April 2022. A little over a week has passed since the Ukrainian Armed Forces pushed Russian troops away from Kyiv and drove them out of the Kyiv region. But there was no certainty that Russian troops wouldn’t attempt to storm the capital again. Entry points into Kyiv and beyond were blocked by concrete slabs and sandbags. At most intersections, there were checkpoints with vigilant observers from the territorial defense and army. However, the city was slowly recovering from the ordeal. Small shops and cafes were the first to come back to life. Kilometer-long traffic jams appeared not on the way out, but on the way into Kyiv. Life, quite literally, was returning to the capital. Unfortunately, not only the good parts were coming back. On April 11, 2022, the Ministry of Defense concluded a significant contract for the supply of critically needed items at that time: 20,000 ballistic helmets, 20,000 body armor vests, and 40,000 plates for them. The contract amount was 24.5 million euros (26 million dollars) with a 100% advance payment. It was after this contract that a certain Polish company named Alfa appeared in the contracts of the Ministry of Defense. Its emergence marked not an entry into a grand story of international success, but rather the beginning of a saga involving one of the top 10 largest debtors to the Ministry of Defense. By the beginning of 2023, Alfa had debts to the Ministry of Defense exceeding 3,5 billion hryvnias (95 million dollars) under various contracts. To understand how this happened, it’s enough to say that the aforementioned Alfa company, despite delays, managed to deliver all the body armor vests and plates. However, out of the 16,000 helmets they imported, 11,000 were immediately returned as unsuitable, and another 5,000 remained in storage, not accepted into the inventory of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Despite the delivery failures, on October 25, 2022, the Ministry of Defense once again ordered an additional 20,000 helmets and 50,000 body armor vests from Alfa, totaling nearly 50 million euros. This time, there was no upfront payment. And this is a good thing because the helmets never arrived in Ukraine, and half of the supplied body armor vests failed ballistic testing. However, even these two contracts, each of which is larger than the scandalous case with Turkish jackets, seem insignificant compared to...
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