Ukrainian gangsters are shunning their Russian counterparts: “It is one thing to be called a criminal; quite another to be thought of as a traitor,” says Mark Galeotti, author of “The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia”
since the eighteenth century. Until it closed because of covid-19, the museum displayed everything from pearls and pistols sneaked into imperial Russia to more contemporary loot. Then came the war in February 2022. “The port stopped working, and everything stopped,” says Mr Otdelnov. It wasn’t just the tourist flows that ended. Odessa had been a key node in a vast network of crime centred on Ukraine and Russia that reached from Afghanistan to the Andes.
This infrastructure supported different business models for different products. Ukraine was a growing “spin-off” transit route for, augmenting routes through the Balkans and Caucasus . Before the war it had the fourth-largest heroin seizures in Europe. Cocaine from Latin America flowed via the Black Sea. In the other direction, mobsters exported weapons to Asia and Africa notably from Mykolaiv, a port. In 2020 Ukraine overtook China to become Europe’s largest source of illegal tobacco.
The knock-on effects are being felt globally as contraband networks are reconfigured to bypass Ukraine. Turkish customs officials say more heroin and methamphetamine is flowing across the border with Iran. Lithuanian border officials saw a fourfold year-on-year rise in illicit tobacco volumes in the first quarter of 2022. Estonian officials working with Europol, the’s police agency, nabbed 3.5 tonnes of Latin American cocaine in the port of Muuga, worth about half a billion euros, last year.
For Ukraine, however, the long-run picture is less clear cut. A frozen conflict could certainly create big risks. Before the invasion Ukraine had somewhere between 7m and 9m legal firearms. There were perhaps as many illicit ones again. The country is now even more awash with weaponry. History suggests that wars fuel arms-dealing: guns from Yugoslavia are used in violent crime across Europe.
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