Report: U.S. military aid to Ukraine was poorly tracked
More than $1 billion worth of shoulderfired missiles, kamikaze drones and nightvision goggles that the United States has sent to Ukraine have not been properly tracked by U.S. officials, a new Pentagon report concluded, raising concerns they could be stolen or smuggled at a time when Congress is debating whether to send more military aid to Ukraine.
The report by the Defense Department’s inspector general, released Thursday, offers no evidence that any of the weapons have been misused after being shipped to a U.S. military logistics hub in Poland or sent onward to Ukraine’s front lines.
But it found that U.S. defense officials and diplomats in Washington and Europe had failed to quickly or fully account for many of the nearly 40,000 weapons that by law should have been closely monitored because their battlefield impact, sensitive technology and relatively small size makes them attractive bounty for arms smugglers.
“There’s not a record of the inventories being done,” Robert P. Storch, the Pentagon’s inspector general, who is also the lead watchdog for U.S. aid sent to help Ukraine’s war effort, said in an interview Thursday.
“It doesn’t mean they’re not there, or they’re not being used,” he said of the highrisk equipment. But “because of their sensitivity, their vulnerability to diversion, or misuse, or the consequences of that, it’s particularly important to have this additional tracking and accountability in place.”
The report was sent to Congress on Wednesday and a copy of it was provided to The New York Times. The Pentagon’s inspector general released a redacted version of it Thursday. It did not investigate whether any weapons had been diverted for illicit use, which “was beyond the scope of our evaluation to determine,” it noted.
The number of weapons reviewed in the report represents only a small fraction of about $50 billion in military equipment that the United States has sent Ukraine since 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas region. Most of the weapons that have been delivered so far — including tanks, air-defense systems, artillery launchers and ammunition — were pledged after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Yet the investigation offers a first glimpse of efforts to account for the most sensitive tools of American military might that have been rushed to Ukraine in the last two years. In that time, as concerns grew that the flood of weapons would inevitably lead to arms trafficking, lawmakers have demanded strict oversight of the shipments.
The report did not detail exactly how many of the 39,139 high-risk pieces of materiel that were given to Ukraine were considered “delinquent” but it put the potential loss at about $1 billion of the total $1.69 billion worth of the weapons that had been sent.