None: Pakistan sold $900m munitions to Ukraine for IMF bailout in US-brokered deal?

WASHINGTON: Pakistan has sold munitions worth $900 million over the past year to Ukraine in a secret deal under pressure from the US, which in turn helped Islamabad secure an IMF bailout.
The so-called “bombs for bailout” deal, first reported in investigative website The Intercept, forced Islamabad from its neutral position in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, even as Washington prioritised protecting Ukraine over furthering democracy in Pakistan.
The Intercept said records detailing the arms transactions were leaked to it earlier this year by a source within the Pakistani military. The documents describe munitions sales agreed to between the US and Pakistan from the summer of 2022 to the spring of 2023, it added.
The Biden administration and IMF denied the story, but the Intercept said its reporting was based on documents outlining the money trail, American and Pakistani contracts, licensing, and requisition documents related to US-brokered deals to buy Pakistani military weapons for Ukraine.

Imran ouster, weapons deal part of US ‘forgiveness package’ for Pakistan?
Some of the documents were authenticated by matching the signature of an American brigadier general with his signature on publicly available mortgage records in the US; by matching the Pakistani documents with corresponding American documents; and by reviewing publicly available but previously unreported Pakistani disclosures of arms sales to the US posted by the State Bank of Pakistan,” the investigative website The Intercept said.
Noting that Pakistan is known as a production hub for the types of basic munitions needed for grinding warfare, the Intercept reported that as Ukraine grappled with chronic shortages of munitions and hardware, the presence of Pakistani-produced shells and other ordnances by the Ukrainian military has surfaced in open-source news reports about the conflict, though neither the US nor the Pakistanis have acknowledged the arrangement.
The weapons deals were brokered by Global Military Products, a subsidiary of Global Ordnance, a controversial arms dealer with “entanglements with less-than-reputable figures in Ukraine”, it said.
The transaction “is a window into the kind of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring between financial and political elites that rarely is exposed to the public, even as the public pays the price”, it added, with a lengthy backgrounder on Washington’s role in encouraging the Pakistani military to oust Imran Khan, who took an “aggressively neutral” stance on the war in Ukraine, from office, resulting in protests and unrest across the country.
The report said Washington warned of dire consequences if Khan remained in power and promised “all would be forgiven” if he were removed. Part of the forgiveness package apparently was the IMF bailout. “The economic capital and political goodwill from the arms sales played a key role in helping secure the bailout from the IMF, with the state department agreeing to take the IMF into confidence regarding the undisclosed weapons deal, according to sources with knowledge of the arrangement, and confirmed by a related document,” it added.