South Ossetia, the semi-independent region at the center fo the Georgia-Russia conflict, is well-known to be a black market haven where illegal goods are traded.

In an article back in April 2008 for The Atlantic, Lawrence Scott Sheets wrote about nuclear smugglers in the region. He mentioned South Ossetia as an area where smugglers of all types of goods operate.

From A Smuggler’s Story:

Faced at independence with economic collapse, Georgia’s corrupt central government had essentially ignored South Ossetia, which became what its inhabitants joked was “the world’s biggest duty-free shop.” Near the administrative border with Georgia, traders even set up an enormous open-air market where people from all over the region came to buy everything from Russian gasoline to pasta, all free of the import duties that they would pay in other parts of Georgia. (In 2004, shortly after President Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in Georgia, his government shut down the market by placing a police and customs post nearby.) South Ossetia also became especially popular with car thieves—Ossetian, Georgian, and Russian alike—who ripped off automobiles in Georgia, drove them the short distance to South Ossetia, and sold them to middlemen who then ferried them to Russia. And the U.S. government says counterfeit $100 bills traceable to South Ossetia have surfaced in at least four American cities.