On February 19 and 23, on his Twitter account, the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Oleksii Reznikov, announced, with supporting photos, the arrival in Ukraine of Canadian Armed Forces planes filled with military goods including rifles, machine guns with optical sights, surveillance equipment and others.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
His tweet, peppered with emoticons, thanked Canada for this “important and timely” decision. Mr. Reznikov thanked his counterpart Anita Anand, Canadian Minister of National Defence.
In other tweets, Minister Reznikov also uploaded photos and footage of weapons arriving from the United States and other NATO countries. Then, everything stopped on February 23, on the eve of the outbreak of war by Russia and the closing of Ukrainian airports to planes from friendly countries.
Since February 24, the minister has continued his interventions on Twitter, but there has never been any question of the delivery of weapons, observes The Washington Post in a long article devoted to the closely guarded secrecy surrounding the shipment of weapons by NATO to Ukraine and neighboring countries.
“It is necessary for us to say what we are doing. But we’re not necessarily going to tell you when, where and how,” UK Defense Secretary James Heappey said in the article.
This principle of radio silence justified by the sacrosanct “operational security” also applies to the Canadian Armed Forces which, since the beginning of February 2022, have sent military equipment, lethal and non-lethal, worth 67.5 million to Ukraine.
Well-kept secret
The Press asked the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) how it could be verified that the promised aid had indeed reached its destination since the start of the invasion.
” Donations [de matériel militaire] are provided exclusively to the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and the Armed Forces of Ukraine, we were told. These donations are verified by end-user certificates provided by the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. »
The process is based on the requirements of the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, of which Canada is a signatory, the CAF continues in its response. Basically, the recipient country of the weapons signs a declaration in which the exported goods and technologies are recorded, for what purpose they will be used, the restrictions imposed and the recipient.
Note that these shipments are also governed by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, a series of American regulations which require the agreement of the United States before a buyer country hands over weapons manufactured there to third countries.
That said, is the handing over of weapons accompanied by any training? ” No. The Ukrainian army has the necessary expertise to use this equipment,” we were told.
It is understood that equipment is now being shipped to countries bordering Ukraine before entering that country. Do CAF representatives “accompany” the boxes of materials to their final destination? “We cannot specify when, where and how the equipment is delivered”, we answer.
Certainly, once the equipment is handed over and all the paperwork is signed, the equipment becomes part of the Ukrainian government’s inventory.
The delivery of equipment from NATO countries visibly annoys Vladimir Putin and the Russian army. For example, when Russia bombed a Ukrainian military base near Poland on March 13, the Russian Defense Ministry said that 180 foreign mercenaries had been killed and that a “large quantity of foreign weapons” had been destroyed. been destroyed.