US aid to Ukraine ‘invested’ in crypto FTX scheme

Free West Media | November 14, 2022
The sudden collapse of a crypto exchange linked to the Democratic Party in the US, has revealed that FTX presently suffers from $10-$50 billion in liabilities and virtually no assets. And among those liabilities, are “investments” made by Ukraine’s leadership clique.
The company FTX, in its bankruptcy filing appears to have held tens-of-billions in American “military aid” to Ukraine. Instead of using the alleged funds to fight Russia, the money was ‘invested’ in the FTX Ponzi scheme.
From the bankruptcy filing it is clear that this money has now disappeared.
“Instead of using US military aid to fight Russia, Ukraine ‘invested’ part or all of it, into FTX, and right now, it looks like all the money’s gone,” said Hal Turner, a well-known American radio host.
The crypto money from unsuspecting clients was also used to fund the Democratic Party in the United States. More evidence has surfaced suggesting that the funds may have been stolen.
The CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, was one of the top donors to the Democrats, with only George Soros outperforming his largesse. Recently, he also shared a podium with inveterate globalists Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.
According to Turner, it seems that Ukraine was receiving money from the US, and then sent it to FTX, and FTX sent it to the same Democrats, who had originally voted to send it to Ukraine. “At this hour, it appears to some observers to be pure, criminal, money-laundering, and a criminal conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws,” said Turner.
Reuters exclusively reported that the founder and CEO FTX transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to the trading company Alameda Research, which is run by his girlfriend Caroline Ellison.
Sam Bankman-Fried was born in 1992 on the campus of Stanford University into a family of academics. Born and raised to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in California, he is the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School. His aunt Linda P. Fried is the current dean of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. His brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried, is a former Wall Street trader and the director of the non-profit Guarding Against Pandemics.
He was the second-largest individual donor to Democratic causes in the 2021–2022 election cycle with total donations of $39,8 million, only behind Soros. Of this, $27 million was given to Protect our Future PAC, bankrolled by Bankman-Fried.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are currently looking into whether FTX.com mishandled customer funds. Bankman-Fried is also being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for potential violations of securities rules.
US wants to build military bases in Uruguay
By Ahmed Adel | November 7, 2022
A draft defence cooperation agreement between Washington and Montevideo, which could allow the installation of US military bases in Uruguay, is once again being considered in the Uruguayan Parliament. Allowing US military bases would effectively damage the sovereignty of Uruguay, a country which currently maintains good relations with both Russia and China.
Senator Gustavo Penadés for Uruguay’s ruling centre-right National Party claimed that the project only involves “some type of investment in construction” and not the permanent presence of US forces in Uruguayan territory. For his part, the president of the Uruguayan Defence Commission and of the opposition centre-left Broad Front, León Lev, admitted that the project is “ambiguous” and will instigate “profound discussion” in Parliament.
The project is defined as “a complementary agreement” for “reciprocal provision” of “logistical support, supplies and services.” It says that Uruguay and the US express their “desire to improve the interoperability, preparation and efficiency of their respective military forces through greater logistical cooperation.” In addition, the purpose of the agreement is to “facilitate logistical support” between the two countries during “combined exercises, training, displacements, stopovers, operations or other cooperative activities.”
Effectively, it is very clear that the bilateral agreement will in fact enable US actions more than anything else. For example, the supply of services that can be provided to each other in reality only benefits the US as Uruguay does not have the capacity to do military missions or operations in North America like the US does in South America. It cannot be overlooked that the initiative is from the US and is drafted in the terms that it proposed.
The project was first discussed in 2012, during the government of José Pepe Mujica, but it did not have the support of parliament. Today, just like in 2012, if the parliament authorises it, it would mean a loss of Uruguayan sovereignty over a part of its territory.
According to Senator Penadés, there is no possibility of US bases in Uruguay and he believes that this interpretation of the agreement is incorrect. The legislator claimed that it is a “standard agreement” like the ones that have been signed between the US and other countries on defence cooperation. When asked what the project refers to when it says “operations in bases [and the construction corresponding to that support],” Penadés said it is about the “infrastructure” that is built in “cooperation,” such as, according to him, hospitals.
For his part, Lev affirmed that the project is “ambiguous” and will provoke “very deep discussion” in parliament.
“As it is ambiguous, it is going to give rise to at least a very deep discussion, I have no doubt. This is not going to be voted on tables and this discussion is going to take many months, if not years. But one can never anticipate,” he said, adding: “There are two main laws for the Government, such as the organic law of the Armed Forces and the retirement law. Parliament is not in a position to quickly study this project.”
Lev pointed out that, in general, agreements with foreign countries take months or years to approve.
“An issue of this nature, with the ambiguities, especially with this potential base, is going to generate a deep debate. The Uruguayan government does not propose the agreement, it makes a scheme with the US and proposes what Washington aspires to. But in politics one should never rush. One has to carefully analyse and see the actions of the political system,” Lev said.
The underlying issue is that the Uruguayan military’s limited defence budget means that it is reliant on the generosity of donor nations. In one example, the US State Department GPOI funds contributed $36 million since 2008 in equipment, training, and construction for the Uruguayan Armed Forces. This is evidently a paltry amount, but in the context of the Uruguayan military, which has a total budget of $1.16 billion, it is significant.
It is recalled that Daniel Castillos, Uruguay’s Ambassador to Moscow, announced in April that his country does not support the economic sanctions on Russia.
“Despite the current situation and criticism regarding [Russia’s] special military operation [in Ukraine], Uruguay has not imposed and does not support any economic and financial sanctions against Russia… and maintains an interest in strengthening trade and maintaining good relations,” he said, adding that it was “necessary” to cooperate with Russia.
For the US, it is important that initiatives like the defence cooperation agreement are signed with Uruguay so that the country can be brought under its sphere of influence. Uruguay currently has friendly relations with the US, Russia and China, but Washington hopes to upset this balance by slowly influencing the country, beginning with military bases. For now, although the US undoubtedly has ambitions for military bases in Uruguay, it appears unlikely to happen in the short and medium term.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Another Extraordinary Murder in Washington D.C.
Mary Mahoney was allegedly the victim of a botched robbery in the Georgetown Starbucks

Mary Mahoney, murdered on July 7, 1997
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 6, 2022
When Seth Rich was murdered in Washington D.C. on July 10, 2016, the Metropolitan Police Department immediately proposed that it was a “botched robbery.” The case reminded me of the murder of Mary Mahoney in a Georgetown Starbucks on July 7, 1997.
Mary Mahoney was an intern in Bill Clinton’s White House during his first term. She then got a job working as a manager of Starbucks in Georgetown, which was frequented by many notable figures in the Washington political establishment. Her murder (along with her two coworkers) was the first triple murder in the neighborhood’s history. Prior to the crime, not a single homicide had been committed in Georgetown for eighteen months.
Robbery appeared an unlikely motive, as none of the day’s cash proceeds had been taken from the store. Mahoney’s murder occurred during the same period that Newsweek reporter Mike Isikoff was investigating allegations that President Clinton had sexually harassed White House employees—an investigation that would ultimately lead him to Monica Lewinsky. Attorneys for Paula Jones were also seeking corroborating cases of Clinton’s sexual harassment of young women.
A year after the murder occurred, the police received a tip to examine a man named Carl D. Cooper from a woman who had just watched an America’s Most Wanted episode on the triple homicide. For several months, investigators found no evidence linking Cooper to the crime. Then another informant came forth—a former drug addict named Eric Butera, who was himself later murdered in “a robbery gone wrong.”
Based on information gleaned from Butera’s associates, Carl Cooper was arrested. After a grueling four-day interrogation, Cooper confessed, stating that the triple homicide was a “botched robbery” (which just happened to be the official working hypothesis). While held at gunpoint, Mary, refused to give Cooper the keys to the safe—a heroic act to save her 50 billion market cap employer from losing a few thousand dollars. Because Mary refused to give Cooper the keys, he shot her five times, including a shot to the back of the head. He then shot her two coworkers, and then left the store without taking a dime.
Cooper was convicted on the grounds of his confession to the Metropolitan Police. However, in a subsequent interview with an FBI investigator, Cooper recanted his confession. Although the FBI investigator unequivocally stated this in his testimony, the court concluded that Cooper’s initial confession was sufficient for his conviction. Cooper was initially represented by a court-appointed attorney, but after his trial began, his court-appointed attorney was joined by the prominent Washington D.C. defender, Francis D. Carter, who initially represented Monica Lewinsky when Monica stated her willingness to remain silent about her affair with Clinton. Carter drafted an affidavit for Monica in which she stated that she had NOT had an affair with the president. Carter was forced to withdraw this affidavit after Monica made statements to Lynda Tripp (equipped with a secret recording device) confirming her affair with Clinton.
That Carter joined the Carl Cooper defense team strikes me as very peculiar, especially given that Carter did not change the defense strategy. I wonder if Carter’s primarily job was—under cover of client-attorney confidentiality—to deliver a message to Carter pertaining to his sentencing prospects and what he might reasonably expect for his wife (to whom he was apparently very attached) if he stuck with his confession.
Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno initially sought the death penalty for Cooper— the first death-penalty matter brought to trial in the District in nearly 30 years, but federal prosecutors later withdrew this request. To date, no evidence has been found linking Cooper to the triple homicide.
In a related case, the District of Columbia was successfully sued for the wrongful death of Metropolitan Police informant, Eric Butera, as the jury concluded the police had been negligent in protecting him during an undercover operation to obtain more information about the Starbucks triple slaying. The woman who gave the initial tip to America’s Most Wanted later publicly accused the police of refusing to protect her and fell under suspicion for being motivated primarily by the reward money offered by the show.
Since the murders occurred, the crime has been the subject of extensive media coverage, several documentary television features, and hundreds of online commentators. Conventional newspaper coverage of the crimes—primarily conducted by the Washington Post and the Washington Times—consisted entirely of straightforward reporting of information provided by police and judicial officers.
Given the controversial nature of the police investigation and judicial proceedings against the man who was charged for committing the crime, it is surprising how little the mainstream media questioned official accounts. Likewise, the TV documentaries simply presented narratives provided by law officers as though they contained nothing that was questionable. This is particularly notable given that substantial details of the official narrative, provided by the same investigating officers, are represented differently in different documentaries. Moreover, some of officers’ statements in the documentaries pertaining to Starbucks procedures and security protocols are NOT consistent with what a veteran Starbucks manager told me.
I would like to interview Carl D. Cooper in prison, but I cannot find him in the federal prison system. Though I have not had the time and resources to dig deep into this component of the story, my preliminary research suggests that his whereabouts in the federal prison system have been concealed.
In 2016, the lead homicide detective in the Mary Mahoney case — Detective James Trainium — published a book titled How the Police Generate False Confessions. It’s a detailed examination of how the police obtain false confessions, and the author is clearly writing from personal experience.
An Extraordinary Unsolved Murder in Washington D.C.
In the matter of SETH RICH, the FBI asks for 66 years to release his laptop contents Nov 5 DNC Staffer Seth Rich, murdered on July 10, 2016

By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 5, 2022
“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.” —James Madison
As an investigative author I’ve often dealt with the extreme frustration of making federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and state Open Records Act requests. So often, it seems that federal and state agencies don’t want to release the information, delay in responding, and then cite multiple exceptions to the law in order to justify keeping the information secret.
I therefore felt sympathy for my fellow Texan, Brian Huddleston, when I saw the recent Epoch Times report that his FOIA request for the information found on Seth Rich’s laptop is being thwarted by the FBI, which asked the judge who ruled in Huddleston’s favor to grant the Bureau 66 years to fulfill the request.
Readers of this Substack may find the FBI’s request reminiscent of the FDA’s request for 55 years to release COVID-19 vaccine data. Given the unfortunate reality of human mortality, one wonders what public interest will be served 55 or 66 years from now, apart from satisfying the curiosity of historians who aren’t yet born.
The murder of Seth Rich—in the middle of one of the most brutal presidential election years in history—has always struck me as an example of the authorities NOT investigating a matter of public interest. The mainstream media and half the country were so blinded by partisan passions that they couldn’t see the grounds for suspecting that the young man’s murder was politically motivated. Just a few hours after the incident occurred—before there was any time to perform an investigation—the Metropolitan Police Department announced that the murder appeared to be a “botched robbery.”
Since Seth Rich was murdered on July 10, 2016—12 days before Wikileaks published embarrassing DNC e-mails—there has been much speculation that he could have been the source because he was upset about how the DNC had treated Bernie Sanders. A good investigator wouldn’t speculate about the crime, but he would certainly notice that, statistically speaking, the murder is extraordinary.
Seth Rich was shot in the back near his apartment building, and though he was carrying a valuable watch, wallet, and cell phone, these were not taken by the assailant. Perhaps it was a botched robbery, as the Metropolitan Police Department quickly announced, but shooting a guy in the back without taking his valuables is not typical of armed robbery. Other robberies in the same neighborhood around the same time followed the conventional pattern of the assailant threatening the victim and demanding his or her valuables instead of opening fire on the victim.
In the year 2016, there were 135 homicides in Washington D.C., which has a resident population of 672,000, which comes to approximately one murder per 5000 residents— a dramatic decline from the city’s murder rate in the early nineties. Incidentally, the Metropolitan Police conducted an analysis of homicide for the years 1998-2000—after homicide rates had dropped significantly—and concluded that the primary motives were
1) Argument/conflict
2). Drug related
3). Revenge/retaliation
4). Robbery
5). Gang related.
During this period, homicides were not equally distributed throughout the city, but were concentrated in particular neighborhoods. 92% of the victims were African Americans 3.2% were Hispanic and 3.2% were white. Though one must consider the possibility that homicide trends in DC have changed since 2000 (apart from merely decreasing in numbers) it’s notable that, of the currently unsolved homicides in Washington DC in the year 2016, Seth Rich is the only white victim in a city that is now 44% white.
Julian Assange has always insisted the DNC e-mails were leaked and not hacked. Former NSA technical director William Binney has also insisted that if the DNC e-mails were hacked, it would be child’s play for the NSA to establish the precise routing of the hack, which indicates that the e-mails were more likely leaked by an insider.
Regarding motive, a good investigator would consider the hypothesis that Seth Rich was murdered NOT in retaliation, but to eliminate him as a witness that the DNC e-mails were leaked by an insider and not hacked by Russians. Almost immediately after the embarrassing e-mails were published, the DNC vehemently proclaimed it was Russian hackers who were responsible, though no evidence has been presented to support this accusation.
Regarding the assailant: A good investigator would consider the hypothesis that he was contracted to murder Rich but knew nothing about his target or the motive for killing him. This hypothesis is consistent with Rich being murdered as he approached the entrance to his home—that is, the contract killer was provided only with the address and a photograph of his target.
Another notable aspect of this crime has been the extremely emotional tone of press reporting from the same reporters who so passionately embraced the Russian meddling story. The mere suggestion that Seth Rich’s murder was politically motivated prompted these same people to angrily denounce this (perfectly reasonable hypothesis) as “wild, right wing conspiracy theory” and to demand that reporters cease and desist from exploring this hypothesis.
And yet, given that the crime remains unsolved, why not explore this hypothesis?
Media identifies major beneficiary of Ukraine crisis

RT | November 5, 2022
Yahoo News has identified a major beneficiary of the Russia-Ukraine slugfest: the US military industrial complex, which is reaping a windfall even as the bloody conflict causes economic havoc, energy shortages and a looming food crisis around the world.
As the media outlet reported on Saturday, EU nations have committed to about $230 billion in new weapons purchases since the Russian military offensive against Kiev started in February. US defense contractors are poised to land the lion’s share of those orders, given their dominance as suppliers to European militaries, Yahoo added.
Many European nations turn to US arms makers for more than half of all their weapons purchases. Yahoo cited data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) to show examples of US dominance in European arsenals. For instance, US-made arms accounted for 95% of the weapons purchases by the Netherlands from 2017 to 2021. The ratios were 83% US weaponry for Norway, 77% for the UK, and 72% for Italy.
European weapons imports jumped 19% during the five-year period as then-President Donald Trump prodded his NATO allies to meet their obligations for defense spending. The Ukraine crisis is set to create an even bigger windfall, as President Joe Biden leads an international campaign to flood Ukraine with weapons and the conflict triggers accelerated steps by European nations to bolster their own defenses.
“This is certainly the biggest increase in defense spending in Europe since the end of the Cold War,” Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform, told Yahoo. The crisis in Eastern Europe dispelled the notion that war on the continent is no longer possible, he added. “They’re waking up to the fact that not only is it very possible, but it is happening, and it’s happening not that many miles away from them.”
Since Biden took office in January 2021, European countries entered at least the initial stage of negotiations for $33 billion in arms purchases, including $21 billion since February, Yahoo said, citing figures from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
US defense contractors will also benefit from Washington’s massive military aid to Kiev, as the Pentagon races to replenish stocks of artillery pieces, rocket launchers and other weapons. Biden has set aside more than $65 billion in military and economic aid for Ukraine since the conflict began.
Russia has warned that the influx of Western weapons will prolong the crisis while making the US and other NATO members de facto participants.
READ MORE:
FBI is ‘rotted at its core,’ Republican lawmakers say
RT | November 4, 2022
America is no longer a country where citizens are afforded equal justice under the law, as guaranteed by their Constitution, because the nation’s top law enforcement agency has been corrupted by politicized leadership and a “woke, leftist agenda” being imposed from the top, Republican lawmakers have claimed.
The allegations were contained in a 1,050-page report released on Friday by Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee. The report, which was based on information gathered from 14 FBI whistleblowers who came forward to expose a pattern of misconduct, argued that the agency was “rotted at its core.”
“Quite simply, the problem — the rot within the FBI — festers in and proceeds from Washington,” the report said. “The FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, have become political institutions.”
The report detailed such abuses as a secret partnership in which the FBI receives private information on conservative users from Facebook, without seeking their consent or going though the legal processes that would normally be required to tap such data.
Whistleblowers also alleged that the FBI “looked the other way” on dozens of attacks against anti-abortion groups, even as the agency sent heavily armed teams of officers to arrest pro-life activists at their homes for alleged violations of selectively enforced crimes. Parents who spoke out at school board meetings over controversial policies were targeted by investigators as alleged terrorists.
At the same time, former FBI official Timothy Thibault “shut down” a probe into the overseas business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and attempted to keep the case from being reopened, the report said. Thibault openly displayed his political bias in social media posts that included his official title.
“America’s not America if you have a Justice Department that treats people differently under the law,” Representative Jim Jordan, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News on Friday. “It’s supposed to be equal treatment under the law. That’s not happening, and we know it’s not happening because 14 brave FBI agents came to us as whistleblowers and told us what exactly is going on here.”
The report also accused the FBI of inflating statistics on domestic extremism to help fuel a narrative promoted by President Joe Biden’s administration. FBI employees who have conservative views are being purged from the agency, it claims.
Republicans argued that the FBI was plagued by a “systemic culture of unaccountability,” as well as “rampant corruption, manipulation and abuse.” The agency’s shift toward “political meddling” has allegedly pulled resources away from legitimate law enforcement duties. For instance, one whistleblower claimed that he was told after the January 2021 US Capitol riot that child sex-abuse cases were “no longer an FBI priority and should be referred to local law enforcement agencies.”
Concerns About Western Weapons Flowing to Ukraine Growing Louder
Samizdat – 01.11.2022
The US and its allies have earmarked nearly $100 billion in security and economic aid to Ukraine so far this year. Last month, the White House asked Congress for a $11.7 billion top-up. Where is this money going? Who’s benefiting from Western taxpayers’ generosity? And why are some US officials suddenly so concerned?
As the Ukrainian security crisis enters its ninth month and the seemingly bottomless pit of Western military and economic support for Kiev continues to expand, some US media and lawmakers have expressed growing weariness about the prospect of shoveling even more cash into the conflict in the weeks and months to come.
On Monday, the editors of Bloomberg, the New York-based financial and business media empire, sent a signal to America’s business community through a rare collective editorial requesting more “transparency” from the Biden administration about where American aid to Ukraine is going.
“The scale of the aid effort is unprecedented. In just seven months, the US has provided Ukraine with nearly double what it gave all of Western Europe on an annual basis during the Marshall Plan in real terms. Support for Ukraine’s military this year equals what the US provided Israel, Egypt and Afghanistan combined in 2020,” the business outlet stressed, calculating that Washington’s support accounts for $60 billion, or two thirds of all Western support for Kiev this year.
At least $27.5 billion of that is for military needs, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s Ukraine Support Tracker.
Pointing out that Kiev hasn’t exactly been a paragon of good governance and anti-corruption, even before the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis, Bloomberg made the unprecedented admission that there’s “the possibility, however slight, that US-made weaponry could fall into the wrong hands or be sold to actors outside Ukraine.” Accordingly, the outlet asked Washington to appoint a special watchdog on Ukraine aid, similar to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction created in 2008.
The effectiveness of such an appointment would be questionable at best, and futile at worst. Last year, Brown University’s Costs of War project calculated that the United States spent over $2 trillion in Afghanistan, equivalent to over $300 million per day for 20 straight years. Still, the effort to turn the war-torn West Asian nation into a model of Western-style governance and democracy collapsed like a house of cards in August 2021, when the Taliban* smashed the country’s NATO-trained army in ten days as US and allied forces evacuated. The inspector general’s appointment seems to have done little in stopping or even stemming the largess of spending on the war in Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, even the mere admission that US arms could destabilize the situation and cause a spike in weapons flows to international black markets and criminal groups is significant, as it echoes concerns that Russian officials from the president to the foreign and defense ministries have been expressing for many months.
“This is not a question only of small arms; there are risks of more powerful weapons falling into the hands of criminals, including man-portable air defense systems and high precision weapons,” President Vladimir Putin said at a recent meeting with regional security officials.
Last month, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, whose party appears poised to take the House and possibly the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections, expressed opposition to giving Ukraine a never-ending “blank check” of American aid as ordinary Americans suffer the consequences of a recession. President Biden admitted that he was “worried” about McCarthy’s rhetoric, accusing the GOP of not “getting” that Washington’s assistance to Kiev wasn’t about Ukraine, but about Eastern Europe, NATO, and “really serious, serious consequential outcomes.”
As domestic weapons stocks show signs of running low and amid US media reports citing behind-the-scenes grumbling from the military and government over the issue continue to mount, it bears repeating the question about where Western arms support for Ukraine is actually going.
Where are the Weapons Zelensky?
It turns out the White House and the Pentagon don’t actually know where the aid goes, with sources telling US media back in April that the Pentagon has “zero” clue where most of the arms end up after they drop into the “big black hole” of the conflict. This is especially the case with small and compact arms like Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger man-portable air defense missiles, which can’t be tracked via satellites and “with nobody on the ground” to keep a lookout.
From time to time, moments of clarity poke through the fog of war.
On Sunday, Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation reported that weapons sent to Ukraine had somehow found their way into the hands of local motorcycle gangs, as well as criminal groups in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Earlier this year, Sputnik Arabic plunged into the seedy recesses of the so-called dark web, finding a Ukraine-based arms dealer willing to ship US-made M4 assault rifles to the conflict zone in Yemen via Poland and Portugal, for a fee.
Separately, in August, a major US television network posted and then quietly scrubbed an investigative feature which revealed that as little as “30 percent” of the Western military aid sent to Ukraine was actually reaching the frontline.
Some Western-dominated regional and international security cooperation agencies have also given an indication (mostly underreported by the mainstream media) on the danger of sending weapons to Kiev.
Europol, the European Union criminal policing agency subordinated to Brussels, continues to resist admitting the scale of the weapons smuggling problem, assuring in July that it is “working with Ukrainian officials to mitigate the threat of arms trafficking into the European Union” and that it has “full confidence” in Kiev’s “measures to monitor and track these firearms.”
However, Interpol, Europol’s older and more respected cousin, has urged the international community to brace for weapons that have been sent to Ukraine ending up in criminal hands. Agency secretary general Juergen Stock warned in June that “the high availability of weapons during the current conflict will result in the proliferation in illicit arms in the post-conflict phase.” Criminal groups are already preparing. “This will come, I have no doubts,” Stock said.
Given the scale of the Ukrainian crisis, and the shady nature of criminal weapons smugglers’ activities to begin with, the real extent and scope of illicit arms smuggling operations, and just how far up the totem pole of Ukrainian and Western administrative power it goes, has yet to be revealed, and probably won’t be revealed, until years or even decades from now.
During the 1980s Soviet War in Afghanistan, the Central Intelligence Agency ran ‘Operation Cyclone’, a drugs and weapons running operation which armed the Afghan Mujahedeen with over $3 billion in US- and European-made weaponry, including Stinger missiles and other sophisticated equipment.
In the decades that followed, Washington discovered how difficult it is to recover these arms from the Afghan ‘freedom fighters’, who eventually morphed into the Taliban, and fought a two decade-long war against the US and NATO occupation, including using weapons sent in the 1980s. In the meantime, Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who served as one of the Arab commanders in Afghanistan in the 1980s, wound up declaring a holy war against the US, with Washington ultimately fingering his terrorist group for the deaths of over 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and in other attacks.


