Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova revealed on Thursday that “Weapons delivered to Kiev [by the West, NATO and France] end up in the hands of protesters and are used against police in France.” She added that these foreign arms provided to “nationalists, Nazis and fascists on Ukrainian territory backfire and not only end up in their countries [Western countries] but also are used against their own people.”
France is therefore suffering blowback from its state policy towards Ukraine, which isn’t the catalyst of its recent troubles but is nevertheless exacerbating them. It was earlier assessed that “Police Racism Is A Problem In France But So Are Criminal Gangs”, with the latter being the recipients of these Ukrainian-destined Western arms via their connections in the black market. It’s unclear what proportion of these gangs’ arms are from this source, but the fact that even some are derived from there is concerning.
Moscow has repeatedly warned about this scenario but its words fell on deaf ears in the West, which falsely claimed that simply talking about this amounted to so-called “Russian propaganda” despite the US itself later admitting that it deployed “personnel” there to track these same weapons shipments. Had there been no credible concern about those arms being sold on the black market, then the US wouldn’t have put its own forces in harm’s way just to track related shipments inside that war-torn country.
What’s ironic is that Kiev’s forces follow far-right ideologies while the final French recipients of their illegally trafficked Western weapons are the useful idiots of local leftist-liberals. These criminal gangs don’t have an ideology of their own but have been exploited via those latter political groups to indirectly advance their cause after being encouraged by them to carry out nationwide riots last week. In other words, far-right Ukrainians are indirectly arming the proxies of their far-left ideological rivals in France.
There’s no honor among thieves as the saying goes and the black market for arms is driven by profits instead of politics, but the outcome above is still intriguing, especially if one reflects on it. Not only have far-right forces ended up arming far-left ones on the other side of the continent, but they’ve done so via a vast smuggling operation involving weapons from their shared allies that are being put to use against one of those same donor states. A specific sequence of events had to unfold for this to happen.
First, Western arms flooded into Ukraine as part of the proxy war that NATO is waging against Russia there, with no safeguards in place (at least initially and afterwards only imperfectly) despite widespread awareness of this recipient state’s corruption before the conflict began. Whether innocently out of haste or partially driven by the ulterior motive of using that country to clandestinely facilitate the export of Western weapons across the Global South, the fact is that this problem was avoidable from the get-go.
Second, members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and allied far-right militias decided to sell these foreign-supplied arms – whether to Western or Global South non-state clients – instead of employing them against Russia like they were intended. Third, whatever institutional safeguards formally existed in that country for preventing these weapons from being redirected away from the battlefield either failed and/or were also compromised by corrupt elements, either of which reflects very poorly on Kiev.
Fourth, however it ended up happening, these illegally trafficked arms were smuggled into the EU in spite of that bloc claiming to have implemented proper security procedures to safeguard against this. Like with Ukraine’s previously mentioned institutions, their European counterparts either failed and/or were also compromised by corrupt elements, which reflects very poorly on them too. And finally, these weapons ultimately ended up in the hands of French criminal gangs who then used them against police.
This last step of the analyzed sequence that unfolded from the moment that Ukraine received its Western arms to them being deployed against the French security forces is the most dangerous case of blowback from this proxy war thus far. It’s one thing for many average folks to experience socio-economic difficulties after the cost of living spiked across the continent and another entirely for them to live in fear of criminal gangs that are partially armed by weapons from the West’s own NATO alliance.
Nevertheless, it’s unlikely that France and others will curtail their export of military equipment to Kiev despite this latest instance of blowback literally endangering the lives of the former’s security forces. That said, some French populists might attempt to raise maximum awareness of this outcome to inspire those state employees who are now at greater risk of harm to pressure their higher-ups to do something about it, which could lead to public support for this proxy war plunging if it becomes a major scandal.
