Attacks in Russia Raise Fears of Black Market for Western Weapons

Russia's Defense Ministry said Tuesday its forces had captured several German-made Leopard 2 tanks and US-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicles in eastern Ukraine. The ministry released a short video on its Telegram channel which showed Russian soldiers inspecting what it said were "our trophies...captured in battle."

If the video is authentic - and NATO officials have not disputed the Russian account - it will add to growing concerns about the fate of western weaponry lost in the course of fighting.

A very different sort of incident raised those concerns earlier this month. The anti-Kremlin Russian militants who launched raids from Ukraine into Russian territory drove U.S.-produced MaxxPro armored vehicles and carried European-made assault rifles - apparently models supplied to the Ukrainian military by western countries. This has raised questions about how exactly these groups - which are supported by Ukraine’s armed forces but not formally part of them - got their hands on high-end western military gear. 

“We’re very much aware of the reports and looking into it,” a U.S. State Department official told The Messenger. “Moreover, we’ve been very clear that we don’t support the use of U.S.-made equipment for attacks inside Russia.” 

At least one NATO country, Belgium, which manufactures the FN-SCAR assault rifles seen in some photos of the Russian fighters, has launched a formal investigation into how they ended up on Russian territory. 

“The rule is very strict,” said Prime Minister Alexander de Croo, who added that if Belgian-supplied weapons were used to attack Russia, “we would take that extremely seriously.”

Ukrainian official: "We do lose stuff on the battlefield"

The Ukrainian government denies supplying the weapons to the groups that have carried out the attacks - the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion - and the leaders of those groups say they got their weapons on the black market.

“Western military aid unfortunately goes back and forth, being raided,” Russian Volunteer Corps commander Dennis Kapustin, a veteran far-right activist who also goes by the nom de guerre White Rex, told reporters after one of the raids. “In Bakhmut for instance, I know that a lot of armored vehicles, American armored vehicles, got raided by the Russian forces." 

In a tweet, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, also suggested the weapons could have been bought on the black market. “As you know,” he wrote, “tanks are sold at any Russian military store.”

But that explanation raises a whole other question: How are weapons sent by western countries to Ukraine winding up on the black market? While extensive safeguards have been set up to track military aid, and some Ukrainian soldiers reportedly risk their lives to recover abandoned weaponry, the potential for smuggling and resale has been a specific concern raised by critics of aid to Ukraine, including a number of members of the U.S. congress.

“I can assure you it’s not us selling them,” said Oleksandra Ustinova, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who leads the committee charged with tracking weapons transfers. 

But, she noted, “unfortunately, we do lose stuff on the battlefield that could be captured later. We don’t, so far, have any evidence that it’s being transferred to the black market, but unfortunately, once they are captured, we don’t have any control over these weapons.”

Trouble on the horizon

A report published in March by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime concurred with official assessments that there’s almost no evidence of western weapons that have been sent to Ukraine leaving the country. For one thing, the demand for those weapons to resist the Russian invasion is simply too great. 

“Legal, illegal, state, and semi-state actors within Ukraine all currently see good reason to continue to stockpile weapons: the time to consider monetizing those stocks through internal and foreign trade is not yet come,” the report reads.

Indeed, even Ukrainian mafia groups are reportedly cutting off their traditional links to Russian black markets in the name of patriotic fervor. “We are thieves, we are against any state, but we decided we are for Ukraine,” one gangster recently told the Economist.

But, the report noted, once the war is over, all that may change. The sheer quantity of weaponry currently in Ukraine could create a lucrative underground market, as happened after previous conflicts, including the 1990s wars in the Balkans and the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Union a decade earlier. 

“Once the guns fall silent [in Ukraine], the illegal weapons will come,” Jurgen Stock, the head of Interpol, said last summer. 

And then there are semi-official groups like the Russian Volunteer Corps, which, however they got their weapons, are now extremely well-armed. At the moment, as long as these groups fight against Putin, they serve Ukrainian interests. But if and when the current threat recedes, a group of far-right Russian nationalists toting the latest in NATO weaponry could pose serious problems. 

For now, with Ukrainian cities under attack and the long-awaited counteroffensive to retake Ukrainian territory gaining momentum, it’s a problem for the future.