The US government is scrambling to trace large quantities of “lethal aid” transferred to Ukraine’s armed forces in recent months, officials told CNN, noting that intelligence agencies have “almost zero” ability to follow the shipments to their final end-users.
Though weapons shipped to Ukraine account for the “largest recent supply to a partner country in a conflict,” the White House is increasingly concerned the aid “may wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the US did not intend to arm,” a senior defense official told CNN on Tuesday.
“We have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero,” said another source briefed on US intelligence, adding that the weapons fall “into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time.”