08/21/2003 | peter byrne

PULL QUOTE: "Corrupt governmental institutions in Ukraine include the Presidential Administration, the Council of Ministers, regional and local governments, and every significant enforcement agency in the country."

- Jonathan Winer, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state

Idiots under Arms
By PETER BYRNE
Post Staff Writer

Ukrainian officials are wondering how and whether to respond to allegations made by former and acting U.S. officials, and by domestic critics of the current authorities, that appeared in an article published by the New York Times Magazine on Aug. 17.
The 8,000 word feature, titled "Arms and the Man," centers on a rare interview with Viktor Bout, one of the world's most successful arms dealers.
Indicted by a Belgian court in February 2002 on money laundering and diamond smuggling charges, Bout is currently living openly in Moscow.
Bout allegedly made his fortune during the 1990s by cutting arms deals with officials in former Soviet states, most notably in Ukraine.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Markian Lyubkivsky said during a regularly scheduled press briefing on Aug. 19 that the ministry has received the article and would respond appropriately after studying it.
"We are still reviewing the material and will have more to say later," Lyubkivksy said.
Andry Chirva, deputy head of the Presidential Administration information policy department, was less measured in his assessment.
After reading a translation of the New York Times article, Chirva said Aug. 19 that it would be counterproductive at this juncture to refute allegations made in it.
"Responding publicly to such rubbish will only make the situation worse," Chirva said.
The article, authored by Peter Landesman, claims that of all the republics outside of Russia, Ukraine was left with the most - and most lethal - weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Much of this arsenal was sold off by corrupt politicians and delivered to countries in Africa and the Middle East by arms brokers, including Bout.
Landesman quotes Jonathan Winer, a former high-level crime-policy official in the U.S. State Department during the Clinton administration, as saying that a generation of corrupt Ukrainian politicians turned the stockpile into a tool for revenue in the 1990s, by shipping weapons to anyone willing to pay for them.
Ukraine, Winer said, became the deepest and most reliable source of supply to the arms-trafficking underworld in the 1990s.
"There's concentrated power, resources in very few hands, no oversight, no separate functioning judiciary, a huge porous border, huge inherited military facilities, lots of airstrips, a bunch of old planes," Winer was quoted in the article as saying. "Ukraine is the epicenter for global badness. It's worse than Pakistan. It's a one-stop-shopping infrastructure for anyone who wants to buy anything."
Expanding on his comments for the Post, Winer wrote by e-mail: "Corrupt governmental institutions in Ukraine include the Presidential Administration, the Council of Ministers, regional and local governments, and every significant enforcement agency in the country."
Winer also acknowledged that the Clinton administration was at fault for not having acted more quickly to address arms proliferation issues with Ukraine.
"We should have dealt with Viktor Bout earlier, and we should have pressed Ukraine earlier and harder on these issues," he wrote.
Hryhory Omelchenko, a former Security Service (SBU) colonel and now an oppositionist parliament deputy, contributed to the article's unflattering description of Ukraine. He said that arms traffickers like Bout have been protected or killed by Ukrainian government officials over the years.
"There's total state control," Omelchenko was quoted as saying.
Most arms deals in Ukraine are consummated in Odessa, according to the article, which quotes an anonymous U.S. government advisor in Kyiv describing the port city as "an open sewer and criminal outlet."
Corroborating the claim is the city's former Mayor Eduard Hurvitz, who is quoted saying that Odessa-based crime syndicates patrol the breakaway Moldovan region of Trans-Dniester. The region is the former home of the Soviet 14th Army, which was left sitting on 40,000 tons of weaponry, the largest arsenal in Europe, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Last February, Landesmann also interviewed Mykola Melnychenko, the former security guard who bugged President Leonid Kuchma's office from 1998 to 2000, meeting with the whistleblower in New York?s Grand Central Terminal to discuss gunrunning deals allegedly sanctioned by Kuchma.
"Asked if he knew Victor Bout, [Melnychenko] at first said no, then yes and later, in a phone conversation, no again," Landesman wrote, adding, "Recently [Melnychenko] said, 'I don't know him in person, but I know a lot about him.'"
Melnychenko, who received refugee status in the United States in April 2001, claimed May 2002 that opposition journalist Georgy Gongadze was murdered for investigating illegal arms sales.
In conversations with the Post, numerous former co-workers of Gongadze?s roundly rejected that charge. It has yet to be substantiated by any of the recordings from Kuchma's office made available by Melnychenko to the public.
U.S.-Ukraine relations worsened last September after U.S. government agencies said they had authenticated a 90-second audio recording from July 10, 2000.
The excerpt contained a conversation between Kuchma and Valery Malev, head of the Ukrspetsexport arms export company, in which Kuchma is heard approving the sale of Kolchuga radar systems to Iraq.
The recording was an excerpt from a 9-minute recording that also included discussion of arms sales to other countries, including Libya. Additional recordings dealing with arms deals to Iran were released in October. One recording, allegedly from a conversation dated May 2, 2000, documents Kuchma approving the sale of a Grad multiple-launch rocket system to Tehran.
Investigative reports by Western media over the years have alleged that Ukraine was a prime source for arms deliveries to countries including Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Liberia, Angola, Sudan, Iran and Yemen. Many of these reports, including Landesman's, cite information leaked from the confidential report of a parliamentary commission that investigated unauthorized arms sales back in 1998. The report allegedly concluded that arms worth $32 billion had vanished from the nation's $89 billion stockpile since 1998.