A profitable criminal scheme that was transporting large quantities of a heroin substitute across Europe and into Ukraine has been dismantled starting on May 22 as the result of a coordinated investigation carried out by Ukrainian State Security Service (SBU), French and Polish police, according to French newspaper Le Parisien and the SBU.
The 11 men involved, who have been arrested and charged, transported a medicine called ‘Subutex’ – a generic name for buprenorphine, a drug from the psychotropic family that is prescribed to heroin addicts – from Marseille, a southern French port city on the Mediterranean Sea, to Ukraine.
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French and Ukrainian police have not said for how long they believe the criminal scheme was ongoing but it would have been made easier by the visa-free travel regime that Ukraine now has with most of the European Union. Police said the suspects probably made a little more than 10 million euros in total.
The medicine, sold in pill form, is originally given to heroin drug addicts to resist the withdrawal period but has also become popular on the illicit market, especially through online marketplaces on the so-called Dark Web.
“The traffic of Subutex is ten times more profitable than heroin,” said Lieutenant Colonel Bousquet when speaking to Le Parisien.
In 2018, while undertaking an investigation into arms trafficking, Ukrainian law enforcement also noticed that the suspects were selling Subutex pills that came from France – which would be sold for 60 euros each.
Ukrainian police shared their information with Europol, the Europe wide law enforcement agency, which then transmitted the suspects’ names to French authorities. Quickly enough, French and Polish investigators noticed that three Ukrainians had been often traveling to Poland where they would take a van and drive to France.
The three men would then systematically meet in Paris with a 30-year-old French national from Marseille who would provide them with an average of 7,000 to 10,000 pills each month, which they would drive back to Ukraine through Poland.
In all, the French police estimate that the gang to have trafficked 200,000 pills to Ukraine in one year alone, whereas the SBU estimates the number to be 150,000.
The yearly black market value of 200,000 pills in Ukraine is estimated at up to 12 million euros, according to French police.
In order to cross the Ukrainian-Polish border undetected, the traffickers would hide the Subutex in detergent – a product traditionally used by drug traffickers to evade sniffer dogs.
As French officers made their arrests in Marseille and Polish officers swooped on their targets, the SBU arrested one trafficker carrying 7,000 pills of Subutex at the ‘Ruska-Rava’ crossing point between Poland and Ukraine and two others within the Ukrainian territory. The SBU pursued their investigation by conducting searches that resulted in the seizing of more pills smuggled into the country previously, as well as the seizure of weapons.
Polish law enforcement also contributed to the dismantling of the scheme by arresting three Ukrainian nationals based in Poland, from where they would transit the pills from France to Ukraine. Profits from the trafficking were used to purchase luxury cars and residences, according to the SBU.
France has been a major source of Subutex, or buprenorphine, for traffickers all over Europe mainly because it can be obtained for free in France under prescription. Europol has even launched the Mismed operation in 2017 in order to fight the fast expansion of the flow and has, as a result, dismantled 24 criminal organizations and arrested 430 individuals throughout 16 countries.
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