Spanish arms manufacturer General Dynamics European Land Systems-Santa Barbara Sistemas (GDELS-SBS) is supplying Latvia with infantry fighting vehicles fitted with Israeli-made turrets, despite Madrid’s arms embargo on Israel, Globes reported on 15 October.
The deliveries cast doubt on the reach of Spain’s 2025 arms embargo on Israel, imposed in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which bans the import and export of military equipment, products, and technology to and from Israel.
Yet the ban has not stopped Israeli weapons systems from being mounted on Spanish-made combat vehicles for sale to third countries.
Latvia has ordered 84 Mednieks combat vehicles, each mounted with a UT30 MK2 unmanned turret built by lead Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, under a contract worth roughly $929 million, with deliveries set to continue until 2029.
Latvian Defense Minister Raivis Melnis hailed the first delivery as a step toward strengthening the country’s defense and its cooperation with NATO partners, as members scramble to meet the US’s demand for greater contribution to the alliance.
Elbit had already secured a deal worth around $100 million in April 2025 to supply GDELS-SBS with the unmanned turrets, months before Madrid declared its embargo, with the Israeli firm stating that the systems were bound for an unnamed European NATO member.
SBS was state-owned until the early 2000s, when it was privatized and sold to US arms giant General Dynamics.
According to Globes, General Dynamics’ presence in Europe greatly helps Israel push its weapons, military components, and technology into the continent, owing to the close ties between the US and Israel.
In early 2026, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s government came under fire for weighing the purchase of military systems from a company partly owned by Israeli arms giant Rafael, even as it pledged to achieve “zero technological dependence” on Israel.
The arrangement illustrates how Israeli arms firms continue to embed components in European weapons programs through multinational manufacturers, even where governments have restricted direct trade with Israel.
Elbit has benefited from surging demand linked to Israel’s war on Gaza and wider regional conflict, reporting a record $32 billion order backlog as of 30 June 2026.
Europe drove most of the backlog growth in the second quarter of 2026, the company said, with roughly 73 percent of its orders now coming from buyers outside Israel.
I am back in NYC at the invitation of the Russian delegation to the United Nations. Unlike my previous appearance before the full UN Security Council, this was an Arria session. An Arria-formula meeting is an informal meeting called by one or more Security Council members to hear from people who normally can’t address the Council. These include NGOs, civil-society figures, experts, victims and witnesses, and non-state actors. It isn’t a formal Council meeting and has no basis in the Council’s rules of procedure.
All fifteen members of the Security Council were represented. Their response was quite revealing (I will reveal that below). Here was my statement:
Chair, Excellencies, distinguished delegates, thank you for the opportunity to address you.
My name is Larry Johnson. I served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency and later in the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. I spent more than two decades working with United States Military Special Operations Forces. I come to this Council not as a spokesman for any government, but as someone who has spent a career studying how wars are fought and how civilians suffer in them and how hostilities are accompanied by disinformation campaigns.
For more than four years this Council has heard that Russia is waging a war against Ukraine and is targeting civilians. You do not need to come to the Security Council to hear this narrative, it is all over media and internet. I ask you to test that claim against the evidence.
Today we heard horrific stories of civilians targeted, of prisoners of war being tortured, and civilians held against their will by Ukrainian armed forces.
Ask yourselves a couple of questions: why are the civilians dying in Russia from drone attacks discounted and why are the civilians that were killed in Ukraine before February 2022 ignored? Based on my experience, the crisis in Ukraine has been accompanied by a sophisticated disinformation campaign designed to place all blame on Russia while exonerating Ukraine.
Begin with the scale of the fighting. By the Ukrainian government’s own figures, Russia has fired well over approximately two and a half million tons of munitions. This includes one hundred thousand glide bombs, attack drones, missiles and millions of artillery rounds since February 2022.
Now consider the human toll. The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has verified 16,431 civilian deaths through the middle of this year. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy, and I do not minimize any of them. However, the ratio of civilian deaths to munitions expended is extraordinarily low for a war of this intensity.
Compare those numbers with what the United States did in the Second World War, a war my country rightly regarded as just. Allied bombers dropped some 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe and killed between half a million and three-quarters of a million civilians in Europe.
In the Pacific, the United States dropped about 160,000 tons of bombs on the Japanese home islands. In all, American air attacks on Japan killed somewhere between 330,000 and half a million civilians.
Put the figures side by side. In total, the United States killed somewhere between half a million and more than a million civilians in the Second World War. The verified toll in Ukraine, after more than four years, is a small fraction of that.
These numbers do not happen by accident. The record of Russia in Ukraine is consistent with a policy of not targeting civilians. These facts contradict the claim that Russia is waging a campaign of extermination against Ukraine’s civilian population.
The same standard must apply to Ukraine.
The killing of civilians in this conflict did not begin in February 2022. From 2014 through 2021, the OHCHR recorded at least 3,404 civilian deaths in the Donbass. From 2018 through 2021, the OHCHR found that 81 percent of civilian casualties from Ukrainian shelling, small-arms fire and drone attacks occurred in areas held by the Donetsk and Luhansk authorities. Those victims are forgotten by the world media and by the United Nations. Few call for any investigation or accountability.
Since February 2022, according to figures the Russian Foreign Ministry presented to the Human Rights Council last month, Ukrainian strikes have killed more than 9,000 civilians in the territories under Russian control and wounded more than 25,500. This Council has rarely discussed those victims. They deserve the same attention and the same investigation as every civilian killed on the other side of the line.
Today we heard some of the circumstances of their deaths. I hope that the United Nations will include those numbers in their reports in order to give an unbiased record of events…. At least 12,404 civilians have been killed by Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2014.
Thus, we come to the simple fact that the number of civilians killed on both sides of the front line are not that different even if we take numbers offered by OHCHR at their face value –12,404 compared to 16,431. And I know that the Government of Russia strongly challenges them, citing in particular the questionable OHCHR claim that Russia was responsible for Bucha.
Why is the focus exclusively on Russia while we hear nothing about Ukrainian Armed Forces committing crimes against civilians?
I am not asking this Council to excuse any unlawful act. Where a strike violates the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution, it should be investigated, whoever carries it out. I am asking the Council to apply a single standard. The nations that sit in judgment of Russia should measure Russia’s conduct against the evidence and against their own history, not against a narrative.
False accusations and biased reports are not the most effective way to protect civilians in Ukraine. The key to protecting civilians is a negotiated end to this war. I urge the members of this Council to put their full weight behind that goal.
Thank you.
The biggest shock came from the US representative. Unlike my previous appearance before the Security Council when the US representative was aggressive and dismissive of my remarks, the guy sitting in the US chair today spoke as if the US had no role whatsoever in the war raging between Russia and Ukraine. He was quite subdued. A complete change in tone and attitude. This told me there is a definite change in the US policy towards Russia.
The Europeans on the other hand were out of their fucking minds. The representatives of Denmark, Latvia, France and Greece were aggressive and rude. They are boiling for a fight. The purpose of the meeting was to present evidence of Ukrainian attacks on civilians in territory now occupied by Russia. Instead of dealing with the facts, the European Lilliputians howled at the Russians.
Even the British representative took a low key approach. That also was surprising. The remaining eight members of the Security Council made measured, neutral remarks. My commentary was in support of Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Ambassador tasked with investigating attacks on civilians. Rodion is a good man and an honest investigator. All in all, a fascinating day.
Login
