Ever since the crisis over Ukraine began last year, a minority of commentators, including the present author, have cautioned about the dangers of inundating the country with weapons, and the risk of fueling extremist groups that could destabilize the country and create blowback for the West, as the United States’ anti-Soviet policy in Afghanistan did in the 1980s. A new CNN report suggests US officials are well aware of these risks.

A suite of anonymous sources told the network that Washington has no way of tracking the weapons they send or knowing where they end up when they enter Ukraine, one of Europe’s largest arms trafficking markets even before the war. “It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time,” one source told CNN.

According to the report, both military analysts and US officials acknowledge that the massive quantity of arms being supplied by more than twenty governments could in the long term “wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the US did not intend to arm.” Ukrainian troops pick up trucks loaded with weapons mostly in Poland, states the report, before driving them across the border, at which point it’s entirely up to Ukrainians how and where they’re given out.