BANGKOK — The war in Ukraine, now in its third year, is intensifying security and economic pressures thousands of kilometres away in Southeast Asia, according to Thai and regional security officials who say the conflict has created new trafficking routes, price spikes and opportunities for organised crime.
“We are intercepting more Eastern European-made small arms on the Thai-Myanmar border than at any time in the past decade,” a senior officer in Thailand’s Narcotics and Transnational Crime Bureau told reporters this week, requesting anonymity because he was not authorised to speak publicly. Seizures of 5.45mm ammunition — the standard Russian calibre — have risen 160 per cent since early 2023, the officer said.
Regional analysts link the uptick to weapons diverted from Ukrainian battlefields and resold through Cambodia and Laos before reaching insurgent groups in Myanmar and the Philippines. “When a major war expands the global stock of illicit arms, Southeast Asia is one of the first places they surface,” said Zachary Abuza, a security scholar at the U.S. National War College, in a telephone interview.
The economic knock-on effects are also widening. Thailand’s Commerce Ministry reports that urea fertiliser prices remain 45 per cent above pre-invasion levels because Russia and Ukraine together supplied roughly a quarter of global nitrogen exports before 2022. Higher fertiliser costs have eroded profit margins for rice farmers in Thailand and Vietnam, pushing some seasonal workers into online scam operations run from casinos in Myeik and Sihanoukville, labour advocates say.
“We are documenting a direct pipeline: laid-off farmhands are lured by Facebook ads promising call-centre jobs, only to be trafficked into cyber-fraud compounds,” said Chenda Man, coordinator for the Mekong Migrant Network. Interpol’s Singapore office confirms a 32 per cent jump in forced-labour fraud cases involving Thai and Filipino nationals since March 2022.
Thai Foreign Ministry spokesperson Kanchana Patarachoke said Bangkok would raise the issue of wartime spill-overs at next month’s ASEAN-EU joint committee meeting. “The conflict in Europe is not remote to us; its secondary impacts threaten our region’s stability,” she said.
Meanwhile, humanitarian groups warn that growing instability could derail ASEAN’s fragile plan to deliver aid along the Thai-Myanmar frontier. “If arms flows continue unchecked, the window for a negotiated humanitarian corridor will close,” said a diplomat from an ASEAN member state.
Analysts forecast that tightening EU export controls and a potential Ukrainian counter-offensive this summer could further displace weapons and migrants. “Unless donor governments pair military assistance with stronger end-use monitoring, Southeast Asia will keep paying a hidden price for the war,” Abuza said.