InformNapalm: Russian Officers and Kadyrovites Organized Weapons Smuggling through Occupied Crimea

Russian officers, together with representatives of Kadyrov’s Vostok-Akhmat battalion, organized weapons smuggling through temporarily occupied Crimea.

The supply chain was identified by the Ukrainian hacker group 256 Cyber Assault Division in cooperation with the international intelligence community InformNapalm.

They discovered that the weapons first arrive on the occupied peninsula, which serves as a hub for further transportation to the black markets of Russia, as well as to the countries of Europe, West Asia, and Africa.

According to the investigation, Russians are using tankers of the so-called “shadow fleet” to export weapons from Crimea.

The hackers hacked into the accounts of Russian officers, including Major Yevgeniy Dmitriev, a platoon commander of the Russian Storm V assault company of the 291st Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd MD, 58th Combined Arms Army), which is currently operating in the Zaporizhzhia sector.

Dmitriev established the smuggling scheme in the summer of 2024 through contacts with Kadyrov’s Vostok-Akhmat. It is explained that thanks to these connections, the major and the people in the scheme were warned about sudden checks by counterintelligence or the FSB, who were looking for people to sell weapons under the guise of buyers.

Also, contraband cargo is not checked at checkpoints. According to the data obtained, in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions of the temporarily occupied territories, there is a stable “work schedule” of specific shifts of the Russian Guard at the checkpoints of the P-280 highway on the Berdiansk-Melitopol-Chongar-Simferopol sections, which allow suspicious cargo to pass through.

This happens either without inspection at all, or for a fee, they turn a blind eye to the discrepancy between the documents and what is actually being transported.

These schemes are coordinated by officers of the 46th Specialized Border Protection Unit, which consists of 99% of representatives of Chechnya and Dagestan. Their main base is located in Askania Nova and nearby settlements of Kherson region, but their senior staff is also dispersed in Ilyinka, Novotroitske, Chaplynka and Kalanchak.

The commanders of the Russian units came up with various ways to obtain weapons that could be sold, the investigation says. These include sending troops to the assault without weapons with the words “you will get a rifle in battle,” overstating the loss of assault rifles, unreported battlefield trophies, and even stealing from neighboring units.

Competition

At some point, Kadyrov’s men had competitors in the illegal arms market – the Russian group Espanola.

In December 2025, Stanislav Orlov, the founder and leader of the group, was shot dead at his vacation home in Sevastopol. According to the main version, the reason was conflicts with other criminal groups and security forces over the use of logistics routes through occupied Crimea to export weapons from the war zone.