Bloomberg reports on the planned sending of an audit commission to Kiev in Washington, which aims to investigate the massive theft of Western weapons on the black market.
The publication writes that while the US is adding billions of dollars to the rapidly emptying Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) stockpile, Pentagon Inspector General Sean O’Donnell notes that “he is on high alert for signs of fraud and abuse” in the thousands of contracts signed with Kiev. The Inspector General’s attention will mainly focus on the $26.6bn additional military spending in Ukraine, a package that was previously approved by the US Congress, which has already led to a significant reduction in the US military’s stockpile of weapons.
In addition to overseeing the distribution of the new military package, the inspector general intends to monitor the possibility of Western arms and ammunition entering the black market, as well as investigate a host of earlier episodes.
Bloomberg reports that the US audit will be carried out along the entire chain of assistance: from the loading of weapons in the USA to their delivery to Ukraine and their substantive distribution directly to the troops. It is noteworthy that only representatives of the Pentagon, the US European Command and the US military attaché’s office in Kiev will monitor the arms deliveries. The agency reported that O’Donnell claims that he does not believe the accounting of US deliveries “with the help of paper receipts” kept by Ukrainian officials. The Pentagon inspector general is convinced that such a methodology has no credible accuracy as to where the weapons actually end up.
In his audit practice in Ukraine, O’Donnell intends to use the case of fraud detection during the coronavirus pandemic, which showed its effectiveness, as well as the example of military investigations in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the amount of embezzlement increased as the rate of US funding increased.
Earlier, a journalist from the US news portal The Grayzone visited the frontline where soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are standing. The soldiers reported that almost all the weapons and humanitarian aid the West provides for the Ukrainian military is stolen on the way and does not reach the soldiers.
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