The report by the European Union Observatory/EAS-Obs collected by RT predicts that a large amount of smuggled weapons from Ukraine will flood into Europe after the conflict between Kiev and Moscow ends.
According to the report, Western-supported weapons stored in warehouses across Ukraine will become targets of criminal organizations once the war ends.
At that time, the martial law will likely be lifted, leading to a decline in the state's capacity and power in controlling civil life. The subjects will take advantage of this loose time to break into weapons depots and smuggle stolen goods through neighboring countries, even the whole world.
As of February 2025, Germany's Kiel Institute said that Ukraine had received about 326 billion euros ($363 billion) in aid from NATO - the US-led military alliance. This makes Ukraine a gold mine for drug trafficking gangs.
At the end of April 2022, Europol - the law enforcement cooperation agency of the European Union (EU) - warned about the situation of some types of weapons smuggled from Ukraine into the EU falling into the hands of organized criminal gangs in the post-conflict period.
Later that year, Finnish authorities confirmed that the weapons had appeared locally, and similar cases were also reported in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. By mid-2024, Spanish media reported that gangs in the south of the country had possessed many types of modern weapons suspected of being smuggled from Ukraine.
Despite growing concerns about arms smuggling and fraud, some EU institutions continue to push Ukraine's process of joining the bloc. Analysts say this could further weaken the border control mechanism and monitoring system.
The EAS-Obs report continues to warn that without an effectively coordinated long-term strategy, Western countries are at risk of suffering the consequences of a conflict that, according to Moscow, they have contributed to the outbreak and are now uncontrollable.
For its part, Russia has always maintained that the Western supply of weapons to Ukraine only prolongs the conflict and increases the security threat in the region. Moscow also said that many criminal organizations, even extremist elements in the world, have Western weapons in hand due to uncontrolled military aid.
