300 Military Vehicles ‘Missing’ From Ukrainian Army Warehouses
Between the period of November 29, 2015 and January 24, 2016, the Ukrainian Army lost 300 units of heavy military weaponry, including artillery rocket systems, Lukashevich said.
The last time Kyiv provided a list of its heavy military weaponry in army warehouses was on November 29, 2015, Lukashevich said. Since then a few hundred military vehicles have simply “vanished” from warehouses.
“The number of ‘missing’ heavy military equipment from the warehouses of the Ukrainian Army increased [between December 25, 2015 and January 24, 2016 alone, the armed forces lost 180 units of military equipment]. In the updated list provided by Kyiv on January 13, there are by 300 units of heavy military equipment less than they had said last time on November 29, 2015,” Russia’s envoy said during an OSCE conference.
The Ukrainian Army is known for its poor management and the lack of discipline. Equipment is missing, soldiers have deserted the armed forces and military vehicles have major manufacturing defects.
For example, last summer the Ukrainian weekly Zerkalo Nedeli (ZN) reported that only one-third of armored vehicles the army received in 2014 and 2015 were in service due to extremely poor manufacturing. Meanwhile, in the spring of 2015, President Poroshenko said that nearly 30 percent of Ukrainian servicemen had deserted in 2014, abandoning their positions.
The OSCE monitoring mission was deployed to eastern Ukraine to observe the implementation of peace agreements reached by the two sides in the Belarusian capital of Minsk with mediation by Russia, France and Germany first in September 2014 and then in February 2015.
Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions have been targeted by Kyiv’s military operations since April 2014, after local residents refused to recognize the new Ukrainian government, which came to power as the result of a coup.