Ukraine paid hundreds of millions of dollars for weapons it never received, – FT

The situation is being worsened by internal corruption scandals related to abuses by officials, the publication writes.

To date, Ukraine has paid $770 million in advance to foreign companies for weapons and ammunition that have never been delivered, the Financial Times reports, citing data from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and other documents .

Quite illustrative is the case of Tanner Cook, the owner of a gun shop on the outskirts of Tucson (Arizona, USA). Several years ago, his company OTL received a contract for 49 million euros to supply weapons to the Security and Defense Forces. But the ammunition that Cook sold never arrived in Ukraine. Despite the fact that the Ukrainian side won the arbitration in Vienna, the money paid to the company was not returned.

At the end of 2022, Ukraine received an attractive offer from the American company Regulus Global. Subsequently, Regulus signed a contract with the Ukrainian Spetstechnoexport for up to $1.7 billion.

The state-owned enterprise claims that it made $162.6 million in advance payments and deposits to Regulus Global for the implementation of part of the contracts for the supply of 155-mm shells, as well as other payments worth 14 million euros. However, Regulus violated the terms of the contract and has not yet returned the funds to Kyiv.

According to the state-owned enterprise, since September 2024, Regulus has stopped all communication and does not respond to letters. Ukrainian officials believe that the American company spent advance funds, in particular, on the creation of production facilities.

“They used the money we sent them… to buy new assets,” said Oleksiy Petrov, the former head of Spetstechnoexport. The company is now trying to recover the funds through arbitration proceedings.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of problems that Ukraine faces when purchasing weapons.

In April 2022, Ukrspetsexport purchased 120-mm mortars from Sudan from sellers who, as it later turned out, were closely connected to the Russian FSB, as well as Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner PMC.

Such steps were somewhat forced. To put that into perspective, in 2022, the annual production of shells in Europe suitable for the Soviet artillery systems used by Ukraine was 600,000 units. This was enough for only one month of fighting (the Russian Federation produced 1.8 million shells per month).

The procurement situation is also deteriorating due to internal corruption scandals. Some of the officials responsible for defense procurement have already been dismissed, while others have been charged. Dozens of contracts are currently under investigation for suspected abuse.

Weapons for Ukraine: latest news

As a reminder, Berlin recently provided our country with a new package of military assistance . It included, in particular, missiles for modern IRIS-T air defense systems, shells for Gepard self-propelled guns, ammunition for Leopard-2 tanks, and 155 mm artillery ammunition.

At the same time, it became known that the new German government will no longer publicly discuss the possibility of sending Taurus aviation cruise missiles to Ukraine . According to the founder of the “Reactive Mail” organization, Pavlo Narozhny, Taurus missiles will be transferred to Ukraine, the only question is when this will happen.

(C)UNIAN 2025