Putin’s guns are set to flood into Britain

 The attempted assassination of a Russian general has highlighted the wider threat of weapons haemorrhaging from the Ukraine war.

On Friday morning, Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev was shot three times by a gunman when leaving for work.

The weapon, which was retrieved from the scene, was apparently a PB, a specialised version of the Makarov pistol with a built-in silencer. This is a relatively rare weapon, originally built for the KGB. When the Soviet Union disbanded at the end of 1991, stocks were left in the hands of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian intelligence agencies and special forces.

The working assumption is that this gun was bought on the black market, part of a growing number of weapons smuggled back from the Ukraine war by soldiers.

Gun ownership in Russia is highly regulated, but nonetheless, its underworld has never had trouble finding weapons: as of 2021, there were perhaps 10 million illegal guns in circulation.

Four years of war, though, have led to a massive increase not just in the number of weapons in the black market, but in their sophistication. Specialised firearms like the PB or the VSS silenced sniper rifle, the latest AK-12 assault rifle and even grenade launchers have started turning up on the streets.

And they are being used. Gun crime is rising, especially in regions bordering the warzone, like Rostov and Belgorod. Rostov-on-Don, a gateway for troops heading into and from the war, has for three years now held the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous city in Europe.

In the main, these are not soldiers’ issued service weapons, which are all serial-numbered and logged. Instead, they are trophies collected from the battlefield, smuggled back into Russia, whether as individual items hidden in a kitbag or whole consignments in the back of a truck.

It doesn’t only happen on one side of the front line, though. Ukraine also has a serious problem with illegal weapons: estimates of illegally held weapons there range up to seven million. Again, many are taken from the battlefield, but others were looted from government arsenals when the state all but collapsed in 2014, or are from the tens of thousands of rifles hurriedly distributed in the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion.

At present, the weapons stolen and gathered in Ukraine largely stay there. It is quite hard to get them over the border into Europe; there is a sense that they may still be needed if the Russians achieve any kind of a breakthrough, and the organised crime gangs that have been buying up guns are waiting for the price on the international market to rise.

Just as when the Balkan wars of the 1990s ended, Europe’s black markets were suddenly awash with weapons, so too there has long been an awareness that peace in Ukraine may also mean mayhem across the continent and in the UK.

Back in 2022, Jürgen Stock, then head of Interpol, warned: “Once the guns fall silent [in Ukraine], the illegal weapons will come. We know this from many other theatres of conflict. The criminals are even now, as we speak, focusing on them.”

Russian disinformation has tried to play up the scale of sales into Europe, but the evidence is that so far, most such illegal transfers have been of individual guns.

However, this is already changing. In 2024, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime began to notice an increase not just in the scale of illegal arms transfers from Ukraine, but also that heavier weapons were being offered for sale: even a massive ZU-23-2 23mm anti-aircraft gun, a snip at £5,500. This was, fortunately, seized by the police.

Last year, a senior Ukrainian security official told The i Paper that the authorities were “taking this very seriously, and making progress fighting the gun-traffickers”. Speaking off the record at the end of 2025, though, an Interpol official who had been working with the Ukrainians admitted that while Kyiv was indeed trying to address the problem, “there are too many gangsters, too much money to be made, too many other priorities. They aren’t losing the fight, but they’re not winning, either.”

One sign of the times is that the scale of underworld arms caches is increasing. Last month, for example, the SBU, Ukraine’s security service, broke up an arms dealing ring selling 75 guns, including Kalashnikov assault rifles, 38 grenades and 13,000 rounds of ammunition.

With the Ukrainian black market already saturated with guns, the obvious markets are in the Middle East – although that too has many sources of illegal firearms – and Europe. European criminals are expected to turn to Ukraine for heavier weapons than those already available, or simply for stocks to resell elsewhere in the world.

Either way, these guns will be used. An analyst from the National Crime Agency recognised this terrible dilemma. “Of course we all want the war to be over,” they said to The i Paper, “but when it does, that’s when our problems begin.”