A Temporary Special Commission (TSC) to monitor the receipt and use of weapons sent to Ukraine will be headed by lawmaker Rustem Umerov, from the opposition Voice party, according to his colleague Yaroslav Zheleznyak.
The parliamentary initiative comes as a response to rising fears of Western weapons provided to Ukraine ending up in the hands of third parties.
“It’s hard to avoid trafficking or smuggling — we didn’t achieve it in former Yugoslavia and probably won’t avoid it in Ukraine,” Jana Černochová, the Czech defense minister, said on July 8. Meanwhile, Swedish Migration Minister Anders Ygeman said most of the weapons supplied to Ukraine were staying in the hands of the Ukrainian military, and “just a limited number of those weapons used in the war can actually be used by organized crime later on."
As a result, EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson announced the creation of a hub in Moldova to fight illegal arms smuggling and human trafficking from Ukraine.
Johansson said the hub was aiming to prevent a post-Balkan war situation, from which crime gangs in Europe profited to build up their arsenal.
Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov called the claims about the risk of arms smuggling “Russian disinformation.”
“We need to survive. We have no reason to smuggle arms out of Ukraine,” he said.
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