Criminal Geographies: How the Russo-Ukrainian War Reshaped Global Crime Networks
March 2026
Research Paper 40
Briefing Note 41
Dr Alexander Kupatadze (KCL)
Prof. Erica Marat (NDU)
SOC ACE project: Exploring the Consequences of Organised Crime and Illegal Trade Displacement on Eurasia
PUBLICATION SUMMARY
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has not only disrupted organised crime but fundamentally reshaped it. This paper argues war and sanctions operate not only as constraints on criminal activity but also as catalysts transforming networks’ geography, methods and composition. It examines how organised crime connected to Russia and Ukraine has been displaced, transformed or reconstituted since 2022. It challenges assumptions, showing displacement has been transnational, multi-directional and enduring rather than local or temporary.
Using mixed methods, integrating machine coded media event data (GDELT), trade-based money laundering (TBML) anomaly analysis, and over 100 interviews in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia, it finds four interconnected displacement forms: spatial, functional, tactical and temporal. Theory suggests displacement should primarily affect neighbouring states, but the evidence shows a broader pattern. While activity has increased across Ukraine’s neighbours, the most significant displacement has been in Russia itself. Crime and enforcement actions doubled or tripled in neighbouring states after 2022, but the greatest growth was in Russia, particularly in regions close to Ukraine. Drug trafficking, arms-related offences and human smuggling have grown. At the same time, Russian law enforcement activity has intensified, producing a wartime environment in which criminality grows alongside coercive state control – making Russia simultaneously more criminalised and more repressive.
Far beyond the region, Russia- and Ukraine-linked migrant smuggling networks have appeared at the US-Mexico border, forged Ukrainian identity documents circulate in the UK, as have trafficking routes connecting Eastern Europe with Central Asia, the Gulf and South Asia. War also changed participants in criminality. Entrants with no past criminal background joined illicit markets, while established organised crime shifted toward cyber-enabled and cross-border digital operations.
The drugs economy is extensively displaced, with trafficking routes shifting from Ukrainian ports and synthetic drug production partly relocating to Kazakhstan. Sanctions have driven trade-based money laundering, including systematic over- and under-invoicing across Europe, e.g. gold and tobacco. The study concludes war and sanctions function as systemic shocks, reorganising organised crime rather than suppressing it, requiring more anticipatory, multi-scalar policy responses.
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