Researchers at Washington D.C.-based think tank C4ADS stood by their initial report released on Sept.7 that accused several Ukrainian companies of aiding Russia in allegedly shipping weapons to Syria from a southern Ukrainian port. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied the report.
The C4ADS group, at a press conference on Sept. 25, also said that they would continue their research into the presence of Syrian government-owned ships at the Oktyabrsk Port near Mykolaiv and possible business dealings between Syrian and Ukrainian businessmen.
Tom Wallace and Farley Mesko, American researchers for C4ADS think tank and authors of the Odessa Network report on the arms trading, spent 10 months investigating links between Russian weapons sales and the little-known Oktyabrsk port.
While allowing for the possibility that grain was moving through the Oktyabrsk port, Wallace said that the port is more typically a hub for weapons shipments abroad.
Some of the details of the researchers’ findings were released on Sept. 7 in the Washington Post, which ran a story called “Ukrainian port eyed as analysts seek Syria’s arms source.”
While Russia is not violating international law by supporting embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the report’s authors say part of the purpose of their study is to help bring more transparency to the murky arms trade – often to repressive regimes – and to Ukraine’s often hidden role in the transactions.
The authors of the report used data from the ship’s on-board transponders, or tracking devices, to track a number of vessels moving among Russian, Ukrainian and Syrian ports in the past 18 months.
They found that some ships that leave Ukrainian ports turn off their transponders, and weeks later resurface close to the Syrian coast. American experts suggested that Russian weapons were moving through the Ukrainian port to Syria.
“We have noticed that a very high percentage of Russian weapons exported go through the territory of Ukraine on Ukrainian ships owned by Ukrainian companies. The Ukrainian government has said these weapons are not going to Syria and I believe them. But it cannot be denied that the overflow of arms from Russia going to many different customers across the globe is going through Oktyabrsk,” Wallace said.
One of the cases Wallace and Mesko tracked was that of Ocean Fortune, a 380-foot-long (116 meters) vessel that left Oktyabrsk on Jan. 5 and then disappeared from tracking radars on Jan. 9. It reappeared in the southeastern Mediterranean Sea in mid-March.
The authors suggested that they had discovered how Russia provides crucial help to Assad, including supplying the embattled dictator with heavy weapons used to battle opposition forces in the nation’s two-year-old civil war. Russia has defended its right to help Assad, while some Western governments are trying to keep arms away from him and have sided with rebels seeking to overthrow him.
The Washington Post said that the Ukrainian owner of the cargo ship Ocean Fortune provided additional information about the vessel’s route during the time in question. “After publication of the article, the company provided records that it says show that the Ocean Fortune traveled to several ports in the Persian Gulf and India during the voyage in question. These data could not be independently corroborated or disproved by The Post,” the paper said.
Ukrainians officials have also denied that any arms trading goes through Oktyabrsk. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Service for Export Control issued statements denying the accusations, and Andriy Yehorov, head of the Oktyabrsk Port insisted, that his port had not provided arms shipments for Syria for the last two years.
The report did contain a few errors related to Ukraine, though. For example, Ihor Urbanskiy, head of a Ukrainian shipping company which according to the report provided a shipment of Russian weapons to Syria, was called a member of Ukrainian parliament. In fact he left parliament member in 2007.
Also, the report calls Vasyl Tsushko an ex-minister of defense of Ukraine. Tsushko, however, only served as an interior minister in the past.
Wallace and Mesko said after the presentation that they have corrected those mistakes.
Kyiv Post staff writer Anna Babinets can be reached at [email protected].
