A confidential report sent to the Security Council details extensive breaches of the international arms embargo on Libya by eight countries since the beginning of the year, according to The New York Times.
As war raged in Libya last winter, a dozen world leaders gathered in Berlin to talk peace. The contradictions surrounding the conference were no secret: Many of the global leaders who pledged to end foreign meddling in Libya’s conflict were themselves fueling it.
As leaders posed for a group photo with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany on Jan. 19, having signed a pledge to respect the arms embargo on Libya, at least five cargo airplanes filled with weapons from the United Arab Emirates and Russia were cruising across the skies of North Africa, bound for the battlefields of Libya.
Using flight data, ship records and other tools, investigators show that egregious violations by leaders who flout the embargo with seeming abandon have reached new levels.
The American newspaper said that four of the cargo planes bound for Libya on Jan. 19 had been sent by the United Arab Emirates, whose leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, smiled as he lunched with Ms. Merkel in a luminous room just before the peace conference. Along with Russia and Egypt, the Emirates is backing the Libyan commander Khalifa Hifter in the war.
The fifth plane that day belonged to Russia — one of nearly 350 Russian military supply flights in nine months that have swelled its force of Russian and Syrian mercenaries to over 5,000 fighters, according to the latest American estimates.
Investigators counted 339 Russian military flights between Nov. 1 and July 31, mostly from Hmeimim air base in Syria, with a potential volume of up to 17,200 tons. The flights supported mercenaries employed by the Wagner Group, a Kremlin-linked private military company that has become a crucial element in Mr. Hifter’s forces.
The report also focuses on the United Arab Emirates, which sent a further 35 military cargo flights to Libya in the 11 days after the Berlin conference in January, and another 100 or so in the first half of the year, many of them using three charter airlines registered in Kazakhstan.
The New York Times added that some of the flight manifests carried suspiciously vague descriptions of their cargo, claiming to be carrying frozen food, men’s suits or a consignment of 800 boilers, investigators said. Others were filled out in the name of the 4th aviation group of the U.A.E. armed forces.