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Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Tuesday, May 27th. And this is your FT News briefing.

I'm Mark Filipino, and today we're doing something a little different on the briefing.

We're going to be answering one big question.

How did Ukraine lose hundreds of millions of dollars on fake arms deals?

For background, right after Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022,

he realized it had a problem. Its soldiers only had enough ammunition to fight for two months.

That kicked off a massive arms procurement race for Ukraine, and since then, it spent

billions of dollars on all sorts of guns, ammo, and bombs from dealers

around the world, but lots of those weapons never even arrived.

Here to talk about how Ukraine fell victim to fake arms deals is Isabel Koshu.

She's an FT correspondent in Ukraine.

And we've also got Miles Johnson, our investigative reporter, who helped report this story with Isabel.

So, Isabel, I want to start with you first.

Just how desperate was Ukraine for weapons at the beginning of the war?

I mean, Ukraine was unbelievably desperate for weapons at the beginning of the war.

And at that point, Ukraine was actually a kind of net exporter of weapons.

...