UN paid Russian air charters hundreds of millions while Putin invaded Ukraine

  In the 14 months since Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and sent proxy fighters to invade eastern Ukraine, Russian companies have won more than $212 million in United Nations contracts to ferry troops, supplies and equipment -- on peacekeeping missions.

  The tally amounts to nearly one-third -- 32 percent -- of the money U.N. headquarters has spent on peacekeeping air transport during that time, according to the U.N.’s procurement website.

  The U.S. pays 28.4 percent of all U.N. peacekeeping expenses, so the Obama administration’s contribution to the Russian bottom line amounts to more than $60 million.

  The open spigot for Russian air transport firms, despite Putin’s aggressive behavior abroad, is based on procurement methods for leased airplanes and helicopters that routinely favored a few winners.  

  Among other things, that system froze U.S. companies out of the costly and strategically sensitive business. According to U.N. records, only one U.S. firm won an air transport contract between June 2005 and June 2013.

  Both U.N. officials and U.S. diplomats now claim that the story is changing -- albeit at a glacial pace that has allowed Russian firms to cash in handsomely even as Putin has orchestrated his thinly disguised Ukrainian adventure.

  The U.N. has announced it will hold a June 17 conference for aircraft companies and government officials to roll out a new version of its air charter procurement system, one that a U.N. spokesman says, “provides greater flexibility for new vendors and innovative solutions.”

  That is an oblique way of saying it will -- perhaps -- introduce actual competition into a charter system that the U.N.’s own auditors have decried since 2009, with little apparent effect, for its skewing of the rules so that only a very few firms could fulfill requirements, competitive pricing was never a requirement, and much of the equipment was dramatically under-used.

  One result already is that a U.S. firm has, for a change, won a $15 million U.N. air charter contract, starting in July. The Illinois-based firm, AAR Airlift, which has worked closely with the U.S. Defense Department as well as the U.N. World Food Program, will be chartered for the peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

  “We have been working on this for many a year,” says Isobel Coleman, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. for management and reform, a former management consultant. Studiously avoiding any mention of Russia by name, she added that “what was bothersome was that so much [of the U.N. business] was in one country’s hands. It was not the best value for the U.N.”