As the war in Ukraine becomes increasingly protracted with no end in sight, the country faces the risk of increased domestic circulation of small arms, generating considerable challenges for public security and law enforcement forces in the years to come. While weapons are not traditionally part of standard household possessions in Ukraine, there is a substantial risk of firearms proliferating in civilian spaces.
In response to the full-scale Russian invasion, an unknown but large number of small arms were distributed among civilians in February 2022, for the needs of territorial defence. While martial law is in force, civilian possession of firearms has been temporarily legalized, however, these weapons must be returned to a police station within ten days of the end of martial law. Some regions far from the front lines have called for these weapons to be returned prior to the lifting of martial law, but attempts so far to recover them have been largely unsuccessful and, as the war continues, Ukrainians are in no hurry to return their weapons (Maznychenko, 2023). The front lines are another important source of weapons, where hundreds of thousands of small arms and their respective ammunition are used in active combat. Currently, a plurality of Ukrainians (39 per cent) concur that soldiers will keep (at least some of) their firearms instead of returning them to the military after the war ends (Small Arms Survey, 2023).
This Small Arms Survey monitoring project offers the opportunity to observe both the extent and the way in which firearms are present in Ukrainian households far from the front lines. The authorities’ ability to adapt and respond to this new reality will be pivotal in ensuring the security of the country’s citizens.
In late June 2023 the Ministry of Internal Affairs embarked on a significant initiative by instituting the Unified Arms Registry (Savin, 2023; LeBrun and Shaban, 2023). This endeavour reflects the ministry’s commitment to enhancing the monitoring of the relatively permissive wartime access to firearms through intensified digital registration procedures, primarily aimed at documenting firearms acquisitions and ensuring effective control over the full life cycle of civilian firearms.[1] It is worth noting, however, that the regulatory framework for addressing trophy firearms[2] remains in the developmental stages (Savin, 2023).
Several households that had guns prior to February 2022 do not have them anymore. In part, they were replaced with new gun-owning households. Still, households now have fewer weapons than they had before the new phase of the war broke out. The number of weapons households claimed to keep at home decreased: the 1,750 households sampled in the summer of 2023 stated that they collectively have 146 firearms, as opposed to 184 before the full-scale Russian invasion. It is worth noting that not all armed households specified the number of guns they had during the interview—about 13 per cent of gun owners did not provide a figure as to how many guns they had (see Table 1).
Firearm possession appears to be more normalized nowadays in Ukraine, because fewer people declined to respond or said they ‘don’t know’ when asked if they have guns at home. Yet it is probable that some respondents do not truthfully answer questions about firearm possession in their own households. For this reason, this survey used an experimental method called the Network Scale-Up Method, which the Latin America and the Caribbean Crime Victimization Survey Initiative (CoE, 2021) originally proposed to capture data on household ownership using more indirect questions.[4] These results suggest that as many as 11 per cent of Ukrainian households may be armed. If we consider the range between self-reports and this network-based area estimation of firearm possession, when projecting the survey proportions to the entire population in the non-occupied parts of Ukraine, it suggests that somewhere between 865,000 and 1.42 million of the approximately 13 million resident households[8] could potentially possess at least one firearm.
As the front lines become increasingly stable and the Russian Armed Forces appear less capable of seizing significant new territory, the perceived need to own firearms seems to be waning, potentially leading to reduced civilian demand for such weapons. Currently, fewer Ukrainians consider it a ‘necessity’ to possess a firearm (30 per cent) in comparison to six months ago (40 per cent) (Small Arms Survey, 2023). Male respondents, however, are notably more inclined to affirm that ‘having weapons in this area is a necessity’ than their female counterparts (men: 44 per cent; women: 19 per cent).
Somewhat counterintuitively, the full-scale war—at least for a period—complicated Ukrainians’ ability to access firearms. In 2019 only 5 per cent of surveyed Ukrainians thought that acquiring a firearm was very difficult or even impossible. This jumped to 33 per cent by the winter of 2022–23, most likely due to surging demand. Currently, 21 per cent of people have this view, with only 11 per cent (13 per cent among men) considering it ‘easy’ to obtain a firearm (see Figure 4). Access to ammunition seems to be even more complicated for our respondents, with 10 per cent finding it easy and 25 per cent perceiving it as very difficult to nearly impossible (Small Arms Survey, 2023).
A significant majority of women do not think that having a firearm is a necessity for themselves, with 73 per cent expressing this opinion, as opposed to 51 per cent of men. Those men and women who have firearms at home typically feel that having a gun made them safer, with 66 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women living in armed households sharing this sentiment. On the other hand, women in households that do not own a gun tend to have more negative perceptions of firearms than men living in such households. While almost half (46 per cent) of men in unarmed households say that having a weapon would make them feel safer, only one in five women agree (19 per cent) (Small Arms Survey, 2023).
Women in general had less desire than men to own a firearm (Table 1). Virtually no women said they personally had a firearm (as opposed to 7 per cent of men), and only about one in ten of the female respondents said they would like a weapon. Elderly women were especially opposed to the idea of having a firearm. In contrast, between 43 and 46 per cent of men in every age group either have or wish to have a firearm.
Despite women not wanting a firearm for themselves and many thinking that it is not necessary to have one, firearm proficiency appears to be regarded as an expected skill for a husband. Nearly six in ten women interviewed believed that ‘some’ (38 per cent) or ‘most’ (19 per cent) wives in their area expect their husbands to be familiar with firearms and know how to use them. Interestingly, men are even more likely to think that such proficiency is an expectation of some or most women living in their area (63 per cent in total). In contrast, only 6 per cent of men believed that most husbands in their area would expect their wives to be proficient in using firearms (Small Arms Survey, 2023).
[1] Over the four months between June and September 2023 about 50,000 new military firearms licences were issued and 87 per cent of applications were approved (Savin, 2023).
[2] Those captured from the enemy or found on the battlefield and retained by individual soldiers.
[3] For example, in Nigeria; see Small Arms Survey and PRESCOM (2021, pp. 45–48).
[4] Not only to measure the possession of firearms reported by the informant, but also to estimate the presence of firearms in the local area through the Network Scale-Up Method.
[5] Author’s estimate.
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