On October 8, 2023, a Georgian-speaking Facebook user published a video showing a gun against the background of a man’s voice in Arabic. According to the description, the Ukrainians sold weapons to Hamas, and they are thanking the Ukrainian authorities for it. In addition, on October 8, one of the Facebook users published a post stating that the arrested Hezbollah terrorists testified and, according to an Israeli military intelligence officer, Arakhamia, Podolyak, and Mamulashvili were negotiating with them for weapons. In the comments of the post, the author did not indicate the source of the said statement; however, it cites a video uploaded on Bitchute, as well as the post published by the Ukrainian blogger Nikolai Dulsky with an identical video.
The claims voiced in videos and posts that are actively circulated by Russian, pro-Russian, and anti-Western accounts are without evidence. No information about the confession of a member of Hezbollah about negotiations with Ukraine can be found in open sources. In the past, Russian propaganda has repeatedly voiced accusations that the weapons given to Ukraine by the West end up on the black market, which was aimed at reducing the aid received from the West. However, so far, there is no evidence to support such allegations.
In the video, which is circulating on social networks, a man can be heard speaking in Arabic. He says that they are thanking the Ukrainian authorities for supplying them with weapons that will be used against their enemies, Israel. In the short video, the speaker cannot be seen, and it is impossible to determine the location and time of filming. The video is actively distributed on Russian Telegram channels. It did not cause any response in the Israeli or international media. The representatives of Ukraine and Israel did not comment on the video either.
Information about Hezbollah talks with Arakhamia, Podolyak, and Mamulashvili and the alleged testimony of a member of the group cannot be found in open sources.
“Myth Detector” contacted the arms expert Giga Inashvili. He explained that the footage shows the anti-tank NLAW that Britain supplied to Ukraine. Also, M2 type and M-240 type machine guns, M-4 machine guns, and under it the Czech BREN 2 machine gun. According to him, these weapons were captured by the Russians in large quantities, and there is a high probability that they got into the hands of Hamas through the Russians. Therefore, there is no evidence that these weapons were supplied by the Ukrainians to Hamas.
As evidence of the video’s authenticity, Russian Telegram channels cite an interview given by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the Jerusalem Post in June, in which he cited two reasons why they refrain from handing over weapons to Ukraine. According to Netanyahu, one reason is the close military border with Russia in Syria, and the second reason he explained as follows:
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel: “we also have concerns that any systems that we give to Ukraine would be used against us because they could fall into Iranian hands and be used against us. And by the way, that’s not a theoretical possibility. It actually happened with the Western anti-tank weapons that we now find at our borders. So we have to be very careful here.”
Notably, in the interview, Netanyahu did not blame the Ukrainian authorities for the discovery of Western weapons near the borders of Israel, and did not say anything about the ways in which these weapons could have been found there.
A statement released by the Institute for the Study of War on October 7 said that the Kremlin is actively using Hamas’s attack on Israel for information operations aimed at weakening US and Western support for Ukraine.
The discovery of arms transferred to Ukraine on the black market is one of the main messages of Russian propaganda aimed at weakening Western support for Ukraine.
A similar message, as if Western weapons are not going to the Ukrainian army, but end up directly on the black market, was spread in the Bulgarian media as early as September 2022, based on the comments of one of the experts. According to EUvsDisinfo, there is no evidence to support this, and the narrative that Western military aid to Ukraine is not being monitored is untrue.
Claims in Russian propaganda media that Ukrainians were selling US-supplied weapons on the dark web have been verified by the BBC’s disinformation team and found to be false.
The claim based on the report of one of the Mexican TV channels, as if the Western weapons transferred to Ukraine ended up in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels, was also unfounded. According to Euronews, an excerpt from the Mexican broadcast was mistranslated and did not say that the weapons entered Mexico from Ukraine. As Euronews found out, the video did not actually show the Javelin, but the Swedish AT4, which costs much less and is widely used by the military forces of Latin American countries, including Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. Euronews also interviewed experts, who said that it is unlikely that the weapons came into the hands of drug cartels from Ukraine.
In a statement issued by the US State Department on October 27, 2022, it was stated that the government of Ukraine accepts the responsibility to protect and account for the military equipment supplied by the US. The State Department notes that due to the chaotic nature of the war, this will be difficult to accomplish, although the U.S. will help Ukraine protect and account for the weapons. For this purpose, the negotiations and cooperation between the US and Ukraine are going on intensively, including through the inspections carried out by the US in Ukraine.
Despite the measures taken, there are cases where Western weapons and equipment were stolen by criminal organizations in Ukraine. According to the Pentagon Inspector General’s report, Russian organizations are among them. The report cites a case where members of an organized crime group led by a Russian official (who has not been identified) joined a volunteer battalion with forged documents and tried to steal weapons, but Ukrainian intelligence has unmasked their plan.
Dissemination of the Video
The distribution of the video on Russian Telegram channels began on October 7, 2023. Russian Telegram channel СВЕЖЕСТИ was one of the first to publish it. Russian actor Andrey Bocharov shared the video on his Telegram channel and then posted it on his Twitter account. Also, on October 7, an identical video appeared on the YouTube channel Kepler, which is managed from Russia, uses Soviet symbols and actively spreads Russian military propaganda. On October 7, an identical video was published by the Russian social network Vkontakte page Сила в правде.
Soon after, Illia Kyva, a former member of the Rada of Ukraine from the opposition platform of the pro-Russian, Eurosceptic party, shared an identical video on his Telegram channel. His mandate was suspended in 2022 after he supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is worth noting that before the video was released on the Internet, Kyva published a post on Telegram, in which he accused Volodymyr Zelenskyy of selling weapons on the black market in the Middle East, and said that evidence of this would soon appear.
On October 8, the video was also shared by pro-Russian Telegram channels 184 регион | Херсонская область and Новокаховская ПРАВДА, as well as YouTube channel Wargasm, from which the video was later deleted. According to the description of the channel, it shows “both sides of the conflict” about the ongoing war in Ukraine and “does not choose sides,” which is why their videos are not covered by “Western mainstream media.” The channel often publishes statements of the Ministry of Defense of Russia and videos of Russian military equipment and operations, as well as videos of damage to Ukrainian equipment and capture of military personnel.
As for the sources cited in the Georgian posts, the videos were published on October 8. The video was uploaded to Bitchute by user wokchefjosh, who has been actively promoting videos containing pro-Russian, anti-Western content and conspiracy theories.
Nikolai Dulsky is a Ukrainian activist and the founder of the movement “Гражданский контроль “Наждак.” He calls himself a socialist politician. His Telegram posts are particularly critical of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government.
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