The Russian Defense Ministry says that the weapons were shipped to Ukraine from the US and Europe, Russia has said that a supersonic missile destroyed a hangar with Western weapons in Ukraine. The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that it struck a storage of foreign weapons at a military airfield near the Black Sea port of Odessa in Ukraine.
Russian supersonic Oniks missiles destroyed a hangar with “weapons and ammunition received from the US and European states,” Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov told a daily press briefing. He added that a runway was destroyed as well.
The ministry also released a video of the missile launch. Konashenkov also told the briefing that seven Ukrainian military targets were hit by airstrikes, including two S-300 air defense missile batteries near the cities of Zaporozhye and Artemovsk,
US Weapons Sent to Ukraine Are Destroyed by Russia or End Up in Black Markets, Ex-Official Says
During the 26 April meeting with NATO foreign military leaders at Ramstein Air Base, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged to move “heaven and earth” to provide more weapons to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Earlier, on 21 April, Joe Biden announced another $800 million in military aid for Ukraine, which marked the eighth instalment of military aid sent to Kiev from the US.
Just days before Biden and Austin’s announcements, CNN published an
article eloquently titled
“What happens to weapons sent to Ukraine? The US doesn’t really know.” The media outlet quoted US officials and Pentagon sources as saying that “the US has few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft and other weaponry it has sent across the border into Ukraine.”
“We have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero,” a source familiar with the matter told CNN. “It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time.”
According to US officials, the risk is that in the long term, “some of those weapons may wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the US did not intend to arm.” For its part, Ukraine “has an incentive to give only information that will bolster their case for more aid, more arms and more diplomatic assistance,” they say.
Nevertheless US officials insist that “a failure to adequately arm Ukraine [is] a greater risk” than billions worth of weapons ending up in the wrong hands.
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