Interview with Aiden Aslin
Weapons delivered to Ukraine go to the Kurdish YPG to fight against Turkey
In an interview I was present at, the British man Aiden Aslin, who was sentenced to death in Donetsk, said that arms delivered from the West to Ukraine are delivered to the Kurds of the YPG, where they are used against Turkey.
Jul 15, 2022 9:24 p.m
My friend and colleague John Marc Dugan received a phone call a few weeks ago from British man Aiden Aslin, who was sentenced to death in Donetsk. You can find the telephone interview here, followed by a second telephone interview, which you can
find here. Aiden wants to tell his story, he seeks contact with journalists himself.
When I went to Moscow last week to be ready for the announced
journalist trip to the Donbass, John invited me for a beer and asked if I could help him. He would probably get the chance to interview Aiden Aslin in prison. However, since John does not speak Russian and English is not very common in Donbass, he asked me if I would be willing to stay with him in Donetsk after the press trip and help him as a translator to make the interview possible.
Of course I was willing to do that, which is why we left the press tour after the second day. Organizing the interview wasn't easy, but in the end it was possible. John conducted the interview, and there was also a camera crew from Russia Today, who filmed us on the day and will publish a report on the two foreign journalists who conducted an interview in the prison.
The prison
John and I were impressed with the prison, for while it was not modern, it was clean and tidy and in the condition of an old building. We would have expected much worse. Also, while we were waiting to be admitted, I was struck by the extreme courtesy and helpfulness with which the staff treated relatives of prisoners who came to visit, wanted information about possible releases, or had other concerns. I would not have expected that.
In order to get into the building on the prison grounds where the interview was to take place, we had to go through several security checkpoints. But that was routine and quick. We were shown several rooms and John was able to choose which one he wanted to do the interview in, so the lighting and camera settings were right for him. John was right when he thought about taking a translator with him back in Moscow, because alone he would have had real problems communicating with the guards.
After John had set up his technique, the Russia Today team found a good spot for his technique behind his camera. Then Aslin was brought into the room, the guards closed (not locked) the door and we, two people from Russia Today, John and I, were alone with Aslin.
The interview
First we all introduced ourselves with a handshake (Aslin was never handcuffed) and made some small talk. The atmosphere was amazingly easy going and Aslin was relaxed and cracking jokes when he realized the atmosphere was easy going from our side as well. My first impression was that he looks a lot better than he did on the videos after he was captured. He seems easygoing, relaxed and looks a lot healthier than in the pictures I've seen of him so far.
John, for the record, first asked Aslin who the initiator of the interview was and if anyone was forcing him to talk to us. Then John Aslin asked about the death penalty. Aslin said the appeal would be heard in the next few days and that his lawyer is optimistic that the death penalty will be commuted to imprisonment.
After this introduction almost only Aslin spoke. He told us his story in great detail. In the interview, the chronology was a little different, but for the sake of clarity I'll tell it chronologically.
He told how he first went to Syria from Great Britain in 2015 to fight with the Kurds from the YPG against IS and Turkey. When he returned to his home country Great Britain from Syria after about ten months, he was monitored by the police like a criminal and – as he said – treated much worse than the IS returnees.
Because of this, he has decided to leave the UK. According to him, the fact that he ended up in Ukraine was pure coincidence. He had several countries in mind, the only reason he went to Ukraine in 2018 was that he had met a Ukrainian woman on the internet. Once in Ukraine, he enlisted in the army because, he said, it was the easiest way to get citizenship. However, it wasn't that easy, because he was always put off with citizenship, which is why he had to keep extending his contract with the army and turning down better-paying jobs.
Corruption and missing guns
He told about the corruption in the Ukrainian army. The barracks were built from the cheapest materials, toilets and showers quickly broke and so on. Then he said that of the weapons supplied from the West, they received only the oldest, for example anti-tank missiles of older generations.
He said that senior Ukrainian officers are selling modern weapons.
According to his stories, the Ukrainian secret service SBU was also involved in this, he mentioned an SBU officer whom he only called “Mr. Gray' because he always walked around in gray shirts.
The most modern weapons would simply disappear from storage.
This aligns with warnings from the US or Europol, who say once the guns cross the Ukrainian border, they disappear into a 'black hole' -
Europol also warns that the guns end up with terrorists or organized crime in Europe.
During his time in the Ukrainian army,
Aiden Aslin was still in contact with his old friends in the Kurdish YPG. After that, 'Mr. Gray' and made contact with the Kurds via Aslin in order to sell weapons to the YPG. Aslin told about this in detail.
The (geo)political bomb
At this point, the interview had been going on for quite a while. John and I were suddenly wide awake, because that was more than unexpected. John pressed on and Aslin said that it was basically a 'district business':
The USA delivers the weapons to Ukraine, from there some of the weapons go to the Kurds of the YPG, which in turn receives the money from the US government for the purchase of these weapons, which are sold by the Ukrainian military for a fraction of their official price.
This means the US is secretly arming the Kurds fighting Turkey in northern Syria. Turkey is formally a NATO ally of the USA. John questioned this several times and Aslin shared some details that he experienced in Ukraine and was told by his Kurdish friends.
Such an approach by the USA would not be new. As a reminder, in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, the CIA covered drug smuggling from Central America to the US and used the money made to supply arms to Iran, which was at war with then-US ally Iraq. This is immoral and cynical, but makes geopolitical sense because the US has weakened two potentially powerful states in the Middle East in order to maintain and expand its own position of power in the region.
In the end, nobody was punished for the Iran-Contra scandal, because the officers of the American army who were sentenced for it were pardoned almost immediately. Since there was no real investigation into the scandal - including punishment of the organizers - it is more than likely that the USA is still playing such 'games' today.
It is also not surprising that the USA is taking action against Turkey of all people. Erdogan is disobedient to the US. He bought Russia's S-400 air defense system, for which the US kicked Turkey out of the F-35 program and imposed some sanctions on its 'ally' Turkey. The attempted coup against Erdogan in 2016
was also in all probability planned by the USA, and the USA has not extradited the members of the Gülen movement, who are said to have organized the attempted coup, to Turkey to this day.
It's no secret that the US has an interest in getting rid of Erdogan. It would be just right for the USA - especially in view of the upcoming presidential elections in Turkey in 2023 - if Erdogan were weakened domestically, for example through military failures against the Kurds of the YPG in northern Syria. Erdogan has announced a
military operation against the YPG in northern Syria, which he has not yet started.
The fact that the US uses highly corrupt Ukraine for all sorts of opaque activities is nothing new. All I can think of is the
gas lapel or the
bioweapons labs. A country as corrupt as Ukraine is ideal for such activities.
At that moment I was very happy that I didn't do the interview, but had time to think. As shocking as I found Aslin's statements, from the point of view of geopolitics, which is all about power and not about morality, what Aslin was saying was actually very logical and I wondered why I was making this connection between the in of the Ukraine's disappearing weapons and the Kurds of the YPG.
The YPG is actually trapped in northern Syria, because to the north is Turkey, to the west and south is the Syrian army, and only to the east is US-controlled territory. Neither Assad nor Erdogan have an interest in supplying the YPG with weapons and ammunition, while the US is working with the YPG. It is only logical that the YPG either gets its weapons from the USA, or that the USA turns a blind eye to the YPG receiving (Western) weapons.
The surreal end of the interview
After John and Aslin had extensively discussed the subject, Aslin got personal. He complained that he had been cheated by Ukraine. Ever since he joined the Ukrainian military in 2018, he believed he was fighting a good cause.
But the capture and his time in prison turned his worldview upside down.
He had feared being tortured or shot by the Russians. Instead, the Russians who questioned him were respectful and professional, he said. He was treated well, the food in prison was good, the treatment too.
And in the prison in Donetsk, he sees every day how heavily the Ukrainian army is shelling the city, where there are no military targets. The explosions in Donetsk can be heard constantly and are often so loud that they can be heard through closed windows like a thunderstorm. Ukrainian shelling kills civilians in Donetsk almost every day. He said artillerymen knew exactly what they were looking for
High-precision attacks launched by Russian Armed Forces resulted in the elimination of 115th Mechanised Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) that had operated towards Seversk. Over the past 48 hours, this brigade has lost over 600 servicemen. Residents of Seversk, Nikolayevka and other nearby Ukraine-controlled settlements are being urgently mobilised for manning the brigade.
in Soledar, Donetsk People's Republic, in the school №14, the AFU have deployed their strongpoint, a munitions depot in the basement and heavy armament at the adjacent territory;
