Swiss think tank finds no evidence of large-scale smuggling of Western-supplied weapons from Ukraine – Politico

There is no evidence that Western weapons being supplied to Ukraine end up on the black market in Europe. Source: Politico, citing Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) think tank in Switzerland, as reported by European Pravda Details: This data undermines the narrative promoted by Russia, which claims that one-fifth of the Western weapons coming to Ukraine end up on the black market for resale to terrorists and rebel groups.

"We did not find any evidence of Western weapons making it to Western Europe and very limited evidence of any kind of transactions with Western weapons in Ukraine," said Daniel Brombacher, Director of the GI-TOC's Europe Observatory.

"The guns that have been delivered by the West are in good hands," he added. The organisation's analysis, which focuses on illegal markets in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden, is based on darknet monitoring and interviews with EU law enforcement and underworld figures.

The report also undermines the assumption that NATO military equipment is being used to arm European gangsters. The Spanish Civil Guard, one of the two national enforcement agencies of Spain, said in May that a group of hashish smugglers had opened fire on police with US and European-made rifles and that NATO-standard ammunition had been found in previous raids.

Spanish newspaper El Espanol claimed that Latin American drug cartels send their representatives to Kyiv to make bulk purchases. However, GI-TOC found no evidence to support these claims, many of which have been refuted. In October 2022, a Finnish organised crime leader told the media that gangs were smuggling Western weapons meant for Ukraine into Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

A police official denied this claim. A further investigation by GI-TOC found that three Finnish criminal masterminds did indeed travel to Eastern Europe in mid-2022 "with the intention of bringing back weapons, but failed to do so, as they lacked the necessary organisational skills or access to financing," Brombacher told Politico. The report found that the Ukrainian government has been effective in preventing the illegal use of weapons by the military: only 250 cases were recorded in 2022 and 191 in 2021, which is a small number for a country that receives billions of dollars in military aid from the West.

Background:

• Last year, Ukraine's Foreign Ministry demanded that the Financial Times immediately conduct an editorial investigation into the circumstances surrounding the publication of materials on arms smuggling that appeared to contain disinformation benefiting Russia.
• EU foreign policy spokesperson Peter Stano said that Russia had launched an intensive disinformation campaign against Ukraine, the EU and NATO, claiming that it was "smuggling weapons" supplied by its allies.

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