In Rush to Arm Ukraine, weapons are bought but not delivered, or too broken to use

Ukraine has paid contractors hundreds of millions of dollars for weapons that have not been delivered, and some of the much-discussed weapons donated by its allies have become so decayed that they were deemed fit only to be cannibalized for spare parts.

Documents from the Ukrainian government show that since the Russian invasion in February 2022, Kyiv had paid more than $800 million to arms suppliers late last year for contracts that were partially or completely defaulted.

Two people involved in the arms purchase in Ukraine said some of the missing weapons were eventually delivered and in other cases brokers refunded the money. But as of early this spring, hundreds of millions of dollars had been paid — including to state-owned companies — for weapons that never materialized, one of these people said.

“We’ve had cases where we paid money and didn’t receive it,” Volodymyr Havrylov, a deputy defense minister who deals with arms procurement, said in a recent interview. He said the government had started this year analyzing past purchases and excluding problematic contractors.

Trouble is inevitable in an arms acquisition frenzy the size of Ukraine’s. Since Russia invaded last year, Western allies have sent Ukraine tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons. As of last week, the United States alone has pledged about $40 billion in military aid (and more in financial and humanitarian aid), and European allies have also contributed tens of billions. In addition, Ukraine itself has spent billions of dollars on the private arms market.

Many of the transfers from Western allies involve modern weapons such as US air defense systems that have proven highly effective against Russian drones and missiles. But in other cases, Allies have delivered supplies of equipment that, at best, have needed a major overhaul.

As much as 30 percent of Kiev’s arsenal is under repair at any given time — a high percentage, defense experts said, for an army that needs every weapon it can get for its nascent counter-offensive.

“If I were the head of an army that donated equipment to Ukraine, I would be professionally ashamed to change things in bad shape,” says Ben Barry, a land warfare expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. .

A recent delivery of 33 self-propelled howitzers donated by the Italian government is a good example of this. Videos showed smoke coming from the engine of one and engine coolant leaking from another.

This is reported by the Italian Ministry of Defense in a statement that the vehicles had been decommissioned years ago, but that Ukraine had asked for them anyway, “to be overhauled and put into service, given the urgent need for resources to deal with Russian aggression.”

Ukrainian government documents show that the Defense Department paid $19.8 million to a US arms dealer, the Tampa-based Ultra Defense Corporation, to have the 33 howitzers repaired. In January, 13 of those howitzers were shipped to Ukraine but, according to one of the documents, came “unsuitable for combat missions”.

Officials in Kiev accused the US company of doing a job that should have been done by the end of December. “The American company, which offers its services, did not plan in advance to fulfill its obligations,” Volodymyr Pikuzo, Ukraine’s director of defense procurement, wrote in a letter to the Inspector General of Ukraine on Feb. 3. the Pentagon.

Matthew Herring, CEO of the company, strongly denied the accusation. “They all worked when we delivered them,” he wrote in a text message this month, saying the Ukrainians had not properly maintained the howitzers after they were handed over. That included those with a coolant leak, which he said had “magically appeared after delivery to Ukraine.”

The Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating the matter, according to a US defense official and an American who has worked with Ukraine to buy weapons.

Ukrainian officials have mostly refrained from complaining about broken equipment, so as not to embarrass their benefactors. “There were quality issues with some howitzers, but we must remember that it was a gift,” said Mr. Havrylov.

But the Kiev government is tired, said another senior Ukrainian official, of being told it has enough Western weapons, while some arrive in poor or unserviceable condition, relegated from combat to be cannibalized for parts.

The official, like several other interviewees, spoke on condition of anonymity to candidly discuss a sensitive security issue that threatens to cause friction among allies. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry declined to comment.

Problems with arming the military are as old as post-Soviet Ukraine itself, drawn for decades between competing factions with differing visions of the country’s arms industry.

After gaining independence in 1991, Ukraine made significant amounts of money selling items from its extensive stockpile of Soviet-era weapons. The country’s arsenal shrank, especially under President Viktor F. Yanukovych, Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader in the early 2010s. In the years after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, a heated debate erupted over whether and in what extent the arms industry had to be revived.

But change was slow, and when Russia invaded last year, Kiev was desperate for weapons and ammunition. The leaders hurried to find weapons wherever they could. Brokers, many untrustworthy, flooded Ukraine with offers, Mr. Havrylov.

The documents obtained by The New York Times, generated by a government audit this year, showed that some of the most valuable sets of undelivered contracts are between the Defense Department and Ukrainian state arms companies that function as independent brokers. In recent months, the ministry has sued at least two of those state-owned companies for broken contracts, and Ukraine recently announced overhauls to make those companies more efficient.

There have also been problems with equipment donated by the West, which contributed to some of it being delivered so late or unpredictably as to complicate planning for Ukraine’s counter-offensive.

The report of a Pentagon inspector general released at the end of May illustrates a number of problems.

Last summer, a US Army unit was ordered to ship 29 Humvees to Ukraine from a depot at Camp Arifjan, a base in Kuwait. While unit leaders had previously said all but one of the Humvees were “fully mission-capable,” an initial inspection after the orders were received revealed that 26 of them were too broken for combat, according to the Pentagon report.

By the end of August, contractors had repaired transmissions, dead batteries, fluid leaks, broken lights, door latches and seat belts on the Humvees and reported all 29 ready for Ukraine. The work was verified by the army unit in Kuwait.

But when the Humvees reached a staging area in Poland, officials found that the tires of 25 of them were rotten. It took nearly a month to find enough replacement tires, which “delayed the shipment of other equipment to Ukraine and required significant labor and time,” the Pentagon report said.

The same army unit in Kuwait would also send six M777 howitzers to Ukraine just weeks after the start of the large-scale invasion of Russia. However, it turned out that the howitzers “required extensive maintenance” before they could be shipped because they had not undergone regular service checks for 19 months, the Pentagon report found.

At least one was in such bad shape it “would have killed someone” if he tried to use it, inspectors concluded in March 2022.

Three months later the howitzers had been repaired and shipped to the assembly center in Poland. But officials there still concluded that all six “had flaws that made them incapable of missions,” the Pentagon audit found. They were repaired in Poland before being sent to Ukraine.

Some weapons systems are so scarce or so fragile that Ukraine has welcomed at least some faulty Western equipment as a source of parts.

In January, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said announced the planned transfer of self-propelled AS-90 howitzers to Ukraine, including some in “varying states of readiness”. Twelve demanded that Ukraine “refurbish or exploit for spare parts,” according to the British Ministry of Defence said in a statement in March.

The senior Ukrainian official confirmed that they were needed to provide spare parts for others.

Reporting contributed by Jason Horowitz from Rome, and Anastasia KuznitsovaDaria Mitiuk and Michael Schwirtz from Kyiv, Ukraine.