Russia's armed aggression against Ukraine in 2014 became the trigger for drastic changes in this type of criminal business. Ukrainian black market for weapons has expanded significantly. The logical consequence was an increase in the number of weapons, first of all, among representatives of the criminal world.

Independent investigative organization “Conflict Armament Research” (CAR) in November 2021 published the report “Weapons of the War in Ukraine: A three-year investigation of weapon supplies into Donetsk and Luhansk”, which contains evidence of Russia's supply of weapons to militants in Donbas.

While illicit ammunition has proliferated widely within Ukraine, the Survey found no evidence of large-scale international trafficking to Ukraine’s neighbours or other countries in Europe. Ammunition seizures at international border crossings are relatively infrequent and small in scale, especially compared to seizures of cigarettes and other trafficked commodities ⁽¹⁾.

No one knows the exact number of illegal weapons in Ukraine. Various sources provided very different estimates. None of the officials or scholars described any well-founded methodology for determining the scope of illegal weapons in Ukraine.

As of October 1, 2021, there were 707,117 firearms owners registered in Ukraine, who have 790,055 units of hunting smoothbore and 170,195 units of hunting rifled and combined weapons in their personal use ⁽²⁾. The number of illicit weapons in Ukraine may ranges from 2 to 6 million units ⁽³⁾. As reported by the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, as of June 2023, the citizens have about 1.2 million units of registered firearms ⁽⁴⁾.

It’s worth mentioning that the situation with illicit movement of weapons across the Ukrainian borders before large-scale invasion depended not only on pure Ukrainian factors, but also on certain circumstances outside of Ukraine, e.g. large weapons warehouses on the territory of Moldova. As noted Vadym Skibitsky, representative of Ukraine's Main Intelligence Directorate of the Defense Ministry, after Russia occupied the territory of Transnistria in Moldova thirty years ago, Russian troops have been training with local separatist forces on defensive and counter offensive operations using ammunition stored in a warehouse in the village of Kolbasna, which shares a border with Ukraine's Odesa region. Part of the ammunition is used for combat training, part – according to military intelligence – for smuggling ⁽⁵⁾.

The report by the independent investigative organisation “Conflict Armament Research” (2021) contains evidence of Russia's supply of weapons to militants in Donbas⁽⁶⁾.

The Ukrainian market for legal firearms predictably became more active after Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022. Under some estimates ⁽⁷⁾ of the Ukrainian weapon market participants, the value of weapons on the legal Ukrainian market in 2022 increased by an average of 70-100%, and for certain specific items - more than doubled. This happened firstly because an increase in the demand for defence and resistance the aggressor. It is clear that the scale and severity of this war led to an increase in registered crimes committed with the use of firearms on the territory of Ukraine in 2022 more than 6 times in compare with 2021 (from 300 to 1929). Intentional homicides using firearms, in particular, have the same dynamics. But it is not known for sure whether legal or illegal firearms were used.

From time to time, there were occasional publications on alleged cases of illegal smuggling (export) of weapons from Ukraine. For example, in an article about the Finnish police it was asserted that weapons destined for Ukraine could end up in the hands of criminal groups in Europe ⁽⁸⁾. But later the Finnish police reported the absence of confirmed information or any specific facts of the supply of contraband weapons from Ukraine. The Finnish ambassador in Kyiv also did not confirm the information published in the Finnish media ⁽⁹⁾.

Europol also denied arms smuggling from Ukraine in 2022 after its statement of the alleged smuggling of weapons out of Ukraine during the war ⁽¹⁰⁾. We may conclude that this topic and corresponding publications turned out to be a fake. Evidently, there is one of the manifestation information campaigns to discredit Ukraine by the russian federation.

International organisations also have not fixed an increase in illegal arms trade from Ukraine in 2022 and 2023. As stressed in the fact - sheet “U.S. Plan to Counter Illicit Diversion of Certain Advanced Conventional Weapons in Eastern Europe”, “intense internal demand for use on the battlefield by Ukrainian military and security forces within Ukraine is assessed to be impeding black-market proliferation of small arms and guided infantry weapons” ⁽¹¹⁾. This Plan is designed for a multi-annual, all -purpose work of the USA and its partners.

According to the EU Statement at the Working Group on Firearms in Vienna in May, 2023, the EU does not observe large-scale illicit trafficking in weapons in Ukraine against the background of the War ⁽¹²⁾.

Thus, it can be stated that there is currently no evidence of the trade in Western lethal weapons assistance from the Ukrainian side.