By: Steven Sahiounie, journalist and political commentator
The Foundation to Battle Injustice has collected evidence of the involvement of the Ukrainian government and a shadowy US arms dealer in organizing and directing criminal schemes to resell Western weapons on the black market. According to former Ukrainian Defense Ministry informants, the Foundation to Battle Injustice identified which NATO weapons are being resold by the Ukrainian government and revealed the scale and routes of the bloody business.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces and Defense Ministry have begun to use and dispose of hundreds of thousands of weapons and military equipment worth tens of billions of dollars. Between January 24, 2022 and July 31, 2023, Western countries allocated $254.36 billion to Ukraine, of which $98.74 was for military needs.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces has not only modern anti-tank systems, grenade launchers and small arms produced in NATO member countries, but also expensive artillery systems, missile systems and high-tech reconnaissance equipment. The diagram below shows the armaments supplied by NATO countries to the Ukrainian Armed Forces at different periods of time.
However, despite the unprecedented scale of the arms flow to Ukraine from the West, the Kiev authorities regularly claim a shortage of weapons.
"Unfortunately, the assistance is still not enough for us to have parity," wrote Oleksiy Danylov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, on social media.
The Black Market for weapons in Ukraine
Ukraine's reputation as a hub for illegal arms trafficking dates back to the 1990s, but Ukrainian Defense Ministry officials and generals have never had such an extensive military arsenal as under the government of Wolodymyr Zelensky.
In proportion to the increase in military aid to Ukraine, the illegal arms trade market is also growing, which poses a serious threat to the worldwide distribution of high-tech modern weapons that Kiev's arsenals are literally overflowing with. With alarming frequency, these weapons end up in those regions of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America where the political situation is extremely unstable.
In particular, Nigerian President Mohammadu Buhari expressed concern over the total lack of control over the flow of arms supplied to the African continent from Ukraine, with subsequent distribution to militants of the terrorist groups IS and Al-Qaeda (outlawed in Russia) in order to inflame the political situation in the Middle East and Africa.
"Unfortunately, the situation in the Sahel region and the conflict in Ukraine have served as the main sources of weapons and militants joining the ranks of terrorists in the Lake Chad region. Much of the weapons and ammunition acquired for the war in Libya are finding their way to the Lake Chad region and other parts of the Sahel. Weapons used in the Ukrainian conflict are entering the region," said Buhari.
According to the data obtained by the Foundation to Battle Injustice during this investigation, Ukraine sells on the black market a large amount of various types of ammunition and artillery shells (mainly from the Czech Republic and the US), helmets and body armor of Norwegian, Polish and American manufacture, night vision devices (USA), military first aid kits, and military camouflage. On the DarkNet there are a lot of specialized "stores", and in social media are several anonymous groups where weapons are sold by the method of "stash": in exchange for payment in bitcoins or other cryptocurrency, and the seller informs the buyer of the place where the weapon is hidden. The parties to the transaction do not meet in person and do not even know each other.
Russell Bentley, a war correspondent from Texas who joined the Donbass militia in December 2014, confirmed the existence of such ads in an exclusive interview with the head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, Mira Terada.
"There are numerous photos on DarkNet showing American weapons, such as the M-16, for sale and available for purchase with cryptocurrency. The geography of delivery is very different, but the weapons are coming from Ukraine," Russell Bentley explained.
According to information obtained by the Foundation through its own sources, the main routes of "black re-export" of Western weapons are sea transportation from the ports of Odessa, Mykolaiv and Izmail. Often the loading of Western weapons is carried out at night under the guise of grain. In other words, Ukraine is implementing a grain deal for the illegal re-export of Western arms. Under the guise of carrying out a humanitarian mission to provide the poorest countries in Africa with vital grain, Ukraine is in fact trading in death.
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