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Opinion
August 25, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 19
the state body tasked with combating arms traf- ficking: vul Frunze 19-21 in Kyiv (recently renamed as vul Kirilivska). This makes Turchinov’s claim that the existing system of state export controls precludes such illicit transfers dangerously wrong.
When this correspondent gatecrashed the GST Ukraine office in the autum of 2014, I saw fold- ers bearing the name Yushmash Avia – the air cargo division of state-owned rocket engine builder Pivdenmash (Yushmash in Russian), which the NYT pointed to as the most likely source of North Korea’s engines.
This casts doubt on Turchinov’s claims that Ukraine’s export control service prevents any breaches of sanctions. Instead, it raises the pos- sibility that organized crime interests long present in Ukraine’s state arms trading sector are actively scheming to breach international sanctions.
Address to depress
That North Korea acquired its latest and most successful rocket engines from Ukraine remains a matter of conjecture. But there is a track record since Ukrainian independence of sanctions-bust- ing behaviour relating to both North Korea and Iran that makes it too large a risk to ignore. And a lot of this sanctions-busting activity was based at the address of Ukraine’s State Export Control Service – the body tasked with combating the country’s arms trafficking.
Thus, Lunov in the late 1990s ran a firm called Antonov-Aerotrack Aviaservis. Antonov-Aerotrack Aviaservis was registered at the same address, and even with the same telephone number, as GST Ukraine has today, ie. the same address as the State Export Control Service.
Lunov’s 1990s firm was a subsidiary of Antonov Aerotrack Aviation, a controversial cargo flier partly owned by Ukrainian state defence and aviation firms. The rest was owned by alleged organised crime interests, including the notorious Austrian firm Nordex, run by controversial busi- nessman Grigory Louchansky. “The CIA reported that it [Nordex] deals in various schemes from illegal arms trading to money laundering for the Russian mob,” the US Embassy in Kyiv wrote in a Crime Digest circular from April 1999.
In 1996, CIA sources told Time magazine that in 1995 Nordex had flown Scud missile launcher parts from North Korea to Iran, using a Ukrainian- registered Antonov Aerotrack plane, via Kyiv. CIA sources also told Time that Nordex had trans- ferred nuclear materials to Iran in 1993-94.
In 2001, the sanctions-busting network apparently struck again: Kazakh cargo flyer GST Aero alleg- edly smuggled a Ukrainian X-55 ‘Kent’ nuclear- capable cruise missile out of Ukraine to Iran. The facts were established by a later investigation by Ukraine’s parliamentary organised crime commit- tee, and an associated criminal investigation lead- ing to charges. GST Aero was renamed East Wing before its involvement in the 2009 attempt to smuggle 35 tonnes of North Korean weaponry out to Iran in breach of sanctions.
None of this means that this network transferred Pivdenmash rocket engines to North Korea. But it does mean that an infrastructure is in place in Ukraine that could do so – and it is located at the very heart of Ukraine’s system of export controls. This is what Turchinov should have been inves- tigating instead of conducting what looks like a whitewash.