The head of the State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine (SFMSU) has called on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to recognise Belarus as a country proliferating weapons of mass destruction and place it on its so called black list of high-risk jurisdictions.
Earlier this week the chairman of the Ukrainian parliament said he has sent an appeal to the FATF asking it to include Russia on its list of high-risk jurisdictions (Trade-based Financial Crime, 14 March 2022, Blacklist and remove Russia from FATF calls from Ukraine).
Springboard for aggression
In a letter to FATF president Marcus Pleyer, the head of Ukraine’s financial intelligence unit (FIU), Igor Cherkaskyi, said Belarus was supporting Russia by providing it with logistics, airports, military bases, military personnel, weapons and military equipment.
Belarus, with the assistance and support of its political leadership, acts as a “springboard to carry out armed aggression against Ukraine,” according to the letter.
Weapons of mass destruction
On this basis, Cherkaskyi, appealed to the FATF president for the task force to recognise Belarus “as a country that, through its actions, carries out the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and to blacklist it by the FATF,” according to a post on the authority’s Facebook page.
Cherkaskyi has also reportedly appealed to the chair and executive secretary of the Egmont Group of FIUs to bar Belarus from accessing a secure communication channel and expel it from the group.
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