China, Iran Missile Sales Confirmed

Smugglers in Ukraine shipped 18 cruise missiles, each capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, to Iran and China at the beginning of the decade, Ukrainian prosecutors said Friday.

The apparent sale to Iran of 12 of the Soviet-era Kh-55 cruise missiles, which have a range of 1,860 miles, is likely to add to concern in Washington about alleged efforts by Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

The allegations surfaced last month in comments by a Ukrainian legislator, and public confirmation by the new administration of President Viktor Yushchenko came Friday.

Each missile is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead with a 200-kiloton yield at altitudes too low to be detected by radar, and the sales have been portrayed as a significant leak of Soviet-era weapons technology.

Yuri Boychenko, an aide to Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, said by telephone from Kiev, the capital, that the sales had not involved the government of then-President Leonid D. Kuchma.

“No state orders were issued to execute this operation. In fact the state had nothing to do with it,” Boychenko said. “It was a totally illegal deal carried out by an international criminal group.”

However, Hryhoriy Omelchenko, the legislator who went public last month with allegations of the smuggling operation, charged Friday that “it is ridiculous to say that they have no information about the involvement of high state officials.”

“The deal, or actually two deals, were from the very beginning monitored by Ukrspetsexport, the state-owned arms sale monopoly,” Omelchenko said in a telephone interview. “Kuchma was in the picture from the very beginning, and in other words he sanctioned the deals. Documents to that effect exist and they should be at the disposal of the general prosecutor’s office.”

Omelchenko said missiles were shipped to China in 2000 and Iran in 2001.

If the missiles were made operational, they could strike Israel if launched from Iran and Japan if fired from China or its neighbor, North Korea.

The Japanese government reportedly is worried that the six missiles allegedly shipped to China could have ended up in North Korea, which claims to possess nuclear weapons. China is a longtime nuclear power that already has a variety of long-range missiles.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said U.S. and Ukrainian authorities have discussed the alleged missile sales.

“Ukraine has launched an internal investigation into the incident. That’s certainly something we welcome,” he said.

Ereli added that he did not have “a lot of details” on the alleged sales.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Borys Tarasyuk, speaking to reporters during a visit to Belarus, said his country’s new reformist government bears “no responsibility for what our predecessors have done” and “can only denounce past, unauthorized transfers of arms.”

“The government has been revising the system of export control over arms and dual-purpose goods,” he said, according to the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.

Boychenko, in the prosecutor-general’s office, said investigators identified three people suspected of being key members of the smuggling ring: two Russians and a Ukrainian citizen identified as Vladimir Yevdokimov. Boychenko said one of the Russians was in custody in the Czech Republic and would soon be extradited to Ukraine.

An investigation of the sales was launched by Ukraine’s security service early last year, and a closed-door trial of Yevdokimov began last summer and is still underway, Boychenko said.

Bogdan Ferents, the attorney representing Yevdokimov, said the missiles involved in the case were substandard and should not even be considered weapons, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported Friday.

His client is accused of being an intermediary in the export deal, Ferents said, but others engaged in “typical fraud” in response to Iranian and Chinese efforts to acquire the missiles. The Ukrainian side “contracted for cruise missiles but exported rubbish,” he said.

The attorney said the missiles sent to Iran and China were manufactured in 1987, had a service life of eight years, had been stored since 1992 in a way that did not meet standards, lacked parts and were missing the technical documents needed to use them, Itar-Tass reported.

Omelchenko, the legislator, said that “if this case is investigated thoroughly and without bias, then highly placed security service and state officials will be brought to account, including President Kuchma himself.”

Omelchenko described Prosecutor-General Svyatoslav Piskun as “an old cadre” who “will not go against his own.”

“They found some low-level scapegoats now like Yevdokimov and some others, and they will try to hang everything on them, thus sparing the big culprits and avoiding a huge international scandal,” he said.

Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.