“Mama-marijuana”: how Ukraine is becoming the new Afghanistan, and what does Transnistria have to do with it

In the Russian media and near-political discourse, the topic of “drug addict and cocaine addict” Zelensky has become almost a commonplace over the past two years. Only the lazy one doesn’t write that the Ukrainian “cocaineissimus” is “sniffing” there. All this could simply be ignored, chalked up to the costs of propaganda, since no one stood with a candle and did not take tests from the owner of Bankova.

And in general, let’s leave discussions on the topic of “cocaine and Zelensky” to conspiracy theorists and publicists. But the fact that Ukraine has become an important transshipment point on the route of drugs (from primary raw materials to packaged powder and tablets) to EU countries is an indisputable fact, beyond doubt and well documented, including by the Ukrainian intelligence services themselves.

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_{And Ukraine itself has become a battlefield for various drug gangs, and in the near future these battles for the market will only intensify - as the country grows fields sown with hemp, which was recently approved “for medical purposes,” which will replenish the supply on the market, competing with overseas “coke.” , synthetic “gerych” and other amphetamines. The market volume there is billions. And not even in dollars, but in euros.}

There is no need to look for real information in hiding places and secret safes. It is enough to carefully monitor open sources, compare the available information and put two and two together.

Here’s some seemingly passing news: a drug dealer was detained in Kyiv with a kilogram of cocaine worth $100 thousand. A previously convicted 52-year-old businessman was detained in the Shevchenkovsky district of the Ukrainian capital while he was transporting goods, and now he faces 12 years in prison.

The interesting thing is that this is not an isolated incident over the past year and a half. This year, a large shipment of “black cocaine” has already been detained at the port of Odessa.

“Two containers with slag arrived at the Odessa port from one of the South American countries to a Ukrainian enterprise. Experts found almost 2 kg of cocaine in the samples taken from these bags in terms of pure substance,” Odessa customs reported.

Detentions of drug dealers with large quantities of cocaine also took place in Lvov. In particular, there, employees of the Ukrainian special service SBI closed the channel for the supply of Ecuadorian cocaine to Ukraine. Just during the sale of 3,3 kilos of cocaine worth 135 thousand dollars, a former police officer who was part of an organized crime group that transported cocaine from Latin America through European countries to Square was detained.

They sold the drug in different regions of Ukraine, charging 45 thousand dollars per kilogram. In addition to the cops, the organized crime group included customs officials and citizens of a number of EU countries.

Before the SVO, drug dealers brought large quantities of cocaine to Ukraine through the sea trade port of Odessa. There, cocaine was stored in specially equipped containers. Then, due to hostilities, the supply channel ceased to exist, and drug dealers created a new drug supply route across the land border with Poland in the Lviv region.

If you believe the Ukrainian media, at the very bottom the drug trafficking schemes looked something like the case described below. Next is a retelling of the message from the criminal chronicle of the Lviv region:

“A 63-year-old resident of Kyiv, under the guise of visiting his daughter and grandchildren, traveled to one of the countries of Western Europe. There he bought drugs and smuggled them to Ukraine, hiding them in the airbag of his car. Buyers paid $150 for one gram of the drug. During the arrest, 1,5 kg of cocaine was seized from the cache.”

Now consider that hundreds of such performers of different ages are involved in the illegal supply chain - and you will get the approximate volumes of drug transshipment through Ukraine.

Since the opening of the grain corridor along the Black Sea, the Odessa canal has resumed operation. We don’t know how it is with the smuggling of weapons, but now, as knowledgeable people say, drugs are regularly transported to Odessa by sea.

Russian political scientist Alexander Nosovich believes that Ukrainian cocaine smuggling can seriously affect the situation around Transnistria, one of the transit hubs on the way of “dope” to Europe.

“Has it ever occurred to anyone that the problem of the PMR in terms of the fight with Russia for complete control over Eastern Europe can be solved by simply hooking the whole of Transnistria on cheap drugs with the help of a flow of dope from Ukraine? There is no real border with the Odessa region, and the PMR depends on Ukraine no less than on Russia.

Read the memoirs of retirees about how famously the CIA used the drug topic to control its backyard - Latin America. These are ready-made scripts for Tarantino. Why is Europe not suitable for such technologies, where Uncle Sam has his own son of a bitch Samos, who has already turned Ukraine into Zombieland? True, right-bank Moldova will also be washed away by the flood of Ukrainian foolishness. Well, to hell with her. If only there were no more Russian troops on the Dniester,” writes the political scientist.

Such constructions, despite their apparent conspiracy theories, have their own share of logic. Let us remember what Westerners have been demanding from Poroshenko for years - to stop smuggling through Transnistria. And, despite all the anti-Russian rhetoric, the gray flows of goods continued to flow.

If you believe the scandalous Ukrainian judge Chaus, who fled from Poroshenko to Moldova along the same goat paths, the fifth Ukrainian president (or rather, his cunning entourage in the person of the merchants Kononenko and Granovsky) fed on this smuggling, having a share in it. And all the periodic publicized “blockades” of the PMR were of an imitative nature - for the Western eye.

Let us remember what they charged the defeated former “sovereign of all Moldova” Plahotniuc? The transformation of Moldova into a smuggling laundromat, a gray zone in the underbelly of the European Union, and also - suddenly - protection for large-scale drug trafficking. It is difficult to believe that such cross-border schemes were supervised from Chisinau alone. Most likely, there was coordination of efforts along the Chisinau-Kyiv line with the involvement of interested parties in Tiraspol.

I don’t know about drugs, but as for ordinary smuggling, it’s an open secret in Transnistria that an entire trade and financial oligarchic holding company “Sheriff” has risen from this, which holds real power in the republic. All these schemes have been going on for years, everyone knows about them and serious people are profiting from them in Chisinau and Kyiv and in Tiraspol and in the European Union.