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Misinformation or disinformation? You’ll find in the community notes of Israeli Fm Gideon Sa’ar’s response to Ukraine's Fm Andrii Sybiha earlier today a reference to an MFA statement. It establishes that on March 23, Ukraine “informed” Israel about the Abinsk and the possible occupied-territory origin of the cargo, and “emphasized the inadmissibility” of import operations. This is linked in the community notes and is supposed to substantiate that “Ukraine submitted a legal request for previous ships. Those requests were ignored.” The record shows that this claim is false.
Here’s the actual sequence as Kyiv itself has now laid out and which has been corroborated by Israeli reporting via Barak Ravid at Channel 12 and Axios.
On March 23, Ukraine’s ambassador in Tel Aviv delivered a diplomatic note about the Abinsk. Three weeks passed. On April 12, the Abinsk arrived in Haifa and began unloading. On April 14, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha personally called Sa’ar requesting the cargo not be accepted. It was only the following day, the day Abinsk completed unloading and the vessel sailed on April 15, that Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office transmitted the formal MLAT, including the court arrest order from April 8. On April 16, Sa’ar texted Sybiha directly stating the ship had departed and could not be detained. On April 20, Israel sent its formal written reply citing the departure and insufficient evidence.
So the procedural channel was used. But it was used in a way that arrived as the operational moment closed. The MLAT finally arrived the day the vessel left port, after it unloaded and its goods entered Israeli commerce. Importantly, the buyer told Haaretz's investigative reporters that Russian suppliers stated this is wheat originating from Siberia, sent west in train cars, with documents “confirming this.” The piece itself notes that Israeli buyers have no way of checking whether they were lied to. The buyer further told Haaretz they only realized the source after the Ukrainian embassy contacted them. That undercuts President Zelensky’s “knowingly purchasing stolen goods” allegation on X.
The community note’s claim that “Ukraine submitted a legal request for previous ships. Those requests were ignored” elides this timing and details of the actual event. In the real world, the MLAT was not ignored. It simply arrived too late to prevent unloading.
When the Israeli foreign ministry is asking for these formal legal requests and evidentiary package, it’s not because it’s saying “we don’t want to recognize that you might have a claim here” or “you may have no legitimate grievance.” It is saying we need to understand under what mechanism and under what criminal statutes we need to investigate this in order to give you a serious finding -- because ultimately this isn’t something Israel is doing at the state level. This is private commerce that needs to be investigated.
And when you realize that Israel is being asked to act as an enforcement arm for a sanctions regime it isn’t party to, on an evidentiary basis that is only formally presented after the moment to act has passed, against private commercial actors whose alleged wrongdoing depends on legal characterizations that are themselves contested, you start to understand that this is not Israel sparking issues with Ukraine, but the other way around.
The public generally speaking has little attention span for absorbing these details, which is where deception and social media become a match made in heaven if you’re looking for a way to cause a target country a headache. The better question is why.
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