Griffiths, Hugh and Aaron Karp. 2008 ‘Ukraine: Coping with Post-Soviet Legacies: Negotiating over guns.’ Inconspicuous disarmament: The politics of destroying surplus small arms and ammunition; 29 (1), p. 215. Arlington, VA: Contemporary Security Policy. 1 April

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Coping with Post-Soviet Legacies: Negotiating over guns

Donor governments were not delighted by the Ukrainian definition of surplus, which included mainly older types of weapons (Figure 4). Modern, automatic weapons, particularly Kalashnikov-type variants and derivatives, were kept aside in hope of finding foreign buyers…

[N]o SALW of this type were declared as surplus until 2003, when, as part of efforts to win financial support from donor governments, Ukrainian officials initially offered 70,000 Kalashnikovs for surplus destruction.

NATO-NAMSA negotiators won increases in the number of AK-47-type derivatives for destruction, with a final figure of 212,719 arrived at in January 2007. (53)…

These weapons were to be destroyed as part of the first phase of the NATO-NAMSA project, which had secured sufficient funding and Ukrainian government agreements to proceed. This first stage of the project would see some 400,000 SALW destroyed, the majority of them modern, conflict-sensitive weapons (Figure 5, p. 217).

Sources cited:

53) Author interviews with Steve Brown, Head, NAMSA Project Office, Kiev, February 2007.

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