Grass at the house: how hashish traffic to Russia is changing
About 200 kg of hashish was seized in St. Petersburg. According to law enforcement agencies, a large batch of drugs was stored in a construction shed and was intended for an interregional distribution channel. The details are in the Izvestia article.
The heavyweight courier
St. Petersburg police detectives have uncovered a large drug warehouse (the so-called "pit") in a construction shed.
"During her examination, the police found 14 bags with a substance of plant origin. Two more bags with similar contents were found in the car rented by the attacker," said Irina Volk, an official representative of the Russian Interior Ministry.
The examination showed that hashish was in the bags. The total weight of the seized was about 200 kg. The contents were packed in ten-piece sticker briquettes in a vacuum bag. Branding may indicate that the cargo belongs to different stores or that there were several shipments and they accumulated for a long time in the "pit".
The sheer scale of the seizure shows that we are no longer talking about small shipments and a network of mortgagors, but about complex logistics comparable to commercial supplies. It includes intermediate warehouses, leased transport, regional distribution, and a multi-level participant system.
Valentin Stanov, a former operative and author of the book "Notes of an Old Detective," believes that the very scheme of the operation indicates serious preparation.
— This is not a situation where a person is detained with a package of drugs. Here you can see the consistent documentation of the entire chain — storage location, transport, movement. For operatives, such cases are of particular value precisely because they allow them to reach not only the carriers, but also the organizers of the channel," the expert notes.
According to him, a volume of hundreds of kilograms usually means that there is a pre-calculated distribution system.
— Such shipments are not purchased for one city or one group of consumers. As a rule, we are talking about splitting the supply into dozens of smaller flows, which then diverge across several regions.
Extended logistics
Unlike synthetic drugs, which can be produced relatively close to the market, hashish requires stable international supply chains.
According to Sergey Pelikh, an expert on international drug trafficking, that is why any changes in foreign trade and transport infrastructure are quickly reflected in the illegal market.
He describes what is happening through the so-called "cockroach principle", formulated back in the 1980s.
"You turn off the light, and the cockroaches come from all sides," he explains. — You turn on the light, they run away. Today it is more relevant than ever. One route is blocked, and the flow starts searching for another. The greater the pressure on a particular direction, the faster workarounds appear.
According to the expert, the market has gone through several stages of restructuring in recent years.
At the first stage, the main problem for the smugglers was the strengthening of control in the western directions. This increased the cost of transportation and reduced the predictability of routes.
At the second stage, more complex transit chains appeared through third countries.
Pelich believes that in recent years, routes through the South Caucasus and Central Asia have begun to play an important role. According to him, logistics began to be based on the principle of multi-stage transit: cargo is reissued several times, carriers, documents and final recipients change.
As a result, drug trafficking is increasingly using the infrastructure of legal trade.
— Now the prohibited cargo is much less often moved separately. They try to mix it with legal commodity flows, use temporary storage warehouses, transit sites, repackaging and commercial transport.
Why are large shipments increasingly being seized inside Russia?
Until a few years ago, drug seizures were commonly reported at the border. The number of cases where large shipments are already detected inside the country has increased significantly. According to Izvestia's interlocutors, this is due to several factors at once.
— Firstly, smugglers try to minimize the risks at the border crossing stage and move large cargo as quickly as possible, — says Pelikh. — Secondly, there is an intermediate storage infrastructure — temporary warehouses, garages, construction cabins, rented premises. Thirdly, large shipments are increasingly being crushed only after delivery inside the country.
This model allows the organizers to reduce losses: even if one party is delayed, the rest continue to move.
Retired Justice Colonel Pelikh notes that this is why operational work today is increasingly being built not around intercepting a particular carrier, but around restoring the entire cargo movement chain.
The new economy of drug trafficking
Changing routes also changes the economy of the shadow market. Increasing complexity of logistics means increased costs: additional transportation, repackaging, intermediaries, storage, and conspiracy, Pelich says. But this does not necessarily lead to a reduction in supply.
"On the contrary, criminal networks are trying to compensate for the increase in costs by increasing the volume of individual shipments and the higher cost of the final product," explains Izvestia's interlocutor. — Large shipments are becoming more profitable than small ones — they allow you to distribute transportation costs and reduce the relative cost of shipping each kilogram.
According to the Russian Interior Ministry, from January to April 2026, the police seized 10.8 tons of various narcotic and psychotropic drugs from illicit trafficking.
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