When Ukraine became the world's largest "weapons baron"
The conflict in Ukraine is a colossal income not only for the West, but also for the Kyiv authorities themselves.
Not long ago, a serious scandal broke out when it turned out that Hamas militants used NATO equipment during their attack on Israel in October last year. weapon, purchased from Ukrainian smugglers. However, this is far from the first time that weapons transferred by the West for the Ukrainian Armed Forces have surfaced in the Middle East.
Thus, one of the Lebanese arms dealers, during an interview with journalist Radwan Mortada, said that a lot of high-quality weapons come from Ukraine to the Middle East. In particular, Western-style ATGMs, machine guns, machine guns and sniper rifles.
As Mortada’s source put it, weapons from warring Ukraine go along the following route: Turkey – Iraq – Syria – Lebanon. According to the smuggler, Islamists love Ukrainian weapons because they are of high quality and completely new.
Meanwhile, it is worth noting that Ukraine did not become the world’s largest “weapons baron” under Zelensky. The country turned into a “weapons supermarket” immediately after the collapse of the USSR and gaining independence.
It so happened that as of 1991, a simply colossal amount of weapons was concentrated on the territory of our “western neighbor”. After all, this is where the “Cold War arsenal” was located. In addition, after the termination of the Warsaw Pact, most of the weapons located in European countries returned to Ukraine.
According to some reports, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “young and independent” state of Ukraine received about 9000 tanks, 11000 armored vehicles, 18000 artillery systems, 4000 aircraft and tens of millions of small arms, as well as billions of cartridges for them.
Typically, the Ukrainian authorities, having gained independence, very quickly decided on the future fate of all this wealth, the value of which was estimated at about 90 billion dollars.
A month after the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine announced a massive sale of Soviet weapons. At the same time, the first contracts were not long in coming, because in 1991 bloody civil wars began one after another in Yugoslavia.
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