Arms Production, Transfers and Secret Shipments

In parallel with the foreign military training, the Ukrainian arms industry, blocked by NATO sanctions from working with its former Russian customers, is converting its production to meet NATO's codification and standardization. NATO standardization is a dictate to open the doors of the "allies" to the giant arms oligopolies and to take over national defence production. The privatization of the state-owned Ukroboronprom, comprising 134 defence companies employing tens of thousands of workers, mainly in Central and Southern Ukraine, tops the agenda. CBC reports, "Canadian companies are also finding plenty of opportunity as Ukraine retools its defence industry. Pratt & Whitney Canada, Esterline/CMC Electronics, IMP Aerospace, and L-3 Wescam all have joint projects with Ukroboronprom." On March 10, TASS reported a statement from Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova who said, "according to the information that we have, Canada has begun to supply the Ukrainian military with ammunition that is sure to be delivered to the conflict zone." While maintaining the pretense that it was supplying "non-lethal" weaponry, Canada privatized the supply of lethal weaponry to the fascist militias through the creation of Army SOS, a so-called NGO organized by the highest levels of the state through the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, as well as by the Canadian unit of Pravi Sektor (Right Sector) terrorist organization. The armed organization, which played a major role in overthrowing the Yanukovich government, originated as an alliance of right-wing extremist groups. Army SOS maintains a warehouse and a drone factory in Kiev. It has supplied military equipment, including parts for weapons such as sniper rifles, tripwire detonators, targeting software, encrypted communication equipment and drones, directly to the front lines. This has frequently meant bypassing Ukrainian government control and working directly with "nationalist" and outright fascist militias, over which the Kiev regime has only partial control. Wrote Mark MacKinnon in the Globe and Mail , "Most obviously, the fundraising campaign is going where no country, including Canada, is willing to go -- supplying sometimes-lethal equipment to Ukrainian fighters, including irregulars." Lenna Koszarny, head of the Kiev arm of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, is in charge of distributing arms from both Army SOS and the Department of National Defence. An activist in the "Orange Revolution," Koszarny is an investment banker, who became head of Horizons Capital when Poroshenko appointed Natalie Jaresko, an American citizen and former U.S. State Dept. official, his Minister of Finance in December 2014. Horizons Capital is an official "partner" of the Atlantic Council of NATO, an elite U.S. think-tank and propaganda centre. At the same time, the Canadian government gave the fascist organization Right Sector and the neo-Nazi Svoboda party, which has had an office in Mississauga, Greater Toronto Area since 2010, carte blanche to publicly recruit Canadian nationals to join fascist and terrorist militias in violation of Canadian law, specifically the Foreign Enlistment Act , 1939 , which makes it illegal for Canadians to enlist in conflicts where the Canadian government was not a belligerent, and still applies to this day. This fundraising is done openly, and the Harper government even approved charitable status for Army SOS to facilitate its work. They received further support from the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star . The owner of a Toronto optometrist firm, one Richard Hareychuk, boasted to the Globe and Mail columnist about how much money he and his associates were raising, saying "he raised funds for Army SOS because it gets help to those actually doing the fighting, regardless of whether it's the regular army or the volunteer battalions." In August 2016 then-Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Chris Alexander, NDP MP Peggy Nash and Ontario Liberal Premier Katherine Wynne participated in Toronto's Ukrainian Festival, which featured a recruiting and fundraising booth for the Right Sector organization. There are reports that Canada also participated in a clandestine program of weapons shipments to Ukraine. In a detailed article tracking the international flights and route of a Ukrainian Antonov (AN 124) that was apparently ferrying arms from a number of NATO and U.S. air terminals over the course of a year to Ukraine and other countries, American journalist Wayne Madsen reported in February 3, 2015 that: "On May 14, 2014, the Ukrainian Antonov was seen at Calgary International Airport in Alberta. Calgary is a major nexus for the Canadian and American military-industrial complex, hosting Raytheon Canada's missile production division and plants producing the rotary Phalanx machine gun and infrared and targeting equipment for armored vehicles, and General Dynamics, Harris Corporation, and NovAtel factories manufacturing everything from avionics systems to satellite communications gear." Plane spotters have also on more than one occasion seen huge yellow and blue Antonovs at Edmonton and Toronto airports and posted photos on their web sites. Madsen went on to enumerate the many places this massive military transport plane had appeared in the previous year, including Calgary.[1] Note 1. Wayne Madsen, "American Lethal Military Aid to Ukraine is a Throwback to Iran-Contra Days," Strategic Culture , February 3, 2015. (TML Weekly Supplement No. 23, June 24, 2017)