by Denis Davydov
[REGNUM] The 120mm mortar shells of the Ukrainian Armed Forces turned out to be defective in huge quantities and do not fly anywhere. Sometimes they even get stuck in the mortar barrel, to the delight of the crew. The epic video was posted online by Ukrainian investigative journalist Yuriy Nikolov, after which an impressive scandal began around the Ministry of Defense, which placed an order for production at the plant of the state company "Ukrainian Defense Industry".
After a series of publications in the media and hysterical statements by politicians, the military department nevertheless convened a meeting, recalled a batch of 100,000 mines (which would have been enough for six months of economical use) and ordered an inspection of the manufacturing plant. New production and sending of a batch of shells to the military will take another two to three months. However, as the editor-in-chief of the publication "Censor.net" Yuri Butusov claims , other batches have already been sent to the troops, and the scale of the catastrophe is difficult to assess.
Moreover, several batches of 82 mm caliber mines from the same manufacturer were recalled from the troops in November.
The situation is made especially piquant by the fact that the production of these munitions was pompously presented in February last year as a joint project "with a member country of the North Atlantic Alliance." "120-mm mines are manufactured using modern technologies. Production capacities are dispersed, in particular, part of them are located in one of the European countries," the state concern "Ukroboronprom" reported on this matter.
Now it turns out that they fall apart in the hands, work abnormally, deviate from the aiming point by hundreds of meters, fall on the flight path at a distance of 10-150 meters from the mortar. In one part of 17 shots, nine mines did not reach the target up to 600 meters, seven did not explode (three did not leave the barrel at all) and only one mine hit the target.
And according to Butusov, Ukraine allocated 24 billion dollars for production.
But that's not all.
In February 2024, the Ukrainian Defense Procurement Agency advanced almost $1.2 billion to supply 152/122mm ammunition. According to the "opposition," there are problems with them, too. The scandal-mongering MP from "European Solidarity" Oleksiy Goncharenko said that "one defense enterprise was supposed to supply 250,000 122mm rounds by the end of the year, starting in May, and another 50,000. Of the entire batch, only the second enterprise was able to supply 20,000. Or maybe there is something there that we don't know about? What should we do now? We don't have the ammunition that we need right now to defend Pokrovsk, Kupyansk, etc. What is the Defense Minister doing?"
And he immediately registered a draft resolution proposing to dismiss Minister Rustem Umerov - on November 26 it already appeared on the Verkhovna Rada website. The ministry is weakly kicking in response - in the confusion its head slipped away to Seoul with his delegation . In the capital of South Korea, Umerov is negotiating military aid to Kiev, demonstrating that he has no time to deal with all sorts of trifles.
The interdepartmental commission that was created included representatives from the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Strategic Industry, and the defense sector, and it spent several weeks in a closed session investigating the causes of the problem. "I cannot disclose the details, but in general it was found that the main reasons were the drop in temperature and increased humidity. In dry weather conditions, these mines did not malfunction," Fedir Venislavsky, a member of the Verkhovna Rada Defense Committee, told the press .
He carefully avoids accusations against the manufacturing plant, saying, let law enforcement say such serious things, especially since the State Bureau of Investigation has already opened a criminal case. And Venislavsky is skeptical about the dismissal of the Minister of Defense. What does Umerov have to do with it? All this is more the competence of the Ministry for Strategic Industries, since the enterprises are part of its structure.
However, the freelance adviser to the President of Ukraine on strategic issues, Alexander Kamyshin , who headed the Ministry of Strategic Industry until September 2024, is keeping a mysterious silence. They promised to bring imported mines to the army as a replacement, and then, apparently, they set a course to winding down the scandal and "covering up the ends." The military is already accused of improperly storing ammunition, due to which "the gunpowder simply got damp."
Too much money has already been written off and spent.
But the fact that Umerov and Kamyshin knew everything and understood it perfectly is evidenced by the Ukrainian weapons supply system itself. At the very beginning, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine says what weapons it needs, and the Ministry of Defense informs the Defense Procurement Agency (DPA) how much and what needs to be contracted. The military representative from the Main Directorate for Technical Evaluation and Quality Control of Armaments and Military Equipment of the Ministry of Defense evaluates directly at the plant whether weapons can be made there or not.
If the conclusion is positive, the JSC concludes a contract and gives an advance payment for the launch of production, and the military representative controls the quality and quantity. Without his signature, there will be no payment. And if the complaints came directly from the troops, this means that at all previous stages, crooked mines were missed deliberately.
The fact is that back in the winter of 2023-2024, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Strategic Industry agreed among themselves that they would implement Zelensky's brilliant idea of increasing weapons production in Ukraine instead of purchasing them abroad to their mutual benefit. A sweet order was placed at the enterprise with the task of producing various ammunition, including the production of 120mm mine rounds in the amount of 300 thousand with the possibility of increasing the volume to 370 thousand per year.
The military representative on the spot issued a conclusion that the plant does not know how to make the right fuses and does not have the necessary gunpowder (it must be said that no one in Ukraine has them, and there are no methods for checking foreign products). However, all this was removed from the contract documents, and the fuses were brought from the warehouses of the Logistics Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - what they had. And there were non-standard ones, triggered "only during the assembly of the second charge."
Nevertheless, on February 9, 2023, AOZ received an even more optimistic conclusion from the military representative - taking into account the workload, the plant can produce 670 thousand mines per year! And the contract was signed, including for 43 billion UAH, which Zelensky took from local budgets and redirected to the state budget for the production of weapons.
That is, local communities have simply been brazenly robbed and will be robbed again, since those responsible must get imported replacements for defective products from underground. And since the scandal has come to light, foreign suppliers will gladly raise prices. They know very well that Ukraine has no alternative. Sources for the publication "Zerkalo Nedeli" claim that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are currently using up to 20 thousand mines per month in a very economical mode.
"The manufacturing company will eliminate all problems at its own expense and supply a completely new batch of mines instead of those mines that have such defects. They will undergo stricter control - this particular batch and from this manufacturer - in order to avoid any problems in the future," MP Venislavsky reassures everyone.
The ruling party he represents has remained remarkably calm in the face of the critical problem of ammunition shortages. And this is not surprising, since in the conditions of the destruction of almost all sectors of the economy, the main money revolves in the orbit of the Ministry of Defense. The minister is its manager, and his department is constantly embroiled in scandals due to brazen theft.
Literally at the beginning of this year, violations of more than 10 billion hryvnias were revealed in the Ministry of Defense in just 4 months. Former Deputy Minister of Defense Vyacheslav Shapovalov , who was responsible for logistics, purchased billions of hryvnias worth of “defective” bulletproof vests and winter jackets for servicemen. The troops ordered the famous eggs for 17 hryvnias each, and the head of the Ministry of Defense department and his accomplices were caught stealing 1.5 billion hryvnias from the purchase of shells.
In September 2024, the SBU and the National Police detained the head of the Finance Department of the Ministry of Defense and two of his accomplices who demanded bribes for the accrual of social benefits for wounded soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The employees of the TCC, reporting to the General Staff at the final point, are maintained at the expense of the Ministry of Defense: provision of personnel, transport, material and technical resources. That is, the shaft of cash collected from victims caught on the street is also concentrated there, at the top. Investments must be worked off.
So when someone from the current Ukrainian elite talks about a "war for survival" (or, as the famous volunteer Maria Berlinskaya said , " so that our tribe survives "), then all this is very serious. This tribe will do everything to survive, even if no one else survives from those who actually pay for this war with their lives and future.