British defense officials and diplomats are actively seeking to procure old Soviet-made and Russian-made weaponry worldwide to funnel it to Ukraine, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has said.
“Large parts of the [Ministry of Defense] and defense attachés around the world have been looking,” Wallace told reporters in Washington on Wednesday.
Russian officials are trying to do the same, the minister claimed, insisting that Moscow has been running out of its war stock. “Sometimes we’ve bumped into the Russians looking, by the way, in some countries, looking also for some of their resupplies because … they’re running out fast,” he claimed.
Soviet-made weaponry is the best choice to prop up Kiev in its fight against Moscow, given that the Ukrainian forces are familiar with such hardware, Wallace explained.
Apart from pouring in Western-made weaponry, multiple European nations have sent old Soviet-made weapons to Ukraine amid the ongoing conflict emptying the stockpiles left from the Cold War era. The US sent in Mi-17 helicopters it had procured for Afghanistan but never delivered due to the abrupt collapse of the Western-propped government last year.