Ukraine’s Double-Edged Sword? The Dangers of Using Criminal Groups for National Defense

What are the dangers of states using criminal groups for national defense? This article evaluates this question in the context of Ukraine’s response to the 2022 Russian invasion. It lays out what is currently known about Kyiv’s use of criminal groups as part of its defense efforts, specifically for intelligence-gathering and for bolstering military manpower. Wartime arrangements with criminal actors, however, could compound corruption concerns among citizens that undermine their trust in the state. Such arrangements might entrench a pre-war perception that criminal groups wield influence over state institutions. The state granting leniency to criminal actors in exchange for wartime support could also reduce already low confidence in Ukraine’s criminal justice system. While leveraging criminal groups may be necessary for defense purposes, Ukrainian authorities should remain cognizant of the trade-offs involved – some of which may not become evident until the post-war period.

Introduction

Wartime leaders often face moral dilemmas. A complex, and arguably under-discussed, dilemma is whether or not to use criminal groups for defense when facing acute national security threats. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine forced the country’s leadership to wrestle with this decision. Confronting Russian forces that have an estimated five times the military budget and ten times the number of active-duty personnel (Dewan, 2022), Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (2023) repeatedly vowed to do ‘everything’ necessary to win the war.

In this vein, the Ukrainian state has reportedly enlisted organized criminal groups to bolster its defense efforts. A complete understanding of Kyiv’s wartime relations with criminal groups remains clouded by the fog of war that has been made even foggier by misinformation permeating the reporting on the conflict. To mitigate these concerns, this article discusses arrangements between the state and criminal actors that are publicly recognized by Ukranian authorities in some cases (e.g., Mazurenko, 2022) and relies on accounts from organizations such as the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) that are generally deemed credible. Citations for the sources used are also provided, so that readers can evaluate their credibility.

The article explores the dangers of the Ukrainian state using criminal groups in wartime. State-sanctioned arrangements that provide criminal actors a reprieve from punishment could erode already fragile citizen trust in the Ukrainian state. The wartime use of criminal groups presents a potentially impactful trade-off that might only become evident in post-war Ukraine as the country aims to rebuild. A GI-TOC report emphasizes that, when the conflict subsides, ‘if [Ukranians] perceive that the war has merely fueled corruption and strengthened criminal actors, then the sense of betrayal will be profound’ (GI-TOC, 2023).

The first section of this article lays out what is known about the Ukrainian state’s use of criminal groups, namely, to gather intelligence and to fill military and paramilitary ranks. The second section discusses the potential for arrangements between the state and criminal actors to reduce citizen trust in the state. The third section recommends that Ukrainian authorities carefully consider the post-war implications of these arrangements.

Ukraine’s Wartime Use of Criminal Groups

The Ukrainian state and criminal groups working toward a common cause of national defense is, in some respects, an uncomfortable scenario for both sides: State authorities have a constitutional mandate to enforce laws that criminal groups by definition violate. Criminal groups tend not to recognize the state’s legal authority, but the Russian invasion has pushed some criminal actors in Ukraine to become willing to aid the state’s fight. As a Ukrainian mafia member told The Economist magazine, ‘We are thieves, we are against any state, but we decided we are for Ukraine’ (How the war split the mafia, 2023).1

Ukraine has a substantial supply of criminal groups that can be tapped for wartime efforts. As with many countries emerging from the Soviet Union’s collapse, the rapid privatization of industry and opening up of commercial markets led to a significant expansion of organized criminal activity (Kupatadze, 2015Williams and Picarelli, 2002). Just before the war, GI-TOC ranked Ukraine as having the third strongest criminal groups in Europe, in particular extensive human and arms trafficking networks (GI-TOC, 2021). Ukrainian criminal groups comprise one-half (with Russian groups comprising the other half) of what GI-TOC (2023) characterizes as the ‘strongest criminal ecosystem in Europe.’

Russia’s invasion has created demand from the Ukrainian state for services that criminal groups can provide. As one criminal actor put it, he and his associates can ‘do the dirty work for Ukraine’ (How the war split the mafia, 2023). Ukrainian political actors working with criminal groups has much precedent in the country, and popular anger over this collusion – and corruption more generally – helped fuel the 2014 Maidan Uprising that overthrew the regime of Viktor Yanukovych (Melnychuk, 2023Zabyelina and Markovska, 2019). The state’s use of criminal groups in the wake of the Russian invasion, however, is fundamentally different: Rather than being aimed at enriching the respective parties, the arrangements appear aimed at bolstering national defense.

The confluence of supply and demand has settled at an equilibrium in which criminal groups reportedly contribute to Ukraine’s national defense through two means. First, they have provided intelligence to the Security Service of Ukraine that helped authorities apprehend Russian criminal actors mobilized in Ukraine for pro-Russian destabilization and sabotage missions (GI-TOC, 2023). In one instance, a criminal purportedly blocked Russian attempts to encourage riots in Ukranian prisons; in return for his service, he was given a reprieve from his expected deportation (Follorou, 2022).

Second, criminal groups provide manpower for Ukrainian military and paramilitary units. The head of an Odessa-based civil defense group stated that, by his estimate, more than 100 criminals, with some carrying ‘automatic weapons, others grenades and even mortars,’ engaged in street patrols to protect against a Russian incursion (Follorou, 2022). Criminal actors are incentivized to join fighting ranks because authorities offer carrots such as deferred prosecutions (Burdyga, 2022) or the prospect of release from prison including for those who have been convicted of murder (Mazurenko, 2022).

Some now-released prisoners have assumed command positions. Serhiy ‘Chili’ Velychko was freed by authorities and became commander of the Kraken Regiment under the direction of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence. Similarly, authorities also released Semen Semenchenko, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament and militia leader allegedly involved in arms smuggling and profiteering on state contracts.2 Semenchenko was set free given his ‘high organizational qualities [that] will benefit the country and defense,’ as stated in a letter from Ministry of Defense submitted to the court on his behalf (Sheredeha, 2022).3

The Ukrainian state using criminal groups for national defense is not novel. Indeed, Russia working with criminal networks as a foreign policy tool has been long-standing and well-documented (Galeotti, 2023).4 Countries with democratic traditions also leverage criminal actors to advance their wartime aims. Take, for instance, the United States’ activities during World War II. The US Navy coordinated with the Italian mafioso Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano to protect against sabotage at New York City docks and gather intelligence for the Allied invasion of Sicily (Raab, 2005).

Implications for Post-War Ukraine

Wartime arrangements between the state and criminal groups tend to diminish or become defunct in the post-war period. One might think of the arrangements as akin to ‘alliances of convenience’ in foreign policy contexts in which, as scholar Evan Resnick (2010) writes, ‘adversaries [work together] in response to an overarching third-party threat.’ When third-party threats subside, the incentives to maintain such alliances also subside. That pattern could well manifest in Ukraine. Even if Kyiv’s wartime arrangements dissolve, however, they could further undermine citizen trust in the state – trust that is already waning due to broader corruption scandals over weapons procurement and the like (Kostenko, Stambaugh and Edwards, 2024).

For one, the state striking deals that ease enforcement against criminal groups might exacerbate Ukrainians’ perception that the actors wield influence over state institutions. A 2021 World Justice Project (WJP, 2022) global survey of criminal justice experts measured criminal group influence on various public sector institutions across countries (Botero and Ponce, 2011). Figure 1 shows the ratings for the courts, government, and police in Ukraine relative to the other European countries in the survey.5 In all three sectors, the criminal influence in Ukraine (represented with the blue points) was rated to be in the top 25% of countries.6 This pre-war influence means that leniency toward criminal actors during and after the war might be seen as a continuation of collusive relations between politicians and criminals rather than as an acceptable wartime trade-off.

Figure 1. Criminal Influence over State Institutions.

The leniency could also erode citizen confidence in Ukraine’s criminal justice system. In the lead up to the war, survey data indicated that trust in the state’s will and capacity to bring criminal actors to justice was already low. According to a 2017 WJP poll of Ukrainian citizens, 73% of respondents expressed being ‘not at all’ or ‘not very’ confident that the criminal justice system is ‘effective in bringing people who commit crimes to justice’ (Botero and Ponce, 2011WJP, 2022). The state releasing convicted criminals and deferring prosecution could exacerbate this skepticism.

Low confidence in the criminal justice system is particularly problematic, because criminal actors have taken advantage of the war to expand their illicit activities. Gun violence has increased tenfold in the year after the war’s outbreak (Galeotti and Arutunyan, 2023). Criminal groups also continue to undermine the war effort in a number of ways: They help Ukrainian conscripts evade military service either by smuggling them out of the country or forging exemption papers (Korniychuk, 2022Ljubas, 2022); they steal humanitarian aid (GI-TOC, 2023); and, they smuggle grain for export without paying customs taxes (Puiulet, Loginova and Shedrofsky, 2023). Some Ukrainian criminal groups even continue to collaborate with their counterparts in the Russian mafia, according to Europol (War puts Russian-Ukrainian mafia bond to the test, 2023).

Double-edged Sword?

Despite persistent challenges in the fight against corruption, Ukraine appears to have made meaningful progress in the decade since the Maidan Uprising, moving ahead of forty countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index ranking during this time period (Dickinson, 2024). These gains have been hard-fought by both authorities who have instituted significant reforms and civil society organizations that have attempted to hold the state accountable. However, citizen concerns over wartime corruption threaten to reverse those gains and undermine trust in the state.

Ukrainian authorities should remain cognizant of the potential that using criminal actors will potentially exacerbate these concerns and harm Ukraine’s post-war prospects. For one, diminished trust in the criminal justice system could lead to growing support for violent vigilantism similar to that which emerged in the initial years after the Maidan Uprising (Zabyelina, 2019). Beyond the trust-eroding effects of these arrangements, criminal actors who were given leniency could use their freedom to profiteer off post-war reconstruction projects, and ties between the state and criminal groups could hamper Ukraine’s efforts to join the European Union, which requires countries to meet rule of law standards prior to accession.

The full extent of Kyiv’s wartime arrangements with criminal actors is not yet known, and several scenarios – for example, the drying up of licit weapons supplies from partner nations – could push Kyiv to deepen existing arrangements (Scheck and Gibbons-Neff, 2023). If the terms are revealed to be more favorable to criminal actors than previously known, authorities should be prepared for a public outcry. In the US context, for example, a national scandal broke out when it became public that the military had cooperated with Luciano during the war in exchange for his pardon (Raab, 2005). One can envision similar controversies arising in post-war Ukraine as more information about wartime arrangements comes to light.

The Ukrainian state may need criminal actors during the war, but it will also need citizens’ trust after the war. If it fails to strike a balance between the two needs, the wartime use of criminal groups could prove to be a double-edged sword for Ukraine.

Notes

  1. Nicholas Barnes’s (2017) typology of crime-state relations provides a useful framework to contextualize state use of criminal groups in wartime. These arrangements fit closest within what Barnes terms ‘alliance’ relationships, defined as ‘contexts in which organized crime maintains formal or tacit agreements that limit enforcement and allow both the state and organized crime to mutually benefit.’ Barnes primarily conceptualizes the alliances as the state leveraging criminal groups for domestic law and order provision. Dynamics in Ukraine show that alliances also form to bolster national defense. 
  2. The line between criminal and political actor is blurry in the case of Semenchenko, but he can reasonably be considered a criminal actor given his illicit activities apparently aimed at financial gain. According to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, a criminal group is ‘a structured group of three or more persons, existing for a period of time and acting in concert with the aim of committing one or more serious crimes or offences established in accordance with this Convention, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit [emphasis added].’ 
  3. There are also reports of Ukrainian scam call centers targeting Russian citizens to trick them into sending money to Ukraine and setting fire to state property (Meegan-Vickers, 2023). However, little evidence has surfaced to-date that Ukrainian authorities support or condone the activities. 
  4. For instance, Russian authorities reportedly promoted tobacco smuggling operations to alleviate an initial cash crunch brought on by economic sanctions at the outset of the war (Prothero, 2022). 
  5. This rating is normalized from 0–1 to facilitate cross-country comparison. 
  6. Similarly, according to a collusion index also based on World Justice Project data, Ukraine is 34th out of the 138 countries ranked, placing it in the top quartile of collusive relations globally (Miller, 2024). 

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr. Gary Espinas, Dr. Cullen Nutt, the JIED editorial team, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

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