KYIV. March 26 (Interfax-Ukraine) - The chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament's national security and defense committee said that the fact that several hundred decommissioned missiles have not been accounted for in Ukraine is a result "of flawed accounting practices and negligence."
"This does not mean that the missiles have been stolen. Rather, this is a result of negligent accounting practices," Heorhy Kryuchkov told Interfax in Kyiv on Friday. "They were not stolen. If this had happened, it would have been made known long ago."
He did not rule out that the missiles might have been disposed of, adding that this possibility needed to be checked.
"This is not an accounting error. This is a result of negligent accounting," he said.
Former Defense Minister Oleksandr Kozmuk declined to comment on Kryuchkov's remarks.
"I am not going to comment on this nonsense," he said.
Defense Ministry spokesman Kostyantyn Khyvrenko confirmed that the decommissioned missiles in question belonged to the Defense Ministry but did not name their type.
He declined to provide further details saying there is a lack of information.
Khyvrenko said that he is not aware of any potential reshuffling following the reports.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Yevhen Marchuk said in a Thursday interview with the Den newspaper that "unfortunately such strange things happen. We are presently looking for several hundred missiles. They were decommissioned but we cannot find them. They are believed to have been disposed of. So, good, they have been disposed of. But where are the results of their recycling?"
Marchuk said that the defense ministry did not abide by the 2000 law on a unified accounting system until the summer of 2003.
The defense minister said that the difference between an inventory of his ministry's property taken after his appointment to this post on June 25, 2003 and a previous one, carried out six months before, was more than UAH1,000bn (some USD170bn).