“With this weapons transfer, the justice department’s forfeiture actions against one authoritarian regime are now directly supporting the Ukrainian people’s fight against another authoritarian regime,” the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said on Wednesday. The 1.1m 7.62mm rounds were seized on 9 December 2022 from a stateless dhow, Marwan1, by naval vessels of US Central Command. The US said the munitions had been sent by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and were bound for its Houthi allies in the Yemeni civil war. Since then they have been warehoused in the Middle East, and a forfeiture claim was launched in a US court in March. The transfer of seized Iranian weapons to Ukraine has come at a time of concern among western defence ministries over their continuing capacity to arm Kyiv in the face of a relentless war of attrition being waged by Russia.

Source: The Guardian October 05, 2023 04:32 UTC