Arms trade

Analyst: US Anti-Tank Weapons in Ukraine Could Cause ‘Serious Escalation’

The US State Department announced on Friday that they had finalized a deal to supply high-end ordnance to the Ukrainian military, including Javelin anti-tank missiles. Both Washington and Kiev insisted that the weapons were solely for defensive purposes.

Brian Becker and Walter Smolarek of Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear spoke to Mark Sleboda, a Russia-based international relations and security analyst and frequent critic of US and NATO policy, about the deal.

..."This is one of the most advanced anti-tank weapons in the US arsenal: it is much more it advanced than the [BGM-71] TOW anti-tank weapons that the US was supplying to sectarian militants in Syria allied with al-Qaeda and it also ended up in [Daesh's] hands. These anti-tank weapons haven't actually been field tested against the most modern Russian tanks, but that's not actually what's on the battlefield, the frozen conflict zone. The militias in east Ukraine, in Donbass, are armed with the exact type of older Soviet model tanks that the Ukrainian military is armed with, and the javelin would indeed make short work of them.