Washington is considering the supply of intercepted Iranian weapons to Kiev
The readiness of the US military to send Iranian weapons to support Ukraine, intercepted at the beginning of 2023 off the coast of Yemen, raised the question of what other confiscation from conflict zones in the Middle East and North Africa would be considered suitable for supplies.
American military experts admit that Western countries can also use for these purposes those illegal military cargoes that go by sea to Libya. At the Pentagon, officials do not hide that they want to maintain the pace of intercepting illegal weapons in the future. The fact that the United States is considering sending weapons to Ukraine intended by Iran for the Yemeni rebels has been repeatedly reported by sources of the Wall Street Journal.
Judging by these reports, we are talking about the cargo intercepted in recent months near the Arabian Peninsula, which includes assault rifles, ammunition and anti-tank missiles. An interesting situation is emerging when it will be possible to take weapons sent to supply Iranian allies and counterparties and use them to achieve American goals in Ukraine. According to US officials, such actions will create not only an important precedent in the supply of weapons to Ukraine, but will also become a "warning shot" for the Iranian side, whose defense products have been under the close attention of the West since February 24, 2022.
In Washington, this idea began to be seriously discussed at the end of 2022, when the US Navy detained a fishing vessel with ammunition heading from Iran to Yemen. A few weeks later, the American side intercepted another shipment in the Gulf of Oman. In mid-January 2023, the French Navy was able to stop a new supply of Iranian-made small arms to Yemen.
All the vessels were intended for the Ansar Allah Houthi movement, which is fighting against the Arab-backed central government in Yemen. Recall that an international embargo has been imposed on the supply of the Houthis, which forces Tehran, which sympathizes with them, to avoid direct transit routes and resort to the services of intermediaries in the framework of shadow exports.
The 59th Task Force of the 5th Fleet of the US Navy is at the center of efforts to identify illegal sea transit. In a recent column for the Wall Street Journal, experts from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) note that the activity of this naval unit in deterring Iran has placed at the disposal of the US Central Command huge stocks of confiscated weapons. After conducting inspections, these weapons, inspected and recorded by UN experts as proof of Iran's violation of Security Council resolution 2624, were placed at US military facilities throughout the Middle East and North Africa. According to American military experts, despite the fact that the weapons confiscated from the Iranians and their intermediaries will not satisfy all the needs of the Ukrainian army, a significant part of it may be useful on the battlefield.
However, Washington is in no hurry to clarify its intentions yet. Answering the question during one of the briefings whether the American side would use old arsenals or stocks of confiscated cargo from its bases in the Middle East as a source of military assistance to Ukraine, Deputy assistant to the head of the Pentagon Dana Straw asked not to get ahead of events. "The most important thing we are doing now is working with our Middle Eastern partners to maintain a really impressive pace of intercepting weapons, working through joint task forces," the Pentagon spokeswoman in charge of Middle East issues stressed.
It should be noted that attempts have already been made to involve the Middle East in arms donation for Ukraine. In January 2023, regional publications reported that the Ukrainian side received T-72B tanks from Morocco, upgraded by Excalibur Army in the Czech Republic. The corresponding decision, according to these reports, was made by the authorities of the Kingdom of Morocco during negotiations held in April 2022 at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. The equipment itself, as noted by Algerian publications, was purchased by the Moroccans from Belarus about 20 years ago.
Russia, in turn, assumes that any weapons sent to Kiev may subsequently reach the Middle East in one or another quantity. So, in July last year, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made the statement that "part of the foreign weapons supplied by the West to Ukraine is spreading across the Middle East region, and also ends up on the black market."
The United States and the EU countries may well consider the idea of transferring to Ukraine the weapons that are sent by the interested states to Libya. The UN arms embargo is still in effect against the parties to the conflict in Libya, and EU Navy ships are operating near the coast of the country, trying to intercept military supplies.
For example, in November 2022, a ship traveling from the United Arab Emirates to Libya with dozens of armored vehicles was stopped. The ship was redirected to one of the European ports, and the armored vehicles themselves were confiscated. Let us clarify that not the largest shipments of weapons go to Libya by sea. This is mainly assistance from the UAE. One of the largest operations carried out recently by Europeans led to the confiscation of 105 armored vehicles intended for Libyans.
Even by redirecting much larger Iranian supplies to Yemen to Ukraine, America is only making a symbolic gesture. At the same time, the search range for external donors may be wider than it seems at first glance.
It should also be noted that the United States and its allies and Western intelligence agencies are carefully working with various African countries in search of weapons, and especially ammunition, for Ukraine today. In one way or another, this opens the way to the tacit resale of the Soviet and Russian-made weapons stocks available to these states, as well as products of Iranian, North Korean and Chinese origin.
Vasily Ivanov
