Sending weapons to Ukraine, we must not forget the lessons of history

Iain Overton warns as world exports tons of weapons to Putin’s war frontline

On February 24, 2001, the MV Anastasia was intercepted in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. It was reported that Spanish authorities found 636 tonnes of assault rifles, ammunition and other weapons in the dark hold. The ship was duly impounded, at least until the Angolan government confirmed that it was indeed their expedition, and the ship was allowed to continue its voyage. In 2001, Angola was in the midst of a civil war that would claim the lives of more than 500,000 civilians.

In 2007, four days before Christmas, the MC Beluga Stamina, an Antigua and Barbuda-flagged vessel believed to be carrying 10,000 AKM assault rifles, along with 42 T-72 tanks, landed near the beaches of Mombasa in Kenya. The shipment is said to have headed for South Sudan. A year earlier, hundreds of people had been killed in the South Sudanese town of Malakal in heavy fighting between forces from the north and their former rebel enemies from the south.

Then, on March 6, 2010, the BBC Romania reportedly made its way to the mountainous port of Matadi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It was carrying 10,000 Kalashnikov rifles. A few months later, gang rapes were reported in North Kivu province. The UN envoy blamed both the rebels and the DRC army.

So far, so good. Three ships, scattered in time and destination, would have legally delivered weapons to countries ravaged by violence – but they had one thing in common.

They had all started their journey in Ukraine.

Traces of these journeys are not easy to find. The organization that records small arms transfers – NISAT – shows virtually no records that these shipments ever left Ukraine. It was only through extensive data research and cross-referencing that these shipments could be traced by Signing time.

But this trend is not new. The opacity of Ukraine’s exports has long been a source of concern for governments and arms trade observers.

So, while weapons are being sent in huge quantities to Ukraine and countries are breaking their own rules of not supplying weapons to active wars, a better understanding is badly needed.

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The Post-Soviet Rush

Between 2006 and 2011, there were some $117 million in recorded firearms exports from Ukraine, and that may be a fraction of the guns that actually left Black Sea ports.

Certainly, Ukraine has played a major role in the proliferation of small arms in the world. With the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, Soviet military units left the lands they had occupied and returned home. As they made their way to Moscow, countless guns were left unsecured and ripe for picking. No less than 2.5 million tons of ammunition and no less than 7 million small arms and light weapons have been abandoned in at least 184 depots. In Odessa, a city of one million, some 1,500 standard freight cars of ammunition were abandoned.

In sum, there were about 100 guns left for every Ukrainian soldier. And so this newly liberated country began to unload its assets. Over the next six years, there were $11 million in small arms sales from Ukraine – most likely a fraction of the actual amount shipped. Moreover, when Ukraine gained independence, its arms industry had to rethink the next source of supply.

Ukraine once accounted for around 30% of the Soviet Union’s arms production, and there were some 750 defense industry companies with a workforce of 1.5 million people to feed. The country has therefore turned to arms exports, which are often illicit.

Six kilometers south of the provincial town of Nikolaev, between stony fallow fields and the thick, slow-moving expanse of the Volga, lies the little-known port of Oktyabrsk. It is fenced behind dense lines of barbed wire. A man-made forest still blocks the view of spectators. But, as you get closer, you spot armored bunkers and glaring guards perched on watchtowers and beyond. From the right spot, you can even make out the outline of heavy loading cranes and thick earthen berms built to absorb the shock of an explosion.

The three aforementioned small arms shipments that left Ukraine all began their journey in Oktyabrsk, a Russian-run port in the heart of a country now considered an enemy.

And it wasn’t just those three. This port is said to have been the point of origin for repeated arms shipments to more than a dozen countries, many of which are notorious for their brutal repression: Sudan and Myanmar, Venezuela and the DRC, Iran and Angola.

In early November 2013, the Greek Coast Guard intercepted a freighter flying the flag of Sierra Leone, the Nour-M near the Imia islets of the cobalt blue waters of the Eastern Aegean Sea. Apparently, there were 20,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles on board, along with 32 million rounds. The ship had left Ukraine a few days earlier.

According to the ship’s captain, Hüseyin Yilmaz, their final destination was the Libyan port of Tripoli. He said the Nour-MThe cargo of had been purchased by their Ministry of Defense, and everything was above board. But the Greek media reported differently. They said the Syrian port of Tartous was listed as the ship’s final destination by vessel traffic systems and that the captain typed Syria into the navigation system, only changing it to Libya after his boat was challenged. . If that was true, then the ship was violating an arms embargo.

Like so many others in the contraband world, it will be difficult to know the truth. the Nour-M was due to sink within 30 days of being taken, beaten to the depths by a storm off the port of Rhodes.

The Greek authorities never specified what happened to the 20,000 rifles. But if, as the authorities and the media suspected, the Nour-M was effectively smuggling weapons out of the Black Sea, it would have been part of a long tradition of Ukraine’s involvement in international illicit activities.

The “Merchants of Death”

Since the fall of communism, Ukraine has become the place to go for illicit goods, named as the epicenter of post-Soviet arms trafficking.

In 1992, a commission concluded that the country’s military stockpiles were worth $89 billion. In 1998, $32 billion had been stolen and resold.

As author Andrew Feinstein wrote in his book The world of shadows“So explosive were the [commission’s] discoveries that the investigation was suddenly closed, 17 volumes of his work disappeared and his members were silenced.

Behind this massive theft hid a new breed of men – the so-called “merchants of death”. When the Cold War thawed, arms dealers with names like Victor Bout and Leonid Minin swooped in. Huge stockpiles of Ukrainian weapons have been bought and sold to groups like the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and FARC forces in Colombia.

Men like Minin became Charles Taylor’s main arms brokers in Liberia, a country under an arms embargo. Minin sent 9 million rounds and 13,500 AKM rifles to the capital Monrovia in two deliveries by air cargo, listing them as bound for Burkina Faso.

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Today, things have changed. This needs to be emphasized.

Experts say the era of the merchants of death is over. An arms dealer said Signing time“I don’t know if there could be another Viktor. He rose through the ranks at the right time. It was a kind of serendipity – the right time, the right place. Viktor was there when governments fell – he had connections. There is no Soviet Union today with large amounts of surplus. The situation is not good for that now.

The past, however, offers two possible paths for the future.

The first is that the port of Oktyabrsk becomes part of the Russian state – captured and held by Putin. From there, even more illicit arms could flow – to Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan. Wherever there is trade, the oligarchs can make a fortune.

The second is that Ukraine wins this war, but the weapons now flowing into the country – unused – could fall prey to future smugglers. If the past is a model for the future, it is not inconceivable that some of the “thousand” anti-tank weapons and “over a thousand” Stinger missiles sent by the UK – according to Defense Secretary Ben Wallace – don’t stay in Ukraine, long term. Citing a US defense official, CNN says US and NATO allies sent 17,000 anti-tank weapons and 2,000 Stingers.

The concern is this: as wars end, weapons tend to linger. And – given Ukraine’s smuggling history – the possibility that some of these weapons, given generously and with good intentions, could one day net a smuggler even more generous profits and then be used with bad intentions, cannot be ignored. What price will an Al-Qaeda operative pay for a missile?

After all, between 2001 and 2015, the Pentagon provided more than 1.45 million firearms to various security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, including more than 978,000 assault rifles, 266,000 pistols and nearly 112,000 machine guns, a loss of 52%.

War has a habit of opening Pandora’s box. It could be that in years to come, a weapons system sent with the best will in the world to help Ukraine in this hour of need could – terribly – be used in an act of terror against the very countries who sent it. After all, didn’t the Stingers given by the CIA to the bona fide mujahideen to defeat the Russians end up posing a threat to US troops?

Perhaps, at least, we need to be reassured that we have the ability to track and optionally disable any weapons system handed over to Ukraine, if the threat of illicit smuggling arises.

Even if you are in favor of arming Ukraine, that is something we simply cannot ignore.

This article was produced by the Byline Intelligence Team – a collaborative investigation project formed by Signing time with Citizens. If you want to know more about the Intelligence Team and how to finance his work, click on the button below.

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