Washington is sending highly sensitive items such as man-portable air defense systems to Kiev, a senior US defense official says.
The United States and NATO are sending weapons to Ukraine at breakneck speed, including highly sensitive items such as shoulder-fired missiles called man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) that can shoot down planes.
Western arms deliveries, another of which is expected to arrive in the next few hours, have been vital to the Ukrainians being able to fight the invading Russian forces much more effectively and ferociously than American intelligence expected.
But moving such quantities of weaponry into Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II carries the risk of some falling into the wrong hands, a possibility the West has considered.
“Frankly, we think it’s worth the risk right now because the Ukrainians are fighting very skillfully with the tools at their disposal and using them very creatively,” a senior US defense official said Friday when he asked him about that danger.
Highly portable missiles, such as Stinger surface-to-air missiles, which are a type of MANPAD, can help win wars, but have also been lost, sold, or ended up in the arsenals of armed groups in the past.
For example, hundreds of US-supplied Stingers were seen as key in helping mujahideen rebels drive Soviet forces out of Afghanistan in a conflict that spanned the 1980s and 1990s.
But subsequently, the US spent years trying to retrieve unused MANPADS from that country and other conflict zones around the world.
In a 2019 Pentagon-funded study, the RAND Corporation think tank estimated that more than 60 civilian aircraft have been attacked by MANPADS since the 1970s, killing more than 1,000 civilians. As of 2019, 57 non-state armed groups were confirmed to possess or were suspected of possessing MANPADS.
Russia was “by far the largest single exporter of MANPADS,” RAND Corp said, with more than 10,000 systems sold between 2010 and 2018 to countries including Iraq, Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Qatar and Libya.
The United States and NATO have not disclosed how many MANPADS have been transferred to Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion, which is now in its third week.
Russia has so far not targeted Western arms convoys heading to Ukraine and the top US defense official said Washington had not seen any Western-supplied inventory fall into Russian hands.
but that could change.
At a Friday meeting of Russia’s Security Council, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu discussed possible future seizures of Western-made Javelin and Stingers anti-tank weapons. They should be handed over to Russian-backed forces in the breakaway Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly endorsed the idea.
“As for the delivery of weapons, especially Western-made weapons that have fallen into the hands of the Russian army, of course, I support the possibility of delivering them to the military units of the Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics,” Putin said.
“Please do this,” Putin told Shoigu.