Ukraine's Defense and Foreign ministries have confirmed the statement made by Eduard Kokoity, president of the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, about delivering military equipment to Georgia.
The Ukrainian authorities have not specified the type and amount of weapons they supplied to Georgia.
Analysts said the deliveries are aimed at creating problems for Russia in the region.
Ukraine and Georgia signed an agreement on military technical cooperation in 2005, immediately after Viktor Yushchenko was elected president of Ukraine. In the fall of 2005, Kokoity for the first time said publicly that Ukraine was supplying T-72 tanks, Mi-8 helicopters, armored personnel carriers, missiles and other weapons to Georgia.
In 2007, the Ukrainian authorities classified information about its military supplies.
"It was done on the order from President Yushchenko," a former employee of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry told the popular daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta. He said the data provided by Ukraine to the UN Register of Conventional Arms were "declarative and voluntary," and therefore likely to be incomplete.
During a visit to Tbilisi in June 2008, Ukrainian Defense Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov said openly that Ukraine was supplying arms to Georgia.
He also said the Georgian and Ukrainian authorities had agreed on joint research into new weapons with a view to joining NATO.
Ukrainian analysts believe that Viktor Yushchenko and his friend, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, deliberately fanned tensions by saying that the issue concerned national security to encourage NATO to admit them to the bloc.
According to analysts, Russia is both countries' hypothetical "external enemy," although they never say so openly. Saakashvili is playing this card now over tensions in South Ossetia.
Last spring, Yushchenko told the West about threats to Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity after the media published Putin's statements at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, where he called NATO's promise of eventual membership to Georgia and Ukraine "a direct threat" to Russian security.
Mikhail Pogrebinsky, director of the Center for Political and Conflict Studies in Kiev, said
Ukraine was supplying weapons to Georgia to create problems for Russia.
"The international practice is to refrain from supplying weapons to regions with a high risk of armed conflicts," he said. "
Kiev probably thinks that the more weapons in Georgia, the more problems for Russia and the better for Ukraine."