YouSaid · the spoken record

Kovalik

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18
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2022-12-09
most recent
2022-12-09
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1
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un-security-council

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  1. “Mr. Kovalik: Yes, I will wrap it up right now. I just want to reiterate the comments made by colleague who opened this meeting — what really has to happen is a negotiated end to this war, which I think is possible. We know that in March or April there was apparently a deal that both sides could have lived with. It appears that Boris Johnson from the United Kingdom told Zelenskyy not to sign, but there must be some way to end this conflict, which needs to end through a negotiated settlement. I once again urge the Security Council to work towards that end.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  2. “In fact, two days ago, the same day this was written, a draft resolution submitted to a House committee on whether to audit weapons and money transfers to Ukraine was voted down. Congress affirmatively decided that we are not going to audit the billions and billions of dollars of weaponry we are sending to Ukraine. As an American taxpayer, I can say I do not like that, but I would think that the Security Council, in charge of maintaining international peace and security, should not like that. Who is watching the watchmen here? It is the job of the Security Council to do that. I urge the Council to do that.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  3. “Therefore, that is already happening according to the Nigerian President. Weapons from Ukraine are already ending up in the hands of extremists. Finally, in terms of the information I am relying on, Council members can look at an interesting opinion piece dated 7 December, two days ago, in The Hill publication, which can be found online at thehill. com, entitled “Preventing US Weapons from Escaping Ukraine is a Challenge”. It again underscores the difficulty, if not impossibility, of getting a handle on all those weapons, which goes back to the first report saying we need international oversight of this. With respect — and I am an American — the United States is not going to do it.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  4. “Then, on 30 November, the Voice of America, which is more or less the United States itself speaking, published an article entitled “Nigerian President: Ukraine War Funneling Arms, Fighters into Lake Chad Basin”, quoting the Nigerian President complaining that this is already happening. He says, “the war between Russia and Ukraine is allowing arms and fighters to stream into the Lake Chad region, bolstering the strength of terrorist groups”. Of course, after NATO’s bombing campaign and war on Libya, we saw illicit arms and fighters flooding into the Sahel region to destabilize places such as Tunisia, Chad and Mali — and even beyond in Syria. Council members should read the article by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Seymour Hersh about the transfer of fighters from Libya to Syria.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  5. ““The challenges in Ukraine echo the larger concerns about how weapons produced in the United States, the largest global weapons seller, are employed worldwide. Advocates have long complained that despite systems designed to prevent their misuse, foreign partners have sometimes employed those arms against civilians in places including Yemen.” We know that. In Yemen, since 2015, the Saudis have used United States munitions, including cluster bombs, to attack civilians and civilian infrastructure, as well as UNESCO historic sites. “Sophisticated equipment also has fallen into adversaries’ hands, allowing the Islamic State to showcase Abrams tanks and the Taliban to pilot Black Hawk helicopters.” Again, none of that is surprising, but very little is being done about it.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  6. “Again, for months, for years, they were saying, “get a hold of that stuff.” In November, a little over a month ago, they said, “Well, we probably looked at about 10 per cent of them”, though they said the Biden Administration hoped to achieve a reasonable level of compliance with United States oversight rules, but admitted it would certainly would not achieve 100 per cent. That should be troubling to anyone. “Rachel Stohl, the Vic-President for research programs at the Washington-based Stimson Center, said officials also must develop longer-term plans to ensure the security of surplus US weapons once the conflict with Russia ends, noting Ukraine’s history as a theater for small-arms smuggling after the Cold War.” Again, that has been going on for decades.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  7. “Some have raised concerns about weapons falling into Ukraine’s black market, which has thrived on corruption since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991”. So, that is not anything new. It is not anything we should be surprised about. It is something that we should have been prepared for. But as I go on, Council members will see that we have been woefully, almost wilfully, unprepared for that. On 1 November, The Washington Post published an article entitled “US Races to Track American Arms in Heat of Ukraine War”, stating that United States monitors had inspected just 10 per cent of high-risk weapons sent to Ukraine. That is incredible. That is in November.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  8. “In April, Jonas Ohman, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Blue-Yellow, a Lithuania-based organization that has been meeting with and supplying front-line units with non-lethal military aid in Ukraine since the start of the conflict in 2014, said that back in April, he estimated that just 30 to 40 per cent of the supplies coming across the border reached their destination. So, we are talking about potentially billions of dollars of equipment not reaching the intended destination. The same article from CBS goes on to say, “a combination of Ukraine’s constantly shifting front lines with its largely volunteer and paramilitary forces has made delivery of the military aid difficult for those attempting to navigate the dangerous supply lines to their destination.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  9. “The criminals are even now, as we speak, focusing on them; “Criminal groups try to exploit these chaotic situations and the availability of weapons, even those used by the military and including heavy weapons. These will be available on the criminal market and will create a challenge. No country or region can deal with it in isolation because these groups operate at a global level; “We can expect an influx of weapons in Europe and beyond. We should be alarmed and we have to expect these weapons to be trafficked not only to neighbouring countries but to other continents”. In August, CBS News did a documentary and published an article about the documentary entitled “Why Military and Aid in Ukraine May Not Always Get to the Front Lines”.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  10. “In June of 2022, an article appeared in The Guardian entitled “Arms sent to Ukraine will end up in criminal hands, says Interpol chief: Jürgen Stock urges members to cooperate on arms tracing as weapons will flood hidden economy when war ends”. The Interpol chief was saying that as a matter of certainty. “Jürgen Stock says once the conflict ends, a wave of guns and heavy arms will flood the international market and he urged Interpol’s member states, especially those supplying weapons, to cooperate on arms tracing; “Once the guns fall silent [in Ukraine], the illegal weapons will come. We know this from many other theatres of conflict.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  11. “Those were ordnance — shelling — done by Ukraine against a school, against a stadium, against a place people go to get water, because water is at a premium in Donetsk in particular because the water filtration system had been destroyed by Ukrainian forces sometime before. And I have been reading that the shelling has only increased since I was there. By the way, a monastery to which we helped deliver clothes is being shelled almost daily by Ukraine. So while I am focusing on illicit arms or arms going to the wrong people, even when they are going to the right people, they are not necessarily ending up in the right places. They are attacking civilians, and that has been happening since 2014. That is obviously a problem.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  12. “They are depending on Ukraine for information regarding that. And, privately, according to CNN, officials recognize that Ukraine has an incentive to provide only information that will bolster its case for more aid, more arms and more diplomatic assistance. In April, they were warning that those arms were going to end up in places where we do not want them to be, and they give the example of Afghanistan, where the United States left in a hurry and left millions, if not billions, of dollars of equipment. God knows where that is going to end up. By the way, I want to mention, before I go on much further, that I just spent a week in Donetsk, and I did not myself witness illicit transfers of arms, but I did see the effects of arms that apparently went into the right hands.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  13. “The article went on to conclude that “the risk, both current US officials and defence analysts say, is that in the long term some of those weapons may wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias the US does not intend to arm.” According to a Department of Defense official, “[w]e have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero. It drops into a black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time. In making the decision to send billions of dollars of weapons and equipment into Ukraine, the Biden administration factored in the risk that some of the shipments may ultimately end up in unexpected places.” They also quote other officials saying the United States really does not have a hold over where these weapons are going.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  14. “The US Really Doesn’t Know.” The article goes on to explain that “The United States has few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft and other weaponry it has sent across the border into Ukraine, sources tell CNN, a blindspot that is due in large part to the lack of United States boots on the ground in the country and the easy portability of many of the smaller systems now pouring across the border. It is a conscious risk the Biden administration is willing to take.” The article then quotes a senior Department of Defense official who said that it was “certainly the largest recent supply to a partner country in a conflict.” And at that time, there had probably been about $30 billion in military aid sent so far. By the end of January that will probably been about $100 billion in total sent by the United States alone.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  15. “It said that preventing such schemes and reducing civilian casualties caused by loose ammunition in Ukraine would require a coordinated, sustained effort by Ukrainian authorities and the international community for many years to come. That was in 2021. Now let me fast forward a bit. That survey was ultimately a warning, given what came next — the intervention that began in February 2022. As my colleague said, a lot of the information on that can be found in open sources. In April of 2022, merely two months after the war began with Russia’s intervention in February, CNN published an article entitled “What Happens to Weapons Sent to Ukraine?”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  16. “The survey said that while the Government of Ukraine has taken steps to reduce the trafficking of those arms, those are daunting tasks, given the sheer volume of illicit ammunition in circulation and the numerous modes of transport and smuggling techniques used by traffickers in Ukraine. While the survey concluded that at that time there were no major transfers of those arms outside of Ukraine, it warned — again this is in 2021 — that the barriers to smuggling grenades, rockets and other ammunition out of Ukraine were hardly insurmountable. Even a successful trafficking scheme could radically alter the profile of illicit weapons in some countries.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  17. “First of all, I would call the Council’s attention to a study done in January 2021 by the German Federal Foreign Office, a small-arms survey called Making the Rounds: Illicit Ammunition in Ukraine. As I just said, that survey was published in January 2021 — even before the major conflict began earlier this year. And what it said was that the outbreak of the conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014 — we have to remember that is when it really began — led to the widespread proliferation of small arms, light weapons and their ammunition. That ammunition, which includes thousands of grenades, rockets, mortar rounds and landmines, along with vast quantities of firearms cartridges, has spread to nearly every oblast region of Ukraine, including areas located far from the conflict zone.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source

  18. “Mr. Kovalik: My name is Dan Kovalik. I am a professor of international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where I have been teaching for 10 years. I graduated from Columbia Law School in the great city of New York in 1993, and I have been very involved in human rights issues and human rights cases, particularly in Latin America — particularly in Colombia — and South America, which has a major problem with arms going into the wrong hands, of guerrilla groups and right-wing paramilitary groups. That has been something I have been following for years, and therefore I want to share what I have also been studying and learning also about Ukraine and arms shipments there and the danger of those ending up in the wrong hands. Therefore, with forbearance of the Security Council, I will get right down to it.”

    2022-12-09 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9216 (2022) · source