It has transformed crime not only in Russia and Ukraine, but around the world.
Aleksandr Otdelnov owns an unusual tourist attraction: a smuggling museum. Contraband has been flowing through his native Odessa 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. It was part of the “strongest criminal ecosystem in Europe”, reckons the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime (gitoc), a think-tank.
Russia’s invasion has hit this underworld with the force of an earthquake (see map 1). The vast majority of rock-hard Ukrainian mobsters have stopped collaborating with their Russian peers: “We are thieves, we are against any state, but we decided we are for Ukraine,” says one. Lucrative heroin-smuggling routes are being remapped, affecting prices and profits for criminal syndicates thousands of miles away. If the disruption proves lasting it could alter the face of global crime. It will also change Ukraine.
The country has struggled with corruption since it left the Soviet Union in 1991. The Maidan revolution of 2013-14 overthrew a corrupt president and some of the oligarchy behind him. In 2019 Volodymyr Zelensky was elected as president on an anti-corruption platform and passed mafia-busting reforms. But at best it was a half-finished clean-up. Before the invasion gitoc ranked Ukraine 34th highest out of 193 countries on its criminality index, and third in Europe. Ukraine also scored notably badly on perceptions of corruption.
The underworld in the government-held parts of Ukraine before 2022 was intermittently, and violently, contested between different groups. Nonetheless it had three facets that linked Ukraine to global criminal markets. First, a contraband “superhighway” linking Russia and Ukraine, passing through the parts of eastern Ukraine that were occupied by Russia in 2014. Second, global smuggling hubs in Odessa and the other Black Sea ports. And finally factories in Ukraine for the production of illicit goods for export.
This infrastructure supported different business models for different products. Ukraine was a growing “spin-off” transit route for heroin from Afghanistan, augmenting routes through the Balkans and Caucasus (see map 2). 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 local manufacture of amphetamines was rising: 67 illegal laboratories were dismantled that year, the highest reported figure of any country.
The war has changed everything by creating “an environment of unacceptable risk for international illicit trafficking”, says a new report from America’s government. Black Sea ports have been closed to shipping or restricted it. The boundary between government-run Ukraine and the territories occupied by Russia is now a fortified series of killing fields, breaking the superhighway. Enlistment in Ukraine has deprived the underworld of manpower while martial law has stopped a wide range of criminal activity. Curfews make it harder to move around at night.
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KYIV, ODESSA AND ROME
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