Immediately after the start of the Hamas attack against Israel on October 8, posts began emerging on Russian social media channels falsely claiming that Western weapons supplied to Ukraine were being used by Hamas.
These messages first appeared on pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and have since been amplified by articles published by Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik. One Sputnik headline quoted a Kremlin-appointed official in Russian-occupied Donetsk, who claimed that both Israeli and NATO weapons supplied to Ukraine were being used to kill Israelis.
There are reports in Western media that Russia is in the process of transporting weapons that Russian forces have captured in its attack on Ukraine, to Hamas in order to fabricate evidence to support these false claims.
The false claim that Western weapons supplied to Ukraine are being sold on the black market has been persistently deployed by the Russian government and Kremlin-aligned accounts on social media since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
On October 8-9, this narrative reemerged with renewed intensity in the context of the Hamas attack against Israel. Pro-Kremlin information operatives are exploiting the situation to advance this false narrative, which is intended to falsely blame Ukraine for contributing arms used to attack Israel.
A widely shared video posted to a Russian-language pro-Kremlin Telegram channel on October 8 claimed that Hamas was thanking “Ukrainian arms suppliers for supplying weapons used in the attack on Israel.” The video also claimed that “during the war in Syria, militants of various Islamist groups also actively used weapons supplied from Ukraine. The black market for weapons associated with the war in Ukraine will provide weapons for many more wars and conflicts, and arms suppliers from Ukraine will still make a lot of money from this.”
A September 2022 BBC report uncovered a broad Russian information operation that used this tactical narrative to erode Western confidence in Ukraine’s ability to track weapons and ultimately, erode public support for the delivery of weapons to Ukraine. The report found that images of weapons systems were uploaded to fake ads posted to the dark web, claiming to be selling Western weapons systems donated to Ukraine. These images were then posted to pro-Kremlin Russian Telegram channels as proof that Ukraine was selling Western-supplied weapons. Those Telegram posts were then used by Russian state media and broadcast globally on RT. The diagram below explains how this narrative has migrated from the dark web to Russian state media.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has amplified this Russian disinformation on his Twitter/X account stating that: “The weapons handed to the nazi regime in Ukraine are now being actively used against Israel. And it’s only going to get worse. Do expect missiles, tanks, and, quite soon, planes fresh from Kiev in the black market.”
It has been reported by credible media outlets that some NATO weapons that were abandoned in Afghanistan in 2021 have appeared in other foreign conflicts. It is likely that Taliban officials have profited from the sale of abandoned Western equipment. However, there is no evidence that any Western weapons supplied to Ukraine have been diverted to Hamas or other terrorist groups.
Weapons sent to Ukraine by NATO states are being tracked by serial number by Ukrainian authorities. A recent report by CBC 60 Minutes details how this tracking system works.
