BBC investigation: Darknet reports of US arms trade to Ukraine turned out to be Russian fakes

Russian state channels and pro-Russian Telegram channels have repeatedly written about the fact that American weapons, which are transferred to Ukraine, are quietly sold on the darknet. It turned out that all these were fake Russian ads.

This is stated in the BBC investigation.

Journalists decided to independently check the reported of Russian channels. They really found such proposals and began to study them in detail. In the ads, the "sellers" really promised to supply NATO weapons to anyone willing to pay. Kyiv was indicated as a geotag, but the name of the capital in Ukrainian was written incorrectly.

One such "seller", which was often mentioned by Russian channels, is called Weapons Ukraine. He writes that he has allegedly successfully completed 32 deals for the sale of American weapons. However, the journalists found that the photos from the ads do not always correspond to the description. Moreover, they were made several years before the start of a full-scale war in Ukraine.

For example, in one of the ads, the "seller" used a photo of an M4 carbine taken as far back as 2014. And on the offer for the sale of the Switchblade drone, a photo of such a drone shot down in Syria was photoshopped.

Later, the journalists decided to contact the sellers and ask for details about the "purchase" of weapons. The first thing that caught my eye was the large number of mistakes when communicating in Ukrainian. To a direct question about errors, the "seller" replied that he was allegedly from Poland. However, linguistics experts are sure that the message was actually written by a Russian-speaking person — and the Ukrainian messages were accurately translated by an online translator from Russian, and not, for example, from Polish.

In addition, the company KELA, which specializes in the analysis of cybercrime threats, conducted its own research to analyze the trading platform itself, where the ads for the sale of weapons appeared. There, it is considered suspicious, since activity on the site is minimal, and experienced users of the darknet have never heard of him.

• On August 4, the film Arming Ukraine was aired on the CBS TV channel. It quoted the words of a Lithuanian volunteer, the founder of the non-profit organization Blue-Yellow Jonas Ohman, who stated that only 30% of the weapons transferred reach the front. The founder of the Mozart Group military company, Andy Milborn, also said in the film that some of the Western weapons do not reach the front lines.
• Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the Presidentʼs Office, said that rumors about the black market of weapons are the handiwork of Russian propaganda.
• Prior to this, on July 21, the official representative of Europol, Jan Op Gen Oort, in a comment to German journalists, stated that Europol detects signs of arms smuggling from Ukraine. There are cases of trade in firearms and military goods on the black market. According to the representative of Europol, cases were recorded when people left Ukraine with firearms. There are also fears that weapons and ammunition are stored along the border for further smuggling into the EU.
• Prior to that, the Verkhovna Rada created a Temporary Investigative Commission on monitoring the receipt and use of international material and technical aid during martial law.
• The EU said that the information about "arms smuggling by Ukraine" supplied to it by its allies is an intensive disinformation campaign initiated by Russia. The U.S. also sees no signs that Ukraine can smuggle the provided weapons out of the country: "We see no signs that these weapons went anywhere other than to fight the Russians."