The most serious breach of the united international front against Iraq may be the sale of the $100 million anti- stealth Ukrainian Kolchuga radar to the pariah state two years ago. Taped evidence suggests that president Leonid Kuchma himself instructed the General Director of the Ukrainian arms sales company, UkrSpetzExport, Valery Malev to conclude the deal. Malev died in a mysterious car accident on March 6, three days after his taped conversation with Kuchma surfaced. The Ukrainians insist that they were preempted by Russian dealers who sold a similar radar system to Iraq - but this is highly unlikely as the Russian system was still in development at the time. the American and British are currently conducting a high-profile investigation in Kyiv. In Russia, illegal arms are traded mainly by the Western Group of Forces in cahoots with private companies, both domestic and foreign. The Air Defense Army specializes in selling light arms. The army is the main source of weapons - plastic explosives, grenade launchers, munitions - of both Chechen rebels and Chechen criminals. Contrary to received opinion, volunteer- soldiers, not conscripts, control the arms trade. The state itself is involved in arms proliferation. Sales to China and Iran were long classified. From June, all sales of materiel enjoy "state secret" status. There is little the US can do. The Bush administration has imposed in May sanctions on Armenian and Moldovan companies, among others, for aiding and abetting Iran's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Armenian president, Robert Kocharian, indignantly denied knowledge of such transactions and vowed to get to the bottom of the American allegations. The Foreign Policy Research Institute, quoted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, described a "Department of Energy (DOE) initiative, underway since 1993, to improve 'material protection, control and accountability' at former Soviet nuclear enterprises. The program enjoys substantial bipartisan support in the United States and is considered the first line of defense against unwanted proliferation episodes." "As of February 2000, more than 8 years after the collapse of the USSR, new security systems had been installed at 113 buildings, most of them in Russia; however, these sites contained only 7 percent of the estimated 650 tons of weapons-usable material considered at risk for theft or diversion. DOE plans call for safeguarding 60 percent of the material by 2006 and the rest in 10 to 15 years or longer". Russian traders learned to circumvent official channels and work through Belarus. Major General Stsyapan Sukharenka, the first deputy chief of the Belarusian KGB, denied, in March, any criminal arms trading in his country. This vehement protest is gainsaid by the preponderance of Belarusian arms traders replete with fake end-user certificates in Croatia during the Yugoslav wars of secession (1992-5).