Maintaining Transparency in US Security Assistance to Ukraine

Patrick Bodovitz is a Security Assistance Monitor intern at CIP

From February 24th, 2022 to September 27th of this year, the United States has provided $61.3 billion in military assistance to Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s war. This figure leaves out the non-military aid to Ukraine from the US, and it excludes the tens of billions of aid provided to the country since Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014. This is a staggering amount of assistance to a country that the United States did not have a close military relationship with before Russia’s annexation of Crimea. While the sheer amount of aid has caused political disputes in Washington, it has been a relatively successful program so far. The ongoing conflict remains confined to Russia and Ukraine, avoiding greater escalation, regional conflagration, or great power war. There is also little evidence that US-supplied munitions have been used in war crimes by Ukrainian forces, apart from one unit of foreign volunteers mentioned in the New York Times. Lastly, there has not been any evidence of weapons going to Ukraine being diverted elsewhere as a result of criminal activity, although this problem could emerge if and when combat ceases. Other US arms shipments have gone to countries where this has proved a systemic problem. 

If the US government succeeds in helping Ukraine defend its territory without the arms being diverted to forces outside Ukraine, or used by Ukrainian forces in acts in violation of international humanitarian law, it could emerge as a useful precedent for promoting transparency in U.S. arms transfers, informing procedures and policies for future transfers.

US Security Assistance to Ukraine

Since 2015, the United States government has trained and equipped the Ukrainian military through Operation Atlantic Resolve. In August 2021, the Biden Administration began accelerated deliveries through the presidential drawdown authority (PDA). Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and on March 15th, Congress approved the first major supplemental bills that set aside funding for the White House to purchase military gear for the Ukrainian military. Drawdowns and supplemental bills have become the main methods to appropriate funds for Ukrainian assistance, including humanitarian aid. 

Initially, the US supplied light weapons and small arms, like Javelin anti-tank missiles, and has since expanded to include artillery, tanks, and long-range ordinance like the Army Tactical Missile. These weapons helped Ukrainian forces to keep fighting. While Ukraine has managed to win back some of its territory, it remains locked in heavy combat, and Russia shows no sign yet of coming to the negotiation table. With an incursion into Russia’s European territory, Ukraine has expanded the battlefield to include both legally Ukrainian and Russian soil.

Since the Trump Administration, the United States government has been more transparent about security assistance to Ukraine than arms shipments to other countries. In the 1990s, Ukraine’s government had horrific corruption scandals in its defense industry, such as false production numbers and illegal weapons sales. In September 2002, the State Department announced that two years prior, Ukraine’s president Leonid Kuchma illegally sold missiles to Iraq, and in light of this, the US put a hold on a portion of its aid to the country. Scandals like this, in addition to Ukraine’s political instability, meant the US government was reluctant to provide military aid to the country. After 2014 and the events of Euromaidan, officials in Kyiv promised to crack down on corruption throughout society, including in its defense sector. 

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the US government has been caught between three competing demands: surging defense articles and services to Ukraine, ensuring accountability for US arms shipments, and managing escalation risks. On September 13th, 2023, the Pentagon agreed to set up an inspection team inside Ukraine to better track equipment moving through the country. This team publishes reports to Congress through the Office of the Inspector General that analyze what is happening to the aid sent through the PDA. Much of this has been a demand by Republicans in Congress, many of whom are skeptical of US aid to Ukraine to begin with and have demanded more oversight. 

An enormous amount of aid has been sent by Ukraine’s backers. The United States alone has sent $61.3 billion since February 2022, raising concerns about how the considerable quantity of weapons will be used and what will happen with the weapons after the war. Jordan Cohen, a defense analyst at CATO, told CNN “the biggest danger surrounding the flood of weapons being funneled into Ukraine is what happens to them when the war ends or transitions into some kind of protracted stalemate.” Besides arms from the United States, many former Warsaw Pact states have transferred their Soviet-origin arms to Ukraine due to their interoperability with the Ukrainian Army.

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) issued a full report on weapons diversion cases in Ukraine and what the Ukrainian government has been doing to address cases of missing weapons. The monitor employed by GI-TOC in Ukraine found that there was no systemic organized smuggling of weapons outside the country. The report also mentioned that any instances where criminal gangs tried to smuggle weapons involved Soviet-era weaponry, not US-origin equipment. This report is the most in-depth analysis done to date on weapons trafficking in Ukraine and validates the assertion that the Ukrainian National Police and Prosecutor’s Office has been closely monitoring the flow of weaponry in the country. 

Some obstacles to transparency persist under the existing regime of monitoring and inspections. In August, the Government Accountability Office found that the State Department and the Pentagon have not always communicated on how to properly ensure that end-use monitoring is being implemented. According to the report, “DOD officials are often unaware of [third-party-transfers] authorized by State until they are identified upon entry to Ukraine, if at all.” While the DOD Inspector General stated that he saw no evidence of weapons diversion of US-supplied defense articles, he concurred that increased inspection was needed.

There are some other challenges that the US now faces in monitoring US-supplied equipment in Ukraine, like the difficulty in monitoring the end use of US-supplied munitions inside Russian territory following Ukraine’s decision to launch an offensive into Russia. While end-use monitoring traditionally has been successful in monitoring the transfer of weapons, it has not been as successful in monitoring the use of said weapons. This is no exception in Ukraine, where the rate of expenditure is very high. Nonetheless, the decision to increase monitoring and publicly release reports about US-supplied weapons in Ukraine is promising and shows that the Pentagon takes seriously concerns about weapons diversion in this war. The monitoring is likely to continue after the war ends to prevent arms being smuggled in the post-war period. 

Recommendations for going forward

Due to the war’s intensity and longevity, the United States is likely to supply Ukraine with arms as long as political will endures. The good news is that the United States government has increased oversight of the flow of weapons into the country. The return of the US embassy has helped by allowing OIG personnel to be based permanently in Ukraine. Additionally, the Ukrainian government knows that it is under intense scrutiny to ensure proper management of its arsenal and is incentivized to comply to ensure the continued transfer of munitions The need for weapons at the front has made it so that people are far less likely to smuggle weapons. Lastly, outside of areas occupied by Russia, Ukraine’s government retains the monopoly of force in the country. It folded volunteer units created in 2014 into the Army and National Guard as part of their reforms undertaken with the intention to eventually join NATO. This is designed to guarantee clear command and control, which is essential for monitoring arms flows. 

Nevertheless, there are further actions the US government can take to ensure that weapons flows to Ukraine do not run into any of the risks that have plagued other efforts to arm partners. One major action the US can take is to push Ukraine to modernize its military justice system. The UAF still relies on protocols dating back to before they began to reform their forces. This includes a lack of enforcement authority for the Military Law Enforcement Service and the shortage of military courts. This can affect accountability, although there is little evidence of Ukrainian leadership sanctioning war crimes, making violations of international law easier to remediate. The United States can provide additional funding and specialists to assist with this effort, such as increasing funding for a greater portion of Ukrainian military officers and civilian personnel to undergo training at the  Defense Institute of International Legal Studies (DIILS). It can also condition portions of the aid provided on the Ukrainian government agreeing to modernize its military justice protocols, in a similar fashion to the European Union conditioning membership on Ukraine making necessary changes to its governance. 

The United States should also consider stationing more personnel in Ukraine to help monitor the flow of weapons. Before the war, the embassy in Kyiv employed close to 800 personnel. Now, there are around 100-200 staffers and the military and civilian staff are overwhelmed. While there has been an effort to increase staffing, it has stalled in the face of intransigence from the White House. Russian attacks on the country pose a risk to personnel stationed there, but most staff work in cities protected by air defense systems. If the United States wants effective monitoring of arms flows into the country and other anti-corruption efforts, it will need more staff on the ground to increase transparency. These staff could be under the mandate of the Office of the Inspector General, the Department of State, and the Department of Defense.

Bottom Line

The United States has a responsibility to ensure that arms it sells or provides to its partners are not re-transferred without authorization, nor used in violation of U.S. and international law. The war in Ukraine has become the latest test of if and how the United States can provide massive amounts of arms to another country without risking fueling arms trafficking or violations of the Foreign Assistance Act. Should the United States continue to emphasize transparency and accountability in transfers to Ukraine, these lessons learned can be applied to other contexts to allow for better monitoring and evaluation of the provision of U.S. security cooperation and assistance. The United States has improved monitoring of the transfer of weapons to Ukraine and also ensured that Ukraine’s government has maintained effective command and control over its armed forces. At the same time, room for improvement remains. The U.S. end-use monitoring system must be reformed more broadly to better assess violations of U.S. and international law, and the United States should condition further aid on the modernization of Ukraine’s military justice system. If the US government succeeds in this, Ukraine will be a useful case study of how the US can train and equip partners without sacrificing transparency, promoting diversion or arms trafficking, and facilitating violations of U.S. and international law.