Criminals and Soldiers in Kharkiv
By Matthew Parish
Wednesday 23 September 2026
Kharkiv is a city in which the distinction between the front and the rear has never been entirely convincing. The Russian border lies too close, the explosions are too frequent and the military presence is too pervasive. Soldiers pass through railway stations, cafés and petrol stations. Military vehicles stand beside ordinary cars. Men in uniform buy cigarettes in shops beneath apartment blocks whose windows have been shattered by Russian missiles. Air raid alarms interrupt dinner. At night, the streets may be quiet for reasons that have little to do with ordinary urban tranquillity.
War changes cities in ways that maps cannot adequately describe. Kharkiv remains a great Ukrainian metropolis, with universities, restaurants, municipal bureaucracy, commerce, families and the remnants of nightlife. Yet she is also a logistical centre for one of the largest wars in Europe since 1945. Enormous quantities of men, weapons, vehicles, money and supplies move through her. People arrive from the front exhausted, frightened, injured or carrying cash. Others travel eastwards knowing that they may not return. In such an environment, the ordinary distinctions between civilian and military life become blurred.
Where armies go, criminals tend to follow. This is not a peculiarity of Ukraine and still less of Kharkiv. It is one of the oldest features of warfare. Armies create markets. They require fuel, accommodation, transport, food, alcohol, spare parts, communications equipment and innumerable other things. They also produce discarded equipment, damaged vehicles, weapons, ammunition and people traumatised by experiences that ordinary society is poorly equipped to understand. Around every great military machine grows an unofficial economy, some of it harmless, some merely irregular and some distinctly criminal.
The overwhelming majority of Ukrainian soldiers passing through Kharkiv are doing nothing more sinister than serving their country in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. This point matters because wartime societies are vulnerable to malicious generalisation. Russia has spent years portraying Ukraine as lawless, extremist or inherently corrupt, and isolated examples of criminal conduct can readily be transformed by propaganda into claims about an entire army or society. That is nonsense. Every army containing hundreds of thousands of people will contain thieves, addicts, violent men and people who break under pressure, just as it will contain heroes, cowards, intellectuals, fools and ordinary people trying to survive.
Nevertheless, war inevitably creates grey zones. A soldier may possess things that would cause immediate alarm in peacetime. He may have military equipment in his car. He may know how to handle explosives. He may be carrying large quantities of cash because electronic payments are impractical somewhere near the front. He may be driving an unmarked vehicle acquired through volunteers. His papers may appear unusual because he belongs to a unit whose movements are deliberately obscure. None of these things necessarily implies criminality.
For criminals, however, this ambiguity is useful. A person wearing military clothing attracts less curiosity in wartime Kharkiv than he would in Warsaw or Berlin. Camouflage is ubiquitous and is not difficult to acquire. Vehicles may carry military markings of uncertain provenance. Volunteers, soldiers, intelligence personnel, police officers and assorted government agencies operate in overlapping worlds in which civilians cannot always know who has legitimate authority. The uniform that represents sacrifice and national defence can therefore also become camouflage in another sense: a means by which the unscrupulous borrow the authority of the state.
The danger is greatest where informal wartime networks intersect with conventional organised crime. Ukraine entered the full-scale invasion with criminal organisations, corrupt officials and black markets, as virtually every large European country possesses in one form or another. The invasion did not magically abolish them. Instead it disrupted some criminal structures, displaced others and created new opportunities. Borders changed their practical significance. Millions of people moved. Normal commercial relationships collapsed. Vast quantities of humanitarian and military assistance began circulating through networks assembled at extraordinary speed.
Much of this informal economy has been indispensable. Ukraine could hardly have survived the first months of the full-scale invasion had everybody waited for perfectly stamped procurement forms. Volunteers bought drones, cars, medical equipment and body armour wherever they could find them. Soldiers repaired vehicles using improvised supply chains. Civilians drove supplies towards places from which sensible commercial operators had fled. Rules were bent because the alternative was sometimes that somebody died.
But informality has a price. The same system that allows a volunteer to obtain a thermal imager for a unit overnight can allow a fraudster to collect money for equipment that never existed. The same absence of questions that permits a battered pickup truck to be driven rapidly towards the front may permit stolen goods to travel in the opposite direction. Trust becomes both a weapon of national resilience and a vulnerability.
Kharkiv is particularly exposed to these contradictions because of geography. She is close enough to the front for the military economy to be everywhere, yet large enough to retain the anonymity of a major city. Soldiers can disappear temporarily into civilian life. Civilians can enter military networks. People from units scattered across the eastern front encounter one another in hotels, garages, bars and railway stations. Deals are made quickly because everybody is in a hurry.
There is another uncomfortable dimension: the psychological consequences of war. A man returning from an infantry position may have spent weeks living according to rules radically different from those of civilian society. Suspicion keeps him alive. Immediate violence may sometimes be necessary. Sleep is irregular. Death is familiar. Authority is direct and consequences are immediate. Then he finds himself in Kharkiv ordering dinner beside a couple discussing university examinations.
Most soldiers negotiate this transition without becoming dangerous to anyone. Yet some do not. Alcohol, exhaustion, trauma and the sudden removal of military discipline can produce confrontations. Wartime Ukraine must deal with these incidents without adopting either of two seductive falsehoods: that soldiers must always be excused because they are soldiers, or that misconduct by individual soldiers demonstrates some wider moral corruption within the Armed Forces. Neither proposition is sustainable.
The same difficulty arises with veterans. Ukraine is creating a veteran population on a scale for which few contemporary European states have experience. These men and women will eventually return to communities carrying remarkable skills, strong networks and experiences incomprehensible to most civilians. The vast majority will become ordinary citizens again. Some will become entrepreneurs, politicians, engineers, teachers or parents. A minority will struggle profoundly.
Criminal organisations may understand this before civilian institutions do. A veteran who knows weapons, surveillance, drones, communications and military logistics possesses skills that have value in both legitimate and illegitimate markets. He may also possess intense loyalty towards former comrades. If civilian employment, psychological support and social reintegration are inadequate, organised crime will have an opportunity to recruit precisely those people whom society most needs to reintegrate successfully.
This is not a prediction that Ukrainian veterans will become criminals. It is an argument for taking the opposite proposition seriously: veteran policy is also crime-prevention policy. A society that honours its soldiers only ceremonially, while leaving them unemployed, isolated or bureaucratically abandoned, creates dangers for itself. Ukraine will need institutions capable of translating military competence into civilian status, employment and dignity.
There is also the question of weapons. A country fighting an existential war necessarily contains an enormous quantity of arms. Ukraine has powerful reasons to account for those weapons carefully, both for her own security and because Russian propaganda eagerly magnifies allegations of weapons trafficking. Yet no state fighting a war of this magnitude can expect perfect control at every moment. Weapons are lost in battle. Positions are overrun. Equipment is destroyed, recovered and transferred between units. Records compiled under artillery fire will not resemble the inventory procedures of a peacetime European army.
The proper response is neither denial nor hysteria. It is professional policing, military accountability and increasingly sophisticated weapons registration as circumstances permit. Ukraine has an overwhelming national interest in ensuring that the instruments required for national survival do not gradually become instruments of post-war criminal violence.
Kharkiv therefore offers a glimpse of a problem that the whole country will eventually confront. War does not divide society neatly into soldiers and civilians, heroes and criminals, legitimate and illegitimate economies. Instead it creates overlapping categories and extraordinary exceptions. A man may be a courageous soldier and nevertheless commit a crime. A civilian volunteer may perform work more dangerous than that undertaken by many uniformed personnel. A criminal may exploit patriotic language. A perfectly legitimate military operation may look suspicious to somebody who does not understand what is happening.
The rule of law becomes more important in precisely these circumstances, not less. Yet wartime law enforcement requires judgement as well as rigidity. Police officers in Kharkiv cannot reasonably treat every soldier carrying unusual equipment as a criminal suspect. Nor can they assume that camouflage clothing confers immunity from investigation. Military status deserves respect, but it cannot become a universal explanation.
There is a deeper reason why this matters. Russia’s war is not merely a contest over territory. It is also a contest over whether Ukraine can preserve and strengthen a political order governed by institutions rather than arbitrary power. If wartime necessity becomes a permanent excuse for illegality, then Russia will have damaged Ukraine even in places it never succeeds in occupying. Conversely, if Ukraine can fight a brutal war while continuing to investigate theft, fraud, violence and corruption, then the survival of the state means more than survival of its borders.
Kharkiv understands ambiguity better than most cities. She is simultaneously a university city and a military hub, a place of culture and a place from which one hears artillery, a civilian metropolis and an indispensable component of the eastern war effort. Her restaurants can be full while villages a short drive away are being destroyed. Young people drink coffee beneath sandbagged windows while soldiers heading towards positions farther east check messages on their telephones.
Amongst all these people there will inevitably be criminals. There will also be soldiers, police officers, volunteers, spies, smugglers, journalists, deserters, refugees, businessmen and frightened civilians, and sometimes appearances will make it difficult to tell which is which. That uncertainty is itself one of the characteristics of a country at war.
The challenge is not to pretend that wartime society is morally simple. It is to prevent complexity from becoming an excuse for cynicism. Kharkiv survives because most people still recognise distinctions between service and exploitation, necessity and opportunism, authority and intimidation. Those distinctions may sometimes be difficult to see beneath camouflage uniforms and darkened streets, but they remain essential.
One day the military traffic through Kharkiv will diminish. Weapons will return to armouries, checkpoints will disappear and soldiers will become veterans. The informal networks that sustained the war will either become ordinary businesses and institutions or fade away. Criminal networks will attempt to survive the transition as well.
The character of Ukraine after the war will depend partly upon which of these transformations succeeds. Winning a war requires soldiers. Winning the peace requires ensuring that the extraordinary freedoms, weapons and informal economies produced by war do not become the foundations of a criminal order. Kharkiv, standing close to the frontier between ordinary life and organised violence, is already living with that problem. The rest of Europe would do well to understand it.
