Washington is pushing back against recent reports claiming the State Department and Pentagon shipped defective anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, saying such allegations smacked of Russian propaganda.
Tina Kaidanow, the State Department’s acting assistant secretary for political-military affairs, said recent claims made on Russian state media outlets that a large number of FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missiles sent to Ukrainian forces were defective is simply “outrageous and certainly not the case.”
“We do not provide anyone with defective Javelins, frankly,” she told reporters during a Monday conference call from the Farnborough air show in the United Kingdom.
Such reports, she said, represented “propaganda of the worst kind.”
Reports of the defective weaponry began circulating on Russian news sites online in early June, nearly a month after the Trump administration completed the transfer of the the shoulder-fired weapon, equipped with a so-called “fire and forget” guided missile system designed for U.S. Army infantry units, to Kiev.
In addition to selling the battle-tested Javelin missile to Kiev, Washington also agreed to provide a small team of “basic skill trainers” to advise Ukrainian forces how to use field the missile during combat operations, Defense Department officials said when notifying lawmakers of the $47 million overseas weapon deal in March.
The unconfirmed reports of the faulty Javelins also came days before Monday’s highly-anticipated meeting between Mr. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The Kremlin continues molding its anti-Ukrainian agenda … Now the next step is American-Ukrainian military-technical cooperation,” Ukrainian MP Dmytro Tymchuk said in an interview with Ukrainian news outlet UNIAN earlier this month.
Moscow has officially remained mum on reports of the weapons deliveries, but has vehemently opposed the U.S. sale of the advanced anti-tank weapon system to Ukrainian forces, since officials in the Trump administration floated the idea in December — weeks after winning the White House in the 2016 election.
At the time, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov accused the United States of “fomenting a war” with Russia by green-lighting the sale of the 210 Javelin missiles and 37 command launch units under the terms of the American arms deal.
The Obama White House intentionally sought to limit U.S. military support for Ukraine, agreed to provide Ukraine with training and equipment, including supplies of small arms such as assault rifles. But deliveries of the Javelin weapon system could open the door to additional foreign military sales of heavier weapons to Ukraine’s embattled forces in the east.
• Carlo Muñoz can be reached at cmunoz@washingtontimes.com.
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