Is the Ukrainian Military Selling ‘Up To Half’ of Its U.S.-Provided Weapons?

Tucker Carlson claimed on a recent video podcast that Ukraine’s military has been selling U.S.-provided weaponry to buyers on the black market, emphasizing repeatedly that he knew this “for a fact.” Some of these U.S.-provided arms, Carlson asserted, have ended up in the hands of drug cartels operating near the U.S.-Mexican border. 

“Fact—not guess, fact—is the Ukrainian military is selling a huge percentage, up to half, of the arms we send them,” Carlson said on The Tucker Carlson Show February 10 while interviewing retired Lt. Col. Daniel Davis. “Half. And I’m not guessing this, I know that for a fact. A fact, okay, not speculation.” Carlson continued, claiming, “they’re selling it and a lot of it is winding up with the drug cartels on our border.” He added that U.S. intelligence has been complicit in the alleged activity. “Our intel agencies are fully aware of this, you tell me they’re not profiting from this, of course. You think CIA is not profiting from this, yes, they are. Can’t prove that, but I believe that,” he said. “We’re sending these arms to Ukraine, billions—hundreds of billions of dollars—and it’s being stolen and sold to our actual enemies.”

He implied that news organizations could verify his claims by finding such weapons for sale online. “You know, the New York Times can get on the web and order Ukrainian weapons,” said Carlson, a former Fox News host who started a podcast after his Fox contract was terminated. “That’s a fact, I’m not guessing, that’s a fact. They could do that today.” 

Carlson’s claims lack any evidence and are likely entirely false. Both the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DOD OIG) and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) confirmed that its officials have found no evidence indicating the Ukrainian military has sold U.S.-provided weapons. 

Mollie Halpern, a DOD OIG spokesperson, told The Dispatch Fact Check that the office “does not have any evidence of weapons diversion.” She added, “Our latest Operation Atlantic Resolve report does not support” the claims Carlson made on his podcast Monday. That quarterly report, released on February 11, evaluated federal oversight from October 1, 2024, to December 31, 2024, and stated that DOD OIG officials “met regularly” with Ukrainian government investigators to “facilitate efforts to account for U.S. investments in Ukraine.” This included placing criminal investigators in Ukraine, Poland, and Germany—where weapon shipment deliveries take place—so that the U.S. government could adequately address “allegations of fraud, corruption and potential diversion of weapons or technology.”

Similarly, a GAO report issued in March 2024 evaluating the DOD’s monitoring of weapon deliveries to Ukraine also found no evidence to support Carlson’s claims. “Had we found such evidence, we would have investigated these leads,” Chelsa Kenney, the GAO director of international affairs, told The Dispatch Fact Check. “In the course of our work, we spoke with dozens of arms transfer policy experts and decisionmakers, military service officials responsible for overseeing weapons transfers for Ukraine, and individuals overseeing and executing end-use monitoring in Ukraine,” she said. “DOD officials with whom we spoke said that there was no credible evidence of diversion of U.S.-provided advanced conventional weapons from Ukraine.” Some DOD officials the GAO interviewed were stationed in Poland at the location where most of the U.S.-provided arms are transferred to Ukrainian officials. “Officials we spoke with in Poland said they were aware of allegations that U.S.-origin defense items had been inappropriately transferred,” Kenney said. “However, they noted that those allegations were consistent with Russian disinformation.”

Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University’s Watt Family Innovation Center Media Forensics Hub, told The Dispatch Fact Check that Russian propaganda outlets have in the past amplified similar claims. For example, he pointed to a May 2023 news story from the Russian-state media outlet RT, formerly known as Russia Today, headlined, “Weapon US gave Ukraine spotted in hands of Mexican cartel – media.” (The U.S. Justice Department in September 2024 indicted two RT employees for spending $10 million to push pro-Kremlin propaganda to U.S. audiences, a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.) 

The RT article highlighted video footage of what it said was a “militant wearing the insignia of Mexico’s notorious Gulf Cartel (Cartel Del Golfo, CDG),” carrying a bulky weapon RT identified as a “US-made anti-tank missile launcher.” RT added that the Pentagon has shipped thousands of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. However, as an AP News fact check reported at the time, the anti-tank weapon featured in the video is not a Javelin but an AT4 model. Mark Hvizda, a former RAND Corporation defense expert who joined the DOD last month, told the AP that the U.S. does use AT4 anti-tank weapons. But, he added, several other countries’ militaries use the weapons, which he said are “normally produced” by a Sweden-based company. 

It’s possible that the AT4 weapon seen carried by the cartel militant is a training model, and not an authentic weapon, as indicated by a yellow-striped band on the AT4 shown in the video. A U.S. Marine Corps weapons manual explaining the meaning of AT4 color-coding states that “a gold or yellow band indicates a field-handling trainer,” designed to train soldiers on how to use the weapon. A diagram included in the manual shows the yellow band on the same part of the weapon as depicted in the video footage. 

The Dispatch Fact Check has reached out to the Tucker Carlson Network for comment. 

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