According to the US military, the western nation has provided Ukraine with around 1.1 million ammunition rounds that were taken from Iran last year.
The rounds were seized from a ship in December, according to the US Central Command (Centcom), which is in charge of overseeing operations in the Middle East. According to Centcom, Ukraine received the Iranian rounds on Monday.
Recently, Ukraine’s Western partners warned that they were having trouble keeping up with the country’s rapid ammunition consumption.
According to the statement, the weapons were initially taken by US naval troops from the stateless ship MARWAN 1 on December 9.
The US government acquired possession of them in July through a procedure known as civil forfeiture which allows an item to be confiscated if its owner is deemed to be indulging in some kind of illegal activities.
A division of the Iranian military forces entrusted with upholding the nation’s government, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was the target of the accusation in this instance.
The US was “committed to working with our allies and partners to counter the flow of Iranian lethal aid in the region by all lawful means,” according to a statement from Centcom.
Iran supports the Houthi rebels in Yemen’s continuing civil conflict, although UN Security Council resolution from 2015 prohibits the organisation from receiving military deliveries. When the Houthis seized power in Sanaa, the nation’s capital, and overthrew the government, the civil war officially broke out in 2014.
Adm. Rob Bauer, head of Nato’s Military Committee, claimed that the “bottom of the barrel is now visible” during a debate on the West’s ammunition shipments to Ukraine on Monday at the Warsaw Security Forum. “The just-in-time, just-enough economy we built together in 30 years in our liberal economies is fine for a lot of things – but not the armed forces when there is a war ongoing,” he said.
He said that due to years of underfunding, the NATO nations’ ammunition inventories were only half full or perhaps less when the conflict first broke out. Governments and arms producers, he continued, needed to “ramp up production in a much higher tempo”.
James Heappey, the UK’s defence minister, asked Nato partners to spend 2% of their national income on defence, a goal that was set by all 31 members of the alliance but is only projected to be fulfilled by 11 of them this year.
As the Biden administration searches for alternatives to aiding Ukraine in the face of opposition from some in Congress, the shipment of the Iranian munitions also occurs.
