Ukrainian Gold Fantasies

I am sure that most STFU readers know by now of the news from more than a week ago, reported by GATA on 7 March (http://www.gata.org/node/13754), that the US had taken custody of all of the Ukrainian gold reserves.  I originally saw a barely intelligible machine translation (no URL saved) of the original news release from Iskra News (located in the Eastern Ukraine, where there are a majority of Russian speakers), but the GATA version has been cleaned up considerably.

 

A reworded, condensed version of the story (with my quotation marks) is that four trucks and two VW minibuses, all without license plates, were waiting on the tarmac when a 'transport aircraft' landed at Borispol Airport, near Kiev.  The fifteen waiting people, dressed in black and armed, quickly loaded more than 40 'heavy boxes' onto the aircraft, which (after other mysterious men had boarded) then took off on an emergency basis. Later, a senior official of the former Ministry of Income and Fees reported in a return call (presumably to Iskra) that the US had taken custody of all gold reserves in Ukraine. Various estimates from the intertubes of the Ukrainian gold reserves involved have varied from 33 or 36 up to 43.2 tonnes.

The application of some third-grade arithmetic to the figures above cause some reasonable doubt on the verisimilitude of the story, or at least on its elaborations with regard to the implied amount of gold putatively involved.  First of all, those must have been some really big, heavy trucks if four of them could carry 33 or more tonnes, recalling the size of the ubiquitous ‘deuce n' a half' US military trucks in use back when I was fulfilling my 'Universal Military Servitude' in the late 1950s.  Secondly, those must have been some really sturdy, heavy-duty boxes if 40 of them contained all of the reported (2013) Ukrainian gold reserves, as each of the 'more than 40' would have weighed at least 700 kilograms, or even up to 1000 kilos, depending on the claimed amount of gold. How many even big and strong men does it take to lift and carry that much weight, much less to hurriedly load it onto an aircraft?  What would they have used?  Slings, with or without carrying poles?  No mention of a fork-lift or two in the news release!  And then, to cut this post short, last but not least what sort of ''transport aircraft' was involved?  Unless it was a high wing military 'roll-on roll-of’ design, like the US C-M5 Super Galaxy or Russian AN-124, either of which can carry well more than three times the reputed amount of gold, how could the men have gotten it up into a cargo version of a low-winged passenger jet without mechanical loading aids?

Note that it was a 'senior official' of the former regime that made the claim that the US had taken Ukrainian gold reserves, as there was no report of anyone at the airport looking inside the boxes..  Perhaps the former official was trying to divert attention from prior reports that the deposed President had squirreled Ukrainian gold away to Russia before he fled there himself?  Presuming that the airport report had any veracity at all, what else could have been in those heavy boxes?  Maybe something like nerve gas canisters or small nukes that somebody wanted to keep out of the clutches of the US sponsored neo-fascist armed groups that had seized power?  Use your imagination!  Everybody else commenting on this 'story' certainly has.