Operational-Search and Administrative Activity of the National Police of Ukraine in Countering Drug-Related Crime: Principles, Methods, Legal Regulation
Author(s): Volodymyr Ogurchenko*, Olena Dzhafarova, Igor Artemenko, Denys Denyshchuk, Maksym Kryvonos
Abstract
Aim: Ukrainian police officers who deal with drugs today face a seller they rarely see: The deal is concluded in a chat, settled in cryptocurrency and completed through a stash left in a park or an entrance hall. This paper asks how two branches of police work that the law keeps apartcovert intelligence gathering under the operational-search statute and open public-order work governed by administrative law-can be joined into one workable response to such a market.
Methods: Doctrinal analysis of Ukrainian statutes and by-laws was combined with a comparison against the 1988 United Nations (UN) convention and the entrapment case law of the European court of human rights. Official drug-situation reports for 2017-2025 were processed with simple descriptive statistics, and two stages of the 2026 police operation “Rubicon” served as case material.
Results: Registered drug offences grew from roughly 28 thousand in 2017 to 48.6 thousand in 2025, and the share of supply offences reached 37% in 2024; yet sentences for supply made up only about one in thirteen of all drug convictions that year. The authors describe three layers of guiding rules for police anti-drug work, group the covert and open techniques actually used, and point to five weak spots in regulation: Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) and blockchain tracing have no statutory name, online test purchases lack a recording standard, the entrapment line is drawn only after the fact, data from administrative protocols are wasted, and cross-border controlled deliveries depend on ad hoc arrangements.
Conclusion: A two-tier model is offered: Open policing supplies signals and lowers demand, covert work follows the money and the servers up to organisers. Concrete wording is proposed for amending the statutes on operational-search activity and on the police.