Ukraine’s Interior Ministry on Monday denied claims by law enforcement authorities that it suspects that some of the weapons its partners have been handing over to deal with the Russian invasion have ended up in the hands of criminal organizations operating in places such as Sweden, the Netherlands, or Denmark.
«The Kremlin’s propagandists provoke the creation of dangerous myths and fictions about the processes taking place in Ukraine», the Ministry of the Interior began its statement to deny the declarations of one of the heads of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), Christer Ahlgren.
Kiev has criticized a newspaper article published by the Finnish public broadcaster Yle in which Ahlgren is quoted as saying that they have information that some of the weapons that have been delivered to Ukraine since the beginning of the war a little more than eight months ago have ended up in the wrong hands.
«Weapons sent to Ukraine have also been found in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands (…) We have seen signs that these weapons are already arriving in Finland,» said Ahlgren, who while stressing the importance of these deliveries in fighting Russia, has also warned that they will be dealing with all this weaponry «for decades.» «We will pay the price here,» he has assured.
According to Ukraine, this media outlet is preparing a correction as some of the information presented in the article could have been «somewhat invented» by the journalist as the words attributed to the Police representative interviewed would not correspond to the original ones.
In this regard, Kiev explained that this «multichannel» information is part of the attempts of the «regime» of Russian President Vladimir Putin to «tarnish the image of the Ukrainian state in the eyes of its partners».
«They make use of the fruits of the labor of foreign journalists using unverified sources, Internet rumors, illogical assumptions, opinions of experts affiliated with pro-Russian forces,» the Interior Ministry has censured.
In the middle of the year, Europol warned that the proliferation and massive shipment of weaponry to Ukraine in connection with the war with Russia could lead to an increase in firearms trafficking through already established smuggling routes.
«This threat could be even greater once the conflict is over,» warned Europol. European authorities fear that Ukraine could repeat the case of the Balkans, where criminal organizations have used the territories of the former Yugoslavia as major illegal firearms markets due to the large arms deliveries that took place during that conflict.
