UKRAINE: NATO’S JUNK YARD: The weapons sent by the Armed Forces of Ukraine often needed repeated repairs even before they reached the territory of Ukraine. Ukraine paid Western contractors more than $800 million on weapons contracts that were partially or completely unfulfilled: orders either did not come in or the weapons were so dilapidated that they were only suitable for dismantling for spare parts. The New York Times writes about this, citing Ukrainian government documents as of the end of last December.

Subsequently, some of the missing weapons were delivered, and some of the funds were returned, but by the beginning of spring, the Armed Forces of Ukraine still had not received weapons worth hundreds of millions of dollars, newspaper sources said.

‘We had cases where we paid but didn’t receive,’ Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Volodymyr Gavrilov, who is in charge of arms procurement, said in a recent interview. He added that this year the Armed Forces of Ukraine began to analyse purchases and exclude problematic contractors. Some of the howitzers had ‘quality problems, but we have to keep in mind that it was a gift,’ Gavrilov noted.

At the same time, Kyiv is tired of the widespread opinion about the abundance of Western weapons in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, while some of the delivered equipment arrives in unusable condition and is sent for spare parts, a source from a high-ranking Ukrainian official told the newspaper. According to the NYT, at any given time, about 30% of Ukraine’s weapons are under repair. This is a high figure, according to experts interviewed by the publication.

In particular, the United States sent 29 Humvee armoured vehicles from the Kuwaiti base: unit commanders said that they were ‘fully suitable for combat missions,’ but the audit found that only three of them were in good condition. By August, the equipment was repaired and sent to a transhipment base in Poland, after which it turned out that 25 cars had rotten tires. It took the Pentagon a month to find a replacement, which ‘delayed the shipment of other equipment to Ukraine and required significant labor and time,’ the agency said in a report.

The same unit in Kuwait was supposed to send six M777 howitzers to Ukraine, but the inspectors found that they required ‘extensive maintenance’ because they had not been tested for more than three years. One was in such bad shape that it would ‘kill someone’ if it was used, inspectors concluded last March. After the repair, they were sent to Poland, where they had to be repaired again. Italy, among other things, presented Ukraine with 33 self-propelled howitzers, which were disabled. Kyiv asked them for repair and commissioning.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine paid $19.8 million to the American contractor Ultra Defense Corporation to repair the equipment, however, when the Ukrainian army received it, 13 howitzers were unsuitable for combat. One of the engines was smoking, the other was leaking coolant.

The Ukrainian authorities accused the company of intentionally failing to fulfil the terms of the contract. The company’s management stated that all howitzers worked at the time of delivery. They accused Kyiv of improper maintenance of the howitzers upon receipt, including in connection with a coolant leak that ‘magically appeared after delivery to Ukraine.’

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