France, Germany, 10 EU nations sold defense kit to Russia in breach of own embargoes

France, Germany, and at least 10 other European nations sold £230million worth of military hardware and defensive kits to Moscow which was used by Kremlin during the war in Ukraine, an EU analysis revealed. The selling of the weapon systems was apparently ‘illegal’ under the EU embargo that bans the arms sale to Russia after the 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russians. Primarily,  France, Germany and Italy have exploited the loophole in the arms embargo and exported missiles, rockets, guns and bombs to Moscow, as first reported by UK’s The Telegraph. 

EU nations flowed arms to Moscow in breach of own embargo imposed post Crimean annexation

The wide ranging report revealed that EU nations evaded the sanctions that banned “the direct or indirect sale, supply, transfer or export of arms and related material of all types, including weapons and ammunition, military vehicles and equipment, paramilitary equipment, and spare parts, therefore, to Russia.”

The embargo was inacted by European Union eight years ago, however, the EU nations flowed in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of arms in breach of the contracts signed before August 1, 2014, as per the report. France sold defence equipment to Russia worth €152 million as part of 76 export licences, pushing the total sales to €1billion by Europe. Germany had been supplying Russia with tanks and howitzers that were used by the Russian troops in its special military intervention in Ukraine. 

German chancellor faces blacklash over 'double standards' 

The report comes at a time when Germany’s chancellor is facing growing pressure to authorise the delivery of heavy weaponry to Ukraine as Russia enters the second phase of the military offensive in the eastern Donbass region and Southern Ukraine. While Olaf Scholz’s coalition partners accused the German leader of failing to assist Ukraine, an EU ally with more advanced arms, citing German defence policy on weapons, the explosive report finds that Berlin assisted Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. This is in contrast to many other NATO countries that have scrambled to supply vital armaments to Kyiv to deter Moscow’s aggression on its territory. 

“Ukraine crisis is entirely engineered by Russia and President Putin as an overt act of coercion against Ukraine,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley had said at a briefing. But Germany, in addition to Russia, sold South Korea heavy weaponry to deter DPRK’s Kim Jong Un regime. German arms supply peaked in 2017 in the crisis hit Korean Peninsula as it rapamtly supplied cruise missiles and howitzers to fuel South Korea’s offensives against the North. Berlin recently agreed to provide Ukraine with £830million in aid, adding that sending heavy arms would not only upset Putin but could lead to nuclear war. EU had continued arms supply to Moscow, fuelling the crisis. 

UK pressurizes India to flow weapons to eastern EU 

Just recently, the deputy commander of Russia's central military district, Rustam Minnekayev, said that Moscow plans to establish a corridor between Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which Russia annexed in 2014, and the Donbas region, indicating that its brutal war might spill over to other occupied regions. The UK meanwhile, which is looking to backfill British tanks to Poland for its supply to Ukraine had recently expressed concerns about prospects of India’s export of spare military parts to Russia, and that the latter could evade an international arms embargo in this way.

UK’s Prime Minister in his speech made during his India visit told reporters here: “We’re looking at sending tanks to Poland to help them as they sending some of their T-72s to Ukraine.” In what may have been under the West’s pressure, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to “contemplate” sending Challenger 2 tanks to eastern Europe to replace Soviet-era T-72 tanks that were deployed by the UK in the Iraq War.