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Several hundred decommissioned Soviet-built surface-to-air missiles are unaccounted for in Ukraine's military arsenal, the defense minister told a newspaper. Defense Minister Yevhen Marchuk, in an interview published in the newspaper Den, appeared to suggest the missiles may have been dismantled without proper accounting, rather than stolen or sold. "We are looking for several hundred missiles," Marchuk was quoted as saying in Thursday?s edition. "They have already been decommissioned, but we cannot find them". Marchuk didn't specify the types of missile.
| SA-2's, SA-3's, that sort of missile wouldn't be much to worry about. Kind of hard to smuggle from place to place. SA-7's and SA-14's are a different story. |
Defense Ministry spokesman Kostyantyn Khivrenko told The Associated Press that he was referring to S-75 air defense missiles ? also known in the West by the code-name SA-2. Marchuk said the Defense Ministry hadn't observed the accounting requirements established by law until last summer, an apparent jab at his predecessors.
| Ukraine doesn't give me warm fuzzies when it comes to their efficiency. But I'm not particularly worried about surprise attacks by terrs armed with 30-year-old SA-2s... |
Hundreds of such missiles from Soviet arsenals in Warsaw Pact member countries had been brought to Ukraine for dismantling but were lost due to "accounting problems," Khivrenko said. He said the absence of records documenting what happened to the missiles was "strange," and added that an investigation was under way. It was the same type of missile that brought down a U.S. U-2 spy plane over the Ural Mountains in 1960.
| Make that 40-year-old missiles... |
Marchuk blamed his predecessors for not observing proper accounting standards while dealing with the missiles and other weapons. "They say they were destroyed. OK, destroyed," Marchuk said. "Every such missile has gold, silver, platinum metals. Where are the results of their destruction?" Marchuk said that when he became minister, "no one knew what the armed forces had," and after nine months in the job he still doesn't have a handle on it precise information. He said that inventories of military equipment had revealed a gaping hole equivalent to some $189 billion. In comparison, Ukraine's entire budget last year was less than $10 billion. |