aaus-list @ ukrainianstudies.org -- [aaus-list] UKRAINE ARMS EXPORTS/IRAQ

[Taras Kuzio <t.kuzio@utoronto.ca>]

RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
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RFE/RL Crime, Corruption, and Terrorism Watch
Vol. 2, No. 1, 10 January 2002


END NOTE
UKRAINE'S DECADE-LONG ILLEGAL TRADE IN ARMS
By Taras Kuzio

Recent accusations in the Western, Ukrainian, and Russian media that
Ukraine has long been involved in illegal arms exports should not be
of surprise to researchers, governments, and intelligence agencies
who have long written about and monitored such activities. Evidence
is allegedly to be found on the "Kuchmagate" tapes in the possession
of former presidential guard Mykola Melnychenko, who has been seeking
political asylum in the U.S. since April 2001.
Organized crime and corrupt state officials do not respect
state borders in the postcommunist world. In May of last year, an
Ilyushin-76 cargo aircraft was intercepted at the Bulgarian port of
Burgas with $250,000 worth of arms. The guns were Czech-made, the air
company was Ukrainian, the destination was Eritrea, and the end user
was stipulated as Georgia.
Ukraine was in a relatively unique position in that as a frontline
(first echelon) Soviet republic it possessed and inherited the
best quality and large volumes of military equipment. Much of this
was superfluous to Ukraine's security needs after 1992, and so it is
not surprising that much of it found its way abroad, often illicitly.
A Ukrainian parliamentary commission found that Ukraine's 1992
military stocks were worth $89 billion and that, in the course of the
next six years, some $32 billion of that was stolen, with much of it
re-sold abroad. The investigation was headed by a parliamentary
deputy and the former deputy defense minister, Lieutenant General
Oleksandr Ihnatenko, who was court-martialed and stripped of his
rank. Ihnatenko leaked some of his findings to Serhiy Odarych, who
heads the Kyiv think tank Ukrainian Perspectives. Odarych was
accosted and shot in the leg in July 1998 and says he was warned to
stop publicizing those findings. As Odarch recalls, "The police said
I shot myself to grab attention."
That the export of large volumes of arms could not be
undertaken without state officials, the Security Service of Ukraine
(SBU), and other bodies either being complicity involved or, at the
very least turning a blind eye, is obvious. After all, taking a tank
or a batch of Kalashkinovs out of Ukraine requires access to either
an air- or seaport. Up to 80 percent of this Ukrainian trade was
undertaken through the shadow economy, which has remained at
approximately half of GDP throughout the post-Soviet era.
In the last decade, there have been many reports of Ukrainian
arms surfacing in countless places around the world. During the
Bosnian arms embargo, Ukrainian arms turned up on both the Muslim and
Croat sides (as did former Soviet weapons from the then-Russian bases
in the GDR despite Russia's support for Serbia), including 20 C-300
anti-missile batteries. Ukraine's arms also ended up in many other
"hot spots" around the world, including: Sri Lanka in its battle
against Tamil separatists (a military-transport aircraft and Mi-17
military-transport helicopters); Southern Yemen in its secessionist
drive (MiG-29s, artillery, and anti-aircraft guns); Peru in its
border conflict with Ecuador (light weapons and missile launchers);
Angola in support of the MPLA government; and in the civil wars in
Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda.
Official arms exports, such as tanks, have gone to Pakistan
since 1996. Recent reports that Ukraine supplied weapons to the
Taliban in Afghanistan could have come via Pakistan, its patron. (See
"RFE/RL Crime, Corruption, and Terrorism Watch," Vol. 1, No. 8, 20
December 2001). Meanwhile, Iran has received MiG-29 fighters, tanks,
and anti-ship missiles.
Ukraine's involvement in this trade has also been assisted by
the Transdniester region, which has long been an economic black hole
through which all types of contraband moves, from cigarettes to oil,
gas, and weapons. The main seaport the Transdniester uses is Odesa.
In 1996, the Moldovans issued eight customs seals to the region and,
by September of this year, the new Moldovan government found that the
Transdniester had made an additional 348 illegal customs seals. Reelected
Transdniestrian President Igor Smirnov's son heads the
region's State Customs Committee. Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin
recently complained that the Transdniester was a hotbed of smuggling,
which is taking place with Ukraine's assistance. "We in Moldova have
understood that Smirnov is a bandit. It is not clear who he is for
Ukraine," Voronin added.
A major transit point for illicitly exported weapons from the
Transdniester are Ukrainian ports in the Odesa region. The
Transdniestrians have their own people in Illichevsk and Odesa who
fabricate documents for goods shipped via Ukrainian ports allegedly
coming from Moldova. The Ukrainian side has therefore refused to
agree to Moldovan requests for joint customs posts, preferring to
maintain Ukrainian border control with the Transdniester that allows
an uncontrolled flow of such contraband. Last month, Ukrainian
President Leonid Kuchma reiterated his opposition to joint
checkpoints on the Transdniester-Ukrainian border because it would be
tantamount to an economic blockade of the separatist enclave.
Most of these illicitly exported goods are weapons, the
mainstay of the Transdniester economy. In the Soviet era, the
region's military-industrial complex only produced military
components. Currently, they have closed production cycles for small
arms, a full range of different types of mortars, 43 Grad multiplemissile
launchers, and grenade launchers.
A picture of Ukraine's illicit trade in arms can be now gleaned
from millionaire gunrunner Leonid Minin, who was arrested in Italy in
August 2000. Minin is a native of Odesa and emigrated to Israel in
the 1970s before going into business after the collapse of the former
USSR re-exporting oil from Russia. He is an associate of Alexander
Angert (alias "The Angel"), a notorious Odesa godfather.
In Minin's Milan hotel room, Italian police officers found
$150,000 in cash and half a million dollars in African diamonds.
There was also a cache of 1,500 documents detailing his dealings in
oil, timber, gems, and guns. Two weeks before his arrest, Minin
chartered an Antonov-124 transport aircraft in Moscow; had it flown
to Kyiv, where it was loaded with 113 tons of small arms AK-47's and
330 grenade launchers, sniper rifles, night-vision equipment), and
ammunition; and then flown to Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast.
Sixteen months earlier, another Antonov aircraft delivered 68 tons of
small arms and ammunition to Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Ukrainian
government protested that the end-user certificate was for Burkino
Faso (which does not use former Soviet military equipment).
Recent accusations have been made by Labor Ukraine (TU) party
leader Andriy Derkach of illegal arms exports in the first half of
the 1990s, when Yevhen Marchuk, former chairman of the SBU and
current secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, was
chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). In his defense,
Marchuk claims that as head of the SBU he stopped the illegal trade
in arms that some officers in the Ministry of Defense with Dmytro
Strashynsky, whose license was revoked, had been undertaking [see
Marchuk's letter to Kravchul included in this issue]. Strashynsky is
also being held in an Italian prison.
On 4 January, the Prosecutor-General's Office launched an
inquiry into the allegations. Strashynsky is accused of forging enduser
certificates for Nigeria, Egypt, Sudan, Morocco, Ecuador, and
Guinea -- which provides a glimpse into the global reach of these
exports. The TU-controlled TV station Era alleges that documents it
has received from Italy show that Marchuk persuaded Kravchuk to sell
weapons to Strashynsky, that the Prohres company that had contracts
with him was under the SBU's "protection," and that Marchuk
supervised Strashynsky's activities in Ukraine. Both Kravchuk and
Marchuk have denied these allegations as an attempt to damage their
reputations on the eve of parliamentary elections in Ukraine.
Ukraine has a bad record in the illicit trading of weapons to
conflict zones and other countries in the last decade. Not
surprisingly, Ukraine's media has either been too scared or has
lacked the information to write about this covert trade, and the
Ihnatenko commission was the only Ukrainian attempt to probe its
illicit trade in arms.
Taras Kuzio is a research associate at the Centre for Russian & East
European Studies, University of Toronto.