencies also on the ground with us.”
“I can say that not one piece of equipment has been diverted in a way that it hasn’t been intended to be used. Not one piece of humanitarian aid or any other direct budget support or other types of assistance. We’re watching this like a hawk, and we need to keep working closely, but the Ukrainians have been incredibly open with all of the security and other types of assistance so that we could have eyes on the ground on what’s happening,” the diplomat assured.
In fact, Brink said, despite a “long history” of the “challenge of corruption” in Ukraine and throughout Eastern Europe, the crisis which engulfed the country last year has actually “changed public perception about corruption and it is not tolerated,” by President Zelensky, his government or parliament.
The ambassador urged US lawmakers to overcome their apprehension about continuing to fund the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, citing Moscow’s status as a “very serious adversary of the United States and all democratic nations,” and warning if the financial support dried up, Russia would “win, with very serious negative consequences to US security, to NATO, to our European partners and allies.”
Brink did not elaborate on how an end to the proxy war in Ukraine would signal a defeat for the West – apart from preventing yet another Eastern European country on Russia’s western border to join a hostile military alliance.
'Not One Piece of Equipment' Pilfered?
But it is her comment about “not one piece of equipment” or “not one piece of humanitarian aid or any other direct budget support” being stolen that’s most amusing, given the literally dozens of reports of Ukrainian officials copiously pilfering Western cash and equipment over the past 20 months. And one doesn’t have to take Russian media’s word for it.
As far back as May of 2022, Europol director Catherine De Bolle predicted that the experience of the 1990s Yugoslav Wars showed the danger of NATO arms winding up in the hands of organized crime. Interpol chief Juergen Stock made a similar prediction shortly after, saying “the high availability of weapons during the current conflict will result in the proliferation in illicit arms in the post-conflict phase.”
But it didn’t take until the “post-conflict phase” for equipment meant for Ukraine to start popping up in unexpected places, with authorities in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands sounding the alarm about “huge quantities” of military-grade weapons making their way into the European Union, pushing Brussels to tighten its gun trade laws. The measures didn’t seem to be sufficient, with unrest in Paris last summer over the police killing of a teen of Moroccan and Algerian descent sparking fears of a civil war scenario stemming from reports of assault rifles sources from “Eastern Europe” being sold in the housing estates of Paris’s poor suburbs.
In the summer of 2022, US television network CBS previewed and then inexplicably deleted a bombshell documentary revealing that just “30 percent” of the military assistance sent to Ukraine by Western countries during the first months of the conflict actually reached the front lines.
In August 2022, a Sputnik Arabic exclusive investigation involving scouring the dark web uncovered Ukrainian arms dealers ready to sell M4 assault rifles to clients in Yemen via intermediaries in Poland and Portugal. Other reporters from major foreign media similarly discovered that weapons ranging from small arms to Javelin anti-tank missiles, Switchblade and Phoenix Ghost drones could be found online, sold by Ukrainian sellers.
Last December, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari warned that weapons sent to Ukraine by the West had begun to filter through to West Africa for use by terrorists and militants in the Sahel.
Authorities in Poland confirmed in early 2023 that the Border Guard had witnessed a more than 500 percent surge in attempts to smuggle guns and ammo into Europe from Ukraine, and that’s presumably not counting even organized smuggling.
Then there are the scandals involving the pilfering of Western military aid funds inside Ukraine itself, from reports in Ukrainian media of contractors charging over 2.5 times more for eggs than their market value due to “technical errors,” to a scandal involving winter jackets sourced in Turkiye inexplicably jumping in price by nearly 300 percent, to reports of bribery in courts related to the embezzlement of humanitarian aid.
4 September 2023, 13:51 GMT
Last June, The Grayzone conducted an independent audit of US funding for Ukraine, discovering that even out in the open, official, on the books data shows that millions of dollars in cash meant for Ukraine have been diverted for other purposes, from funding foreign think tanks and media to paying out to private equity firms.
The escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli crisis last month has finally brought at least some US officials attention back to the subject of Kiev’s transformation into an illegal weapons smuggling hub, with House Republicans announcing plans to investigate whether Palestine’s Hamas militants got their weapons from Ukraine or Afghanistan after footage of Hamas assault squads showed them using M4 rifles.
A second Sputnik investigation on the dark web last month uncovered further evidence of Western aid sent to Ukraine ending up on the private arms market, including C-4 explosives, starting at the low-low price of $800 per charge on one seller’s page.
Ambassador Brink isn’t the first American official to claim that there’s “no evidence” of American weapons assistance being misused by Kiev, with the suggestion long becoming a standard talking point in Washington to keep the military production lines going and the money flowing.
But privately, officials have been more recognizant of the problem, with the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General discovering earlier this year that information about the “quantity, location and condition” of some military equipment sent to Kiev was corrupted “because the Armed Forces of Ukraine did not always report the loss, theft or destruction” of equipment “as requirement.” Furthermore, in the case of night vision devices, “serial number stickers” often have a tendency to become illegible or fall off, “making it difficult to conduct serialized inventories of these articles,” according to the auditors.
Earlier this year, veteran US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Washington is perfectly aware that weapons delivered to Ukraine are being resold to the black market, often by lower level Ukrainian commanders.
As for Russian officials, they’ve been warning for well over a year that the Ukrainian crisis has turned into an illegal arms seller’s bonanza, supplying militants, criminals and terrorist groups with an array of deadly firepower. But their warnings have largely fallen on deaf ears.
