In reality, Palermo prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia spoke about drones “of the type used in the war in Ukraine,” not about aircraft supplied to Ukraine, and stressed that these were merely “indications” of interest rather than documented transactions. The only weapons shipment he reported as actually seized turned out to be Balkan in origin — dating to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Research to date does not confirm any organized outflow of weapons from Ukraine to EU countries.
Russian media write that “the Italian mafia is allegedly attempting to obtain UAVs used in Ukraine.” The propaganda claims that mafia structures “are seeking to acquire, through shadow channels, unmanned aerial vehicles that entered circulation as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation.”
The ANSA report cited by Russian propagandists refers to drones “like those used in Ukraine war” — that is, to a class of weapon, not to specific aircraft taken out of Ukraine or supplied to Ukraine as partner assistance. Neither the prosecutor quoted by the agency nor the agency itself claimed that the mafia is buying Ukrainian drones or weapons from Western deliveries to Ukraine.
Speaking on July 28, 2026, at a session of the parliamentary anti-mafia commission, Palermo chief prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia stated: “We have identified weapons originating from Salento (in Apulia), but which in fact arrived from the Balkans — from the former Yugoslavia. But we are aware of the mafia’s interest in more sophisticated weapons. For example, in those that appeared on the black market during the Russian-Ukrainian war. We have come into possession of indications of the procurement of munitions dropped from drones — weapons against which we are not prepared to defend ourselves.”
What is at issue here are munition-dropping drones: adapted commercial aircraft available on the open market worldwide, not examples of Western military aid to Ukraine. Such drones are used, for instance, to deliver mobile phones into Palermo’s prisons.
The claim that “Ukrainian weapons are leaking into Europe” has been promoted for several years, yet independent research does not corroborate it. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) report “Smoke on the horizon” states plainly that the proliferation of illegal weapons has so far been confined to Ukrainian territory itself, and that no confirmed cases of organized weapons smuggling from Ukraine into EU countries have been recorded; no organized or large-scale flow of weapons from Ukraine into the rest of Europe has been identified since 2022. Individual finds and risks are real, but researchers have found no systemic channel of the kind Russian propaganda describes.
The day after the ANSA report appeared, the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano linked the prosecutor’s remarks to the figure of “800,000 missing weapons in Ukraine,” and Russian outlets presented this as a single established fact — as though the figure represented the quantity of weapons that had supposedly ended up on Europe’s black market. In reality, the figure of 780,465 comes from the open Register of Lost and Stolen Weapons maintained by Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, which is kept publicly and regularly published by the Opendatabot service. Notably, 94% of the entries are losses (lost in combat, destroyed, left behind on occupied territory) and only 6% are thefts, while the register is dominated by assault rifles, hunting rifles, carbines, and pistols — that is, personal and distributed civilian weapons, not heavy Western equipment.
No source offers any evidence that these units entered European circulation, still less that they reached the Cosa Nostra. Telling, too, is the speed with which the story was amplified by outlets in the Pravda network — infrastructure documented by France’s Viginum agency and NewsGuard as an element of Russia’s information operations apparatus. On July 29 alone, the network’s Italian domain published several versions of the story with progressively escalating formulations: from “Ukrainian drones on the black market” to “combat drones intended for Ukraine” and “weapons from Ukraine are reaching the mafia in Italy.”
An actual statement by an Italian prosecutor about the mafia’s interest in modern weapon types was thus transformed into a report that Western military aid to Ukraine is flowing to European organized crime.
StopFake previously debunked fakes claiming that Ukrainians had begun selling American kamikaze drones on the darknet and that Europol was aware of cases of weapons smuggling from Ukraine.
