(Paris) A large number of weapons sent to Ukraine will end up falling into the hands of criminals in Europe and beyond, the director general of Interpol worried on Wednesday, urging States to take an interest in tracing these weapons.
Posted at 12:57 p.m.
“The wide availability of weapons during the current conflict will lead to the proliferation of illicit weapons in the post-conflict phase,” German Jürgen Stock told the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris, where he spoke. was made from Lyon, the headquarters of Interpol.
“Criminals are already, right now, focusing on that”, he continued, seeing in the European Union “a likely destination for these weapons, because the prices of these firearms on the black market are significantly higher in Europe, especially in the Scandinavian countries”.
Kyiv’s Western allies have shipped tons of military equipment to Ukraine, which has been trying for more than three months to repel Russian forces, which already control swaths of its territory in the east and south.
On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden announced that the United States will “provide the Ukrainians with more advanced missile systems and munitions that will allow them to more accurately hit key targets on the battlefield in Ukraine.”
But “even weapons that are used by the military, heavy weapons, will be available on the criminal market,” Stock warned.
“We are already encouraging member countries (of Interpol, editor’s note) – we have a database on sharing information on weapons – to use these databases because no region or country can take care of it alone,” he continued.
“The criminals I’m talking about operate globally, so these weapons will be traded across continents,” commented the director general of Interpol.
The conflict in Ukraine has also caused a spike in “large-scale thefts of fertilizers as well as an increase in counterfeit agrochemicals, as these products have risen in value”, he pointed out, as well as a ” increase in fuel thefts in Europe” for the same reason.