Public security

Taken From Ukraine’s War Zone, Grenades Are Used in Crimes, Too

The police are seizing an ever-growing number of explosive devices, even in areas far from the fighting, Small Arms Survey, a group that monitors the distribution of weapons globally, said in a report released in the spring.

Arms experts say it is no surprise that more and more grenades are leaking from the war zone. Hand grenades are easy to hide and hard to keep a good accounting of in combat situations.

“A grenade is consumable: It means that a soldier can claim that it exploded, but easily hide it instead,” said Bohdan Petrenko, the deputy director of the Ukrainian Institute of Research of Extremism in Kiev. The soldier can then sell it on the black market for about $15, a tidy sum in a country with per capita household income in 2016 of $1,135.66.

As a result, hand grenades have become an increasingly familiar aspect of Ukrainian life. In one of the earliest and deadliest attacks, a hand grenade thrown into a crowd of protesters in Kiev in 2015 killed four police officers and injured 141 people.

More recently, a Ukrainian serviceman killed himself by detonating a grenade after a quarrel with his girlfriend. An unemployed man threatened a gas station attendant with a hand grenade and then drove off without paying the bill.