.
3/5/14,
"Flashback: Senator Obama pushed bill that helped destroy more than
15,000 TONS of ammunition, 400,000 small arms and 1,000 anti-aircraft
missiles in Ukraine," UK Daily Mail, by
David Martosko, U.S. Political Editor
 |
| 2005 Obama, Lugar in Ukraine |
*Obama
traveled to Ukraine with Sen. Dick Lugar in 2005 just seven months after
he became a senator, touring surplus weapons stockpiles
*Most of the small arms and ammunition were left over when Soviets withdrew from Eastern bloc nations, and later dumped in Ukraine
*The two senators secured U.S. funding to help destroy the weapons instead of leaving them intact
*Ukraine exported more than 700,000 small arms in 2004-2007, including 101,000 each to Libya and the UK, and 260,000 to the U.S.
*But most of the ammunition stockpiles – crucial for keeping a standing army battle-ready – were destroyed....
 |
| 2006 Obama, Lugar in Kiev |
"As a U.S. senator, Barack Obama won
$48 million in federal funding to help Ukraine destroy thousands of tons
of guns and ammunition – weapons which are now unavailable to the
Ukrainian army as it faces down Russian President Vladimir Putin during
his invasion of Crimea.
In
August 2005, just seven months after his swearing-in, Obama traveled to
Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine with then-Indiana Republican Senator Dick
Lugar, touring a conventional weapons site.
The
two met in Kiev with President Victor Yushchenko, making the case that
an existing Cooperative Threat Reduction Program covering the
destruction of nuclear weapons should be expanded to include artillery,
small arms, anti-aircraft weapons, and conventional ammunition of all
kinds.
 |
| 2005, Obama, Lugar in Ukraine |
After a stopover in
London, the senators returned to Washington and declared that the U.S.
should devote funds to speed up the destruction of more than 400,000 small arms, 1,000 anti-aircraft missiles, and more than 15,000 tons of ammunition.
Photographs from the trip show Obama
inspecting a plant where Soviet-era artillery shells and shoulder-fired
missiles were collecting dust, leftovers dumped in Ukraine after the
USSR withdrew from Eastern bloc nations after the once-mighty communist
nation fell apart.
The
United Nations had already identified some 7 million small arms and
light weapons, and 2 million tons of conventional ammunition, warehoused
in more than 80 weapons depots spread across the country.
Many
of the artillery shells shown in photographs from Donetsk, multiple
weapons experts told MailOnline, would be the same types of ammunition
required to repel advancing Russian divisions as they advanced to the
west, had they not been destroyed.
Two experts said the ammunition,
particularly small-arms rounds, would have been useful to train
Ukraine's armed forces and million-strong reserves.
'Vast stocks of conventional munitions and military supplies have accumulated in Ukraine,' Obama said in am August 30, 2005 statement from
Donetsk. 'Some of this stockpile dates from World War I and II, yet
most dates from Cold War buildup and the stocks left behind by Soviet
withdrawals from East Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungry and Poland.'
'We need to eliminate these
stockpiles for the safety of the Ukrainian people and people around
world, by keeping them out of conflicts around the world.' [Paragraph 8, Obama quote]. More than a year later, President George W. Bush signed into law a proposal authored by Obama and Lugar.
Obama said then that the existing Cooperative Threat Reduction Program 'has effectively
disposed of thousands of weapons of mass destruction, but
we must do far more to keep deadly conventional weapons like
anti-aircraft missiles out of the hands of terrorists.'
Much
of the Ukrainian small-arms supply was ultimately exported, not
scrapped, by a Yushchenko regime that chose revenue from arms dealing
over the cost of melting down metal.
In 2008 the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported
that between 2004 and 2007, the Ukrainian Export Control Service told
the UN that it sent 721,777 small arms and light weapons to 27 different
countries.
The United
States was the top recipient, with more than 260,000 of those weapons,
followed by the UK and Libya, which each imported more than 101,000.
That flood of weapons exports has continued, with annual export records showing
hundreds of thousands of new exports each year, covering everything
from pistols and carbine rifles to heavy machine guns and anti-tank
weapons.
But while today's 130,000-strong
standing Ukrainian military isn't short on AK-47s, Russian troops have
met little to no large-scale resistance from armored divisions or heavy
artillery as they steamrolled their way into Crimea.
Some
of that was Ukraine's own doing – it sold 320 tanks to Pakistan in the
1990s, for instance – but Obama and Lugar accelerated the pace of the
country's arms liquidation.
While
the Ukrainian army seems to have been careful to avoid provoking an
even larger conflict, it's impossible to know whether Putin would have
behaved differently in the face of columns of heavy weapons that once
belonged to the Soviet Union in whose KGB he held a high-ranking
position.
Sky News video
broadcast on Tuesday showed Russian troops firing automatic weapons over
the heads of apparently unarmed Ukrainian Air Force personnel near a
contested airfield in Crimea."
=================
Caption for first image: "Obama, then a junior senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, worked
with then-Republican committee chair Dick Lugar (L) to oversee
destruction of
Soviet-era war materiel through an agreement that Lugar
had brokered years earlier, covering only nuclear weapons."
Caption for second image: "In 2006 Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko (L) warmly received Lugar and Obama in Kiev," AP photo
Caption for third image: "Sen. Lugar lost his seat in 2012 after it emerged that he no longer
lived in Indiana, the state he represented. Obama became president in
2008, and now faces a crisis in the nation he once sought to disarm."
.
No comments:
Post a Comment