Arms Trafficking After the USSR and Yugoslavia

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the breakup of Yugoslavia over that decade left in circulation one of the largest surpluses of light weaponry in contemporary history. Arsenals sized for mass armies fell under the control of new, weak states with improvised administrations, and part of that materiel ended up in private hands, in African conflicts or in European organized crime.

The Soviet surplus

The Soviet Army kept enormous stockpiles of rifles, grenade launchers, mines and ammunition spread across every republic. With the dissolution, those stockpiles passed nominally to the successor states, many of which lacked the inventory capacity, oversight and budget to guard or destroy them. Studies by the Small Arms Survey and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have systematically documented the problem of surplus stockpiles in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia through the 1990s and 2000s.

Transnistria and the Caucasus

Transnistria, the Moldovan breakaway territory where the Soviet 14th Army remained stationed with a large depot at Cobasna, became a standard reference in reports on weapons diversion, although the real scale of the trafficking has been debated among analysts. The conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and Chechnya both absorbed and redistributed materiel drawn from state arsenals.

The Yugoslav breakup

Yugoslavia was a distinctive case: besides its military stockpiles, it applied the doctrine of Total National Defense, which distributed weapons among territorial units spread across the whole country. When war broke out, that weaponry ended up in the hands of the republics, militias and private individuals. The Yugoslav arms industry, with hubs such as Zastava in Serbia, kept producing during and after the conflict.

The collapse of the Albanian state in 1997, following the failure of pyramid financial schemes, triggered the mass looting of military depots: various international reports estimated the number of weapons stolen at several hundred thousand, many of which later fed the Kosovo conflict and the European black market. Decades later, weapons of Balkan origin have surfaced in police investigations in Western Europe, including attacks in France and Belgium, as documented by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.

Routes and middlemen

The surplus did not move on its own: a network of middlemen, air cargo companies and forged end-user certificates made it happen. The best-known case is that of Russian businessman Viktor Bout, convicted in the United States in 2011 of conspiracy linked to arms trafficking and the subject of UN expert-panel reports over cargo flights to embargoed zones in Africa. UN reports on Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia documented how materiel of Soviet and Balkan origin reached those conflicts despite embargoes.

• Forged end-user certificates that legalized on paper shipments to embargoed countries.
• Air cargo companies registered in jurisdictions with lax oversight.
• Overland routes from the Balkans to Western Europe, carrying handguns and reactivated rifles.
• International surplus-destruction programs led by the OSCE, UNDP and NATO.

What remains today

The problem has not been resolved. Collection and destruction programs have eliminated large quantities of materiel, but the Small Arms Survey still points to poorly guarded surplus stockpiles in several regions and to the persistence of 1990s-era weapons in criminal circuits. The war in Ukraine has also reopened the debate over controlling weapons transferred to a country at war, a risk European bodies have called for monitoring, though no conclusive data on large-scale diversion exists so far.