Fontanka reports that the case is connected to the murder of entrepreneur and municipal deputy Aleksandr Petrov in the Vyborgsky District of Leningrad Oblast in 2020. He was shot by a sniper. Petrov was considered Traber’s right-hand man and the “owner of Vyborg.” Petrov’s son, Vitaly, is the first Russian Formula 1 driver to compete in world championships.

The Telegram channel VChK-OGPU, citing sources, writes that shortly before his murder, Petrov allegedly began selling off assets in Vyborg and wanted to move abroad to join his son, which led to a conflict with Traber. The case has been transferred to the central office of the Investigative Committee, and Traber and Danilenko will be questioned in Moscow.

Along with Traber’s detention, law enforcement also conducted searches at the home of Gennady Petrov, the leader of the Petrov-Malyshev organized crime group, a source in the Ministry of Internal Affairs specializing in criminal organizations told IStories. This was also reported by the VChK-OGPU. Details of the search are unknown.

Who is Ilya Traber

Traber has known Vladimir Putin since the 1990s, during Putin’s time working at the St. Petersburg mayor’s office. According to Novaya Gazeta, in the 1990s, St. Petersburg Vice Mayor Vladimir Putin helped Traber with the privatization of the St. Petersburg seaport, which was the subject of fierce competition among several criminal clans.

Ilya Traber is a former submarine officer who went into business in the 1990s. In retirement, he was involved in the antiques business in St. Petersburg, which is how he got his nickname. His company, Antiquary, quickly became a monopoly on the city market with the support of Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.

During the redistribution of property in the 1990s, Traber gained control over St. Petersburg’s port infrastructure, including seaport terminals, logistics structures, land assets on the Baltic Sea, and projects in the oil and gas sector.

This includes the St. Petersburg Fuel Company (PTK), the St. Petersburg seaport, and the aircraft refueling service at Pulkovo Airport. Traber was involved in the expansion of ports in Primorsk and Ust-Luga and participated in the creation of the Northern Sea Route. Among his subordinates was the current head of Gazprom, Alexey Miller. Traber was also considered the “shadow owner” of Vyborg.

Spain declared Traber internationally wanted in connection with the Malyshev organized crime group case. He is suspected of ties with its leaders, Gennady Petrov and Aleksandr Malyshev (both were detained during a major operation in Europe).

Traber’s former bodyguard, Sergey Gess, claims that before becoming president, Vladimir Putin would visit Traber’s office “for advice.”

“He’s still incognito. He never showed off: in the ’90s he drove a Zhiguli [cheap Soviet and Russian car model based on the Fiat 124]. And I didn’t understand why he drove [such a cheap car]? And once we’re driving, he’s behind the wheel, and coming toward us is a BMW, a Mercedes… And the Antiquarian says: ‘It’s too early to buy foreign cars, 1937 could still start again,’” Gess recalled about his boss’s habits.

• As IStories reported, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Traber, together with Leningrad Oblast Governor Aleksandr Drozdenko, created “the Leningrad Frontier” foundation to support the Russian military. In the eight months of 2022, the foundation collected 56 million rubles in donations, but a significant portion of these funds ended up with the family of businessman Oleg Barzinsky, who is close to Drozdenko and Traber. A co-founder of the foundation is Traber’s charity foundation, “Starorusskaya, 12.” This is the address of Ilya Traber’s mansion, known in St. Petersburg’s criminal chronicles of the 1990s. According to official reports, in 2025 this foundation allegedly spent 46.1 million rubles on donations.

Who is Gennady Petrov

Petrov is known as one of the leaders of the Malyshev criminal organization. He is acquainted with high-ranking Russian security officials, for example with FSB First Deputy Director Sergei Korolev. Petrov also called Vladimir Putin his friend, and a Spanish intelligence officer described Petrov as an acquaintance of Putin from the KGB days.

In the early 1990s, Petrov was listed as a member of the Malyshev organized crime group. By the mid-1990s, companies associated with Petrov acquired stakes in the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal and the St. Petersburg Fuel Company. These businesses were also linked to Ilya Traber.

Petrov also became a co-owner of Bank Rossiya, which brought together Putin’s friends from the Ozero cooperative: Yury Kovalchuk, Nikolai Shamalov (his son Kirill is the former husband of Putin’s daughter Yekaterina), and developer Viktor Myachin. At the same time, Petrov became a neighbor to Putin’s friends in the famous house on Kamenny Island.

In 1996, Petrov moved to Spain, where he became the target of surveillance by local law enforcement. The Spanish investigation found that Petrov discussed appointments of senior officials and heads of state companies with leaders of the Investigative Committee, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the FSB. Petrov claimed that he had worked with Putin in the KGB. Former FSB officers told Novaya Gazeta that he could have been a KGB informant.

In 2008, Petrov and Aleksandr Malyshev were detained in Spain, but the case eventually collapsed. In 2010, Petrov was released on bail and later returned to Russia.

• As IStories found out, recently Petrov has been involved in two Russian projects worth hundreds of billions of rubles. These include the construction of the Tavrida highway in Crimea and the Scandinavia highway between St. Petersburg and Finland, as well as the supply of coal, pig iron, and iron ore raw materials across Russia and abroad through the largest trader that emerged on the market after Evraz was included in the sanctions lists.

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Russia’s economy is slowing down sharply. Regional budget deficits are growing, businesses are struggling under extremely high interest rates, and inflation continues to push prices upward. Disruptions of mobile communications and internet shutdowns across many Russian regions have added to public frustration, creating growing social discontent that the Kremlin can no longer easily dismiss.

Inside the Russian elite, tensions are also rising. According to an intelligence report recently published by IStories, Financial Times, and CNN, senior Russian security officials are increasingly blaming one another for failures in Ukraine. 

Ahead of the Victory Day parade on Red Square, Vladimir Putin asked Donald Trump to persuade Volodymyr Zelenskyy not to strike Moscow during the celebrations. A leader who wants everyone to believe he is winning the war does not ask his enemies for a temporary pause so he can safely watch a parade of a heavily depleted army.

Vladimir Putin has fallen into a trap of his own making — a system built not on democratic institutions, but on informal rules and competing clans organized around money, security structures, political influence, and personal loyalty to the Czar. For decades, Putin acted as the ultimate arbiter between these groups, balancing their interests. But as the pressure of war grows and Putin’s authority weakens, the balance inside the elite is beginning to break down.

Different factions are now quietly preparing for an uncertain future — strengthening their control over financial resources, security agencies, and even private military forces. To understand where Russia may be heading in the coming years, it is necessary to understand the key clans that dominate the Russian system today — and the struggle that may begin once the current balance of power finally starts to collapse. 

To understand the trajectory of the Russian state in the coming years, it is essential to map the primary actors who will likely participate in the inevitable Russian “Game of Thrones.”

IStories and CORRECTIV have built profiles of the most influential Russian clans, their leaders, and the assets they control. The project focuses mainly on groups that possess not only formal political authority but also real physical power through control over security services, armed structures, or other coercive institutions.

For that reason, the profile does not include figures often described by the media as “technocrats” — such as Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Central Bank chief Elvira Nabiullina, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, and others. Although they occupy senior government positions, they do not appear to possess the kind of direct coercive power that could play a decisive role in a future struggle for power in Russia.

This profile covers some of the best-known and most powerful Russian clans and groups, but it is not a complete list of all potential actors in Russia’s potential “Game of Thrones.”

The Bodyguards

Viktor Zolotov (72 years old) met Vladimir Putin in the early 90s by a stroke of luck. According to the former head of the Security Service of Russia’s first president, Alexander Korzhakov, he hired Zolotov out of desperation — there were no people.

Therefore, when the then-mayor of St. Petersburg asked Yeltsin to provide him with protection against St. Petersburg gangsters in the early 90s, Korzhakov decided to get rid of Zolotov and sent him to guard Sobchak.

In St. Petersburg, Zolotov met Putin and soon became responsible for his protection and that of his family members. When Putin became president, he appointed Zolotov as head of the Presidential Security Service.

For many years, Zolotov remained in the shadow of his boss. However, after mass protests against election fraud broke out in Russia in 2011, which Putin perceived as a conspiracy by Western intelligence agencies with part of the Russian — primarily liberal — elite, he decided to promote his bodyguards to leadership positions in law enforcement and other government agencies.

Putin appointed Zolotov as head of the Interior Ministry’s Internal Troops, which in 2016 were renamed Rosgvardia and removed from the MVD into an independent paramilitary structure with 350,000 personnel.

In this post, Zolotov is essentially tasked with the same mission he has performed for the last 35 years — guarding Putin and his power. For these purposes, in 2023, following the failed mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin issued a decree transferring heavy equipment to Rosgvardia. Now, in the event of internal unrest, Putin’s bodyguard will be able to use heavy tanks against the Russian people.

There is no doubt Zolotov will decide to do so: as one of the leaders of the Russian criminal world told me, in St. Petersburg criminal circles, Zolotov had the nickname “The Pierced” (Probitiy) — for his cruelty and unquestioning loyalty to the Tsar.

Alexey Dyumin (53 years old) comes from a military family. In 1995, he joined the Main Guard Directorate (predecessor of the FSO), where he dealt with communications; in 1999, he joined the Presidential Security Service.

Since then, for 15 years, Dyumin served in Putin’s security detail, never leaving his side day or night, preventing him from drowning in the ocean, and guarding him from bears in the taiga. Initially, Dyumin owed his promotion to Viktor Zolotov: “Viktor Vasilyevich Zolotov is a person who did a lot for my destiny, taught me sense and wisdom… and I understood immediately that he is a very strong, spirited commander behind whom one can go to the end. And then there was an introduction to Vladimir Vladimirovich… and off we went!” Dyumin recalled. However, Dyumin subsequently became one of Putin’s main favorites and one of the most likely successors to the presidency. 

In 2014, as part of the campaign to promote bodyguards to the highest echelons of power, Putin appointed Dyumin as deputy head of the GRU and commander of the Special Operations Forces (SSO), which played a key role in the occupation of Crimea. According to a source acquainted with Dyumin, he received the Hero of Russia star for this operation.

In 2016, Putin appointed Dyumin as governor of the Tula Oblast, which he led for the next eight years. As soon as the Russian president’s favorite became governor, everyone began to help him: from the Ministry of Defense, which began building bridges in the Tula Oblast, to the Moscow government, which renovated the embankment in Tula. State companies and private businesses joined in.

In 2024, Putin returned his favorite to Moscow and appointed him as his assistant overseeing the defense-industrial complex, as well as the Secretary of the State Council. This once insignificant advisory body received constitutional status in 2020 during major amendments. According to many experts, Putin gave the body constitutional status to be able to lead it in the future and hand over power to a successor while retaining the ability to control their decisions.

Dmitry Mironov (56 years old) is a descendant of military officers whose career became a classic example of a “personal bodyguard” ascending to the heights of state power. Since the early 90s, Mironov served in state security (FSO), where he for many years held the position of Vladimir Putin’s adjutant. The degree of closeness to the president is evidenced by the fact that in narrow circles, Putin reportedly affectionately calls him “sonny.” 

Mironov’s public career began in 2014 when Putin appointed him head of the GUEBiPK of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Already in 2016, similar to Alexey Dyumin, Mironov was sent for “testing” in a region — he headed the complex and protest-prone Yaroslavl Oblast. As governor, he enjoyed exclusive access to the president. 

In 2021, Putin returned Mironov to Moscow, appointing him as his assistant. Today, he holds one of the most non-public but strategically important positions — chairman of the commission on personnel policy in law enforcement agencies. Through Mironov’s hands pass the dossiers of all the country’s key siloviki, making the former adjutant the “chief HR officer” of the regime. 

Like other members of the “bodyguards” clan, Mironov also oversees mobilization resources, heading the Council for Cossack Affairs and supporting Cossack units in the war with Ukraine.

Alexey Rubezhnoy (53 years old) is a career officer of the “Alpha” special unit who replaced Dmitry Kochnev as head of the Presidential Security Service (SBP) in June 2016. Rubezhnoy focused on creating powerful economic influence, using the SBP as a tool for lobbying and control over strategic assets.

Rubezhnoy heads the Supreme Supervisory Board of the Russian Boxing Federation, led by Umar Kremlev (Lutfulloev) — a businessman with a criminal past. Rubezhnoy and Kremlev are relatives; they are married to sisters. Through Rubezhnoy’s patronage, Kremlev gained access to personal communication with the president. Their partnership allowed them to take control of multi-billion dollar markets: from monopolizing the betting business to managing the country’s largest lottery operator. After the full-scale invasion in 2022, Rubezhnoy became one of the main beneficiaries of the process of deprivatization and “nationalization” of private property. 

It was Rubezhnoy who lobbied Putin for the decree transferring the assets of Russia’s largest car dealer, Rolf, to the temporary management of Rosimushchestvo; the new owner effectively became Rubezhnoy’s protégé, Kremlev.

Dmitry Kochnev (61 years old), director of the Federal Protective Service (FSO), is one of the most secretive and least-known silovik within Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. In 2021, Kochnev was promoted to General of the Army — Russia’s highest military rank (excluding Marshal) — underscoring a status that places him on equal footing with Sergei Shoigu, Alexander Bortnikov, and Viktor Zolotov.

Kochnev began his career in state security during the Soviet era, joining the KGB’s 9th Directorate in 1984, which was responsible for protecting the country’s top leadership. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he continued his rise through the structures of the Federal Protective Service.

In the early 2000s, Kochnev entered Vladimir Putin’s orbit, gradually becoming one of the most trusted officers in the president’s personal security detail. He oversaw the operational work of the Presidential Security Service (SBP) and was responsible for organizing the protection of top officials and strategic facilities.

In 2016, Putin appointed Kochnev as director of the FSO. While the agency is formally responsible for guarding high-ranking officials, the Kremlin, government communications, and strategic sites, it has long since transformed into an independent center of influence with vast financial, technical, and operational capabilities.

Following the invasion of Ukraine, the FSO’s role expanded significantly: thanks to constant access to Putin and information on top officials, Kochnev and his agency wield immense influence.

Alexander Kurenkov (53 years old) is a career intelligence officer whose biography exactly repeats the path of “adjutants” who became state ministers. From 2002, he began service in the FSO, and from 2015, he became Vladimir Putin’s adjutant.

In 2021, Kurenkov was transferred to Rosgvardia to Viktor Zolotov, where he became deputy director. However, in May 2022, Putin appointed him head of the MCHS. Putin characterized him as a “hard worker” (sluzhaka) in the best sense of the word, capable of bringing strict order to the structure. 

In June 2025, Kurenkov was promoted to Colonel General. Under his leadership, the MCHS is integrating into the military agenda, actively restoring the civil defense system and shelters, for which over 150 billion rubles is planned.

The Consiglieri

Yuri Kovalchuk (74 years old) is called the “personal banker” and chief ideologue of the president, responsible for forming the media agenda and strategic planning. Kovalchuk is the informal curator of Russia’s internal policy. 

Through the National Media Group (NMG), led by Putin’s mistress Alina Kabaeva, Kovalchuk controls the country’s largest media resources: Channel One, Fifth Channel, REN TV, and Izvestia. 

The economic foundation of the clan consists of Bank Rossiya and the SOGAZ insurance group. 

Yuri Kovalchuk’s role reached a new level after 2020: according to many sources, it was he who spent the most time with Putin in isolation during the pandemic, sharing his views on “restoring historical justice” and confrontation with the West. 

Through Sergey Kiriyenko, they control the presidential administration, and through Mikhail Kovalchuk (Yuri’s brother), they control fundamental science and the budgets of the Kurchatov Institute. 

In 2024, the clan’s influence was secured by the appointment of Yuri’s son, Boris Kovalchuk, as head of the Accounts Chamber.

Mikhail Kovalchuk (79 years old) is the elder brother of Yuri Kovalchuk and the chief ideologue of Russia’s scientific and technological development. 

Since 2005, he has led the NRC Kurchatov Institute, which has turned into a “scientific empire,” absorbing dozens of the country’s leading research institutes. 

Kovalchuk serves as Putin’s guide to the world of “science of the future” and global threats. He is the author of theories about the creation of “nature-like technologies” and “biological dangers” coming from the West. 

After 2022, Mikhail Kovalchuk became a key figure in ensuring “technological mobilization,” promoting the idea of the complete isolation of Russian science from Western institutions.

Sergey Kiriyenko (62 years old) is the curator of the Putin regime’s internal policy, serving as First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration since 2016. His alliance with the Kovalchuk clan is strategic: Kiriyenko provides administrative resources and personnel selection, while the Kovalchuks provide financial and media support.

His influence is built on total control over meanings and personnel. He is the ideologue of the “Leaders of Russia” system. In the digital environment, the clan is anchored through Sergey’s son — Vladimir Kiriyenko, who headed the VK holding. This turned the country’s largest social network into an instrument of state control and propaganda. After 2022, Kiriyenko became a key “civilian” face of the war, overseeing the creation of a new ideological layer in society.

Boris Kovalchuk (48 years old) is the son of Yuri Kovalchuk, embodying the process of transferring power and assets to the “heirs” of the president’s inner circle. From 2009 to 2024, he led the Inter RAO holding — one of the country’s largest energy companies. In 2024, he was appointed head of the Accounts Chamber of the RF.

This appointment turned him into the country’s chief “auditor,” giving the Kovalchuk clan an unprecedented lever of control over the entire vertical of power, allowing them to oversee the financial discipline of potential competitors.

Alexander Beglov (69 years old) is considered a direct appointee of Yuri Kovalchuk, ensuring the clan’s interests in their “base” region. As governor of St. Petersburg, Beglov acts as an operator of large infrastructure and investment projects in which Bank Rossiya and Kovalchuk-linked contractors are interested. 

In 2024, having been re-elected for a new term, Beglov maintained full administrative control over the country’s second most important city for the Kovalchuk clan.

Alexander Gutsan (65 years old) is a trusted person of the Kovalchuk clan in the law enforcement vertical. In September 2025, Gutsan’s political weight reached its peak: he was appointed Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation. This appointment allowed the Kovalchuk clan to gain control over the main supervisory body in the country. 

In league with Boris Kovalchuk (head of the Accounts Chamber), the family now has the ability to not only audit financial expenditures but also immediately initiate criminal and administrative prosecution of any officials or businessmen. Gutsan plays the role of a key tool in the legalization of property redistribution.

The KGB Colleagues

Sergey Chemezov (73 years old) is one of the most influential people in Putin’s circle, whose connection with the president dates back to the mid-80s in Dresden (GDR). 

Since 2007, Chemezov has led the state corporation Rostec. Under his control are hundreds of enterprises of the military-industrial complex. 

After 2022, Chemezov’s role as the main arms producer for the Russian army became critical. He actively participates in the process of “creeping nationalization”: assets of private owners who fail to cope with state defense orders or are recognized as “disloyal” are systematically transferred to the management of Rostec.

Nikolay Tokarev (75 years old) is a member of the “Dresden group.” Tokarev traditionally belongs to Sergey Chemezov’s orbit of influence. 

Under his leadership, Transneft turned into a key tool of the Kremlin’s energy diplomacy, managing the world’s largest oil pipeline system. 

After 2022, Tokarev’s role became critical in the context of reorienting oil flows from the West to the East. In the clan hierarchy, Tokarev acts as the “guardian of the pipe” — the regime’s key financial artery.

Denis Manturov (57 years old) is the key conductor of Sergey Chemezov’s interests in the government. Chemezov publicly called Manturov a “reliable friend.” 

In May 2024, he received the status of First Deputy Prime Minister, making him the chief curator of the entire real sector of the economy and the military-industrial complex. 

For the successful supply of the front in 2026, Putin awarded Manturov the title of Hero of the Russian Federation. Manturov plays the role of a strategic operator who legalizes Rostec’s expansion and puts civilian industry on “military tracks.”

Sergey Kulikov (50 years old) is one of the most trusted young technocrats in Sergey Chemezov’s system. In December 2020, Kulikov replaced Anatoly Chubais as head of Rosnano.

His appointment marked the final transition of the innovation sector under the control of the Rostec group and the siloviki. 

In the context of the war, Rosnano was reoriented toward the needs of the VPK, particularly for creating new materials and microelectronics for the front.

The Oilmen

Igor Sechin (65 years old) is known in the media as “Darth Vader” for his tough management style. Since 2004, Sechin has headed Rosneft, turning it into the world’s largest oil company through a series of aggressive takeovers. He became the main ideologue of state capitalism. 

Power support for Sechin is provided by the so-called “Sechin’s Spetsnaz” — the 6th service of the FSB’s Internal Security Directorate, which he helped form for the Yukos case. 

Former head of the “Six,” Ivan Tkachev, now heads the Department of Military Counterintelligence of the FSB (DVKR), which gives Sechin unprecedented levers of influence over the army leadership.

Gennady Timchenko (73 years old) is a heavyweight of the Putin elite. According to official statements by the US Treasury, Vladimir Putin personally had investments in Gunvor, which made Timchenko the actual manager of the president’s personal oil income. 

After 2022, Timchenko’s role became critical for the regime’s survival under the oil embargo. His structures and former managers switched to managing the “shadow fleet” — numerous tankers with opaque ownership. 

Timchenko acts as the architect of parallel export corridors.

Lieutenant General Ivan Tkachev (55 years old) led the 6th service of the FSB’s Internal Security Directorate, created with Sechin’s direct participation to purge the political and economic field of opponents. The “Six” gained a reputation as an “Oprichnina.”

After UMB, Tkachev headed Department “K” of the FSB, and then moved to the post of head of the Department of Military Counterintelligence (DVKR) of the FSB.

During full-scale war, the DVKR exercises direct oversight of the Ministry of Defense and monitors the distribution of giant defense budgets.

Eduard Khudaynatov (65 years old) is a key business partner of Igor Sechin, performing the role of “trusted person” for managing private assets. 

In 2013, he formally left Rosneft to create his own private holding — the Independent Oil and Gas Company (NNC). 

NNC became a unique tool in the architecture of Sechin’s clan, systematically buying up oil fields and refineries that are then integrated into general logistics chains with Rosneft.

NNC is effectively a “private branch” of the state oil monopoly.

Alexander Novak (54 years old) is a key technocrat in the management system of the Russian fuel and energy complex. Despite his “technocrat” status, Novak is deeply integrated into Igor Sechin’s orbit of interests.

Since 2015, he has been a member of the Board of Directors of Rosneft.

In May 2024, Putin re-confirmed him as Vice Prime Minister. Novak plays the role of Sechin’s “state interface,” legalizing Rosneft’s initiatives through government decrees and international agreements.

The Rotors

Arkady Rotenberg (74 years old) is a childhood friend of Putin. He built a giant construction empire specialized in the most ambitious state projects, the main symbol being the Crimean Bridge.

Rotenberg operates through private structures that depend entirely on budget funding. 

After 2022, Arkady Rotenberg and his clan members became key beneficiaries of property redistribution and nationalization.

According to the Financial Times, Rotenberg-linked company “Roskhim” has already acquired at least three Russian companies after they were nationalized. In 2020, Putin awarded him the title of Hero of Labour of the RF.

Igor Rotenberg (52 years old) is the eldest son of Arkady Rotenberg. 

His main asset is a stake in RT-Invest Transport Systems, the operator of the Platon system, which collects fees from heavy trucks on federal highways. This project is a classic example of public-private partnership in the interest of a narrow circle of people. 

Igor Rotenberg also controls Gazprom Burenie, Gazprom’s largest contractor. He manages “digital rent,” providing the family’s long-term financial stability.

Boris Rotenberg (68 years old) is the younger brother of Arkady.

Boris was traditionally responsible for the financial block and the management of the family’s personal assets. 

He also acts as the main curator of sports projects, which are an important channel for informal communication with Putin. 

After 2022, SMP Bank was integrated into Promsvyazbank (PSB), allowing family assets to be integrated into the system for servicing state defense orders.

Oleg Belozerov (56 years old) has headed RZD since 2015. His career is inextricably linked with St. Petersburg and the interests of the Rotenberg brothers. 

Under his leadership, RZD became the main customer for Rotenberg construction holdings, including projects for the expansion of the Eastern Polygon (BAM and Transsib). 

Belozerov ensures the smooth operation of military transport logistics.

The Military

Andrey Belousov (66 years old) was appointed Minister of Defense in May 2024.

He is the main architect of the concept of “Military Keynesianism,” whereby huge military spending should become the engine for the entire Russian economy. 

Belousov’s main task is to conduct a “total audit” and eradicate corruption schemes. He does not claim the role of commander but fully controls financial flows. 

He is an ideal tool for Putin to control the security block.

Valery Gerasimov (70 years old) has been Chief of the General Staff since 2012.

He is one of three people in the country with access to the “nuclear briefcase.” 

Since January 2023, Gerasimov has personally led the Joint Group of Forces in the conflict with Ukraine. 

He remains the key link between the political leadership and the fighting army.

Admiral Igor Kostyukov (65 years old) has led military intelligence since 2018.

Under his leadership, the GRU turned into Russia’s main instrument for sabotage abroad. 

In 2024–2026, the GRU became the main operator of “hybrid war,” including cyberattacks and sabotage at logistics hubs supplying aid to Ukraine. 

In January 2026, he led the Russian delegation at talks in Abu Dhabi, highlighting his status as an influential political player.

The Chekists

Alexander Bortnikov (74 years old) has headed the FSB since May 2008.

He acts as the main “guardian of the regime,” responsible for internal stability and fighting dissent. 

After 2022, his influence became existential for the Kremlin.

Despite facing criticism for misjudging the situation in Ukraine at the onset of the invasion, Bortnikov retained his post and was reappointed as the service’s director in May 2024. His main task is to ensure total political sterility within the country.

However, according to sources of IStories, Bortnikov is losing influence due to his health and spends more time in sanatoriums than at work.

Sergey Korolev (63 years old) is the “Gray Cardinal” of the Lubyanka. 

Despite a reputation for being close to leaders of the criminal world (helping Gennady Petrov and the hitman Aslan Gagiev), such connections are interpreted as “operational work” in the Putin regime. 

Today, Korolev is the First Deputy Director of the FSB and effectively manages the day-to-day activities of the service due to Bortnikov’s health.

General Alexey Sedov (71 years old) has led the 2nd service since 2006, which human rights activists call the “political Gestapo.”

This service oversees the fight against “extremism” and “internal threats,” which in practice translates to the persecution of opposition leaders, journalists, and activists.

The 2nd service of the FSB is responsible for the physical and legal elimination of political opponents: its employees were behind the poisoning of Alexei Navalny.

Sedov has the right of direct reports to Putin. 

In 2026, Sedov remains the key architect of total political control.

Nikolai Patrushev (74 years old) served as Secretary of the Security Council for 16 years (2008–2024), transforming the body into a “shadow government” that shaped an aggressive foreign policy and an anti-Western vision for the country’s development.

His positions were shaken after the Yevgeny Prigozhin mutiny. 

In May 2024, he was moved to the more modest post of assistant to the president overseeing shipbuilding. 

Nevertheless, he retains significant influence within the state security system through a network of his appointees, including Alexey Sedov.

The Orthodox

Konstantin Malofeev (51 years old) is known as the “Orthodox oligarch.” He was at the origin of the 2014 events in Donbas and Crimea. 

After 2022, his significance grew due to the financing of numerous private armed units and volunteer battalions. Possessing his own mini-army, Malofeev could become a “jack-in-the-box” in the 2026 struggle for succession.

Igor Shchegolev (60 years old), the Presidential Envoy to the Central Federal District and former Minister of Communications, is a former intelligence officer of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (PGU) who served under TASS cover. Shchegolev’s ties to Putin date back to 1999; he served as an advisor when Putin headed the government and ran the presidential protocol department in 2002.

In 2008, Shchegolev was appointed Minister of Communications. Between 2009 and 2010, a fund managed by his longtime friend, Konstantin Malofeev, acquired roughly a 10% stake in Rostelecom, Russia’s largest state-controlled telecommunications company. Malofeev later sold this stake back to Rostelecom in 2013 for more than 30 billion rubles. Russian media suspected that Malofeev may have been acting in Shchegolev’s interests.

Georgy Shevkunov (Tikhon) (67 years old) is widely known as Vladimir Putin’s “confessor” and ranks among the most powerful figures within the Russian Orthodox Church. He grew close to Putin in the late 1990s when the latter headed the FSB. Putin reportedly visited the priest on his own initiative; Tikhon was then the abbot of the Sretensky Monastery, located just a couple of kilometers from the FSB headquarters on Lubyanka.

Shevkunov is a long-standing ideologue of Russia's confrontation with the West and a key pro-war propagandist who has exerted immense effort to shape state policy.

Sources acquainted with Malofeev and Shchegolev note that both are deeply connected to Tikhon. Despite the Metropolitan’s strained relations with the official church leadership, he is frequently tipped as a potential contender for the post of Russian Patriarch.

Translation: CORRECTIV, IStories

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The names of the individuals have been changed at their request for security reasons.

“The defendant may be deported after the military operation is completed.” Why Russia detains ex-prisoner Ukrainian citizens

Olha's prison term ended in January 2026, but instead of being released, she was sent to a temporary detention center for foreign nationals in one of the regions of Central Russia. Olha came to Russia as a teenager and graduated from high school and college there, but kept her Ukrainian citizenship. On the verge of her release from prison, the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) decided that her stay in Russia was “undesirable,” and the Ministry of Internal Affairs ruled to deport her. 

Deporting foreign nationals after their prison sentences is a common practice which had also been used in pre-war Russia, says Oleksii Ladukhin, a lawyer at Every Human Being. After the full-scale invasion began, direct deportations to Ukraine were halted. Because of this, Ukrainian citizens are spending months and years in detention centers. 

IStories has obtained a court ruling extending the detention of a Ukrainian citizen in one of such centers. Here is how Russian court justifies indefinitely detaining people in such conditions: “The circumstances preventing the deportation of the administrative defendant are temporary in nature; once the special military operation (an official euphemism used in Russia to describe the Russo-Ukrainian war — Ed.) is completed, the administrative defendant may be deported to their country of citizenship.” This essentially translates to indefinite detention.

According to Ladukhin, before the war deportations used to take about two weeks; everything would depend on whether the person being deported had their valid documents and on the level of cooperation with the receiving country authorities. “Courts did not routinely and massively extend detention periods like they do now, because it was possible to file a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights over such practices,” says the lawyer. “In 2022, the situation changed dramatically. Neither we nor our colleagues from other organizations have had a single case where a court would reject a Ministry of Internal Affairs request to extend the detention of a Ukrainian citizen.”

Russia is using the Ukrainians subject to deportation as bargaining chips. In May 2025, during a large-scale “1,000 for 1,000” prisoners of war exchange, 120 civilians returned to Ukraine. But among them there wasn't a single person of those abducted from the occupied territories. Instead, Russia sent back those Ukrainian citizens it was supposed to deport anyway: those who had served their sentences in Russian penal colonies and prisoners from Ukraine's Kherson oblast who had been taken to Russia in 2022.

In a conversation with IStories, Mykhailo Savva, a Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties expert, described this practice as “blatant fraud on the part of Russia.”

Not less than 1,000 Ukrainians are stuck in detention centers for foreign nationals across Russia, but the exact number is unknown, says Hanna Skrypka, a lawyer with the Protection for Prisoners of Ukraine NGO. The detainees are kept in various Russian regions, and in many cases there is no way of communication for them. The detainees IStories were able to speak with say that in the Sakharovo detention center (in Moscow Oblast — Ed.) alone there are about 300 to 400 detained Ukrainians. There are about 70 of them kept in the village of Voronino in Smolensk Oblast. As more people are released from penal colonies, the number of detainees is growing. 

Olha has been kept in the center for more than four months. According to her, some of the people there have had their detention term extended up to seven times. “No one is giving us any information. It’s agonizing. The people are burned out and desperate. We’re treated like subhumans. They say deportation is impossible and that I’ll be stuck here until the end of the ‘special military operation.’ It sends shivers down my spine,” she says. Oleksii Ladukhin says one of the people who reached out to him spent more than three years at the foreigners detention center.

“I’ll die here without treatment”. The detention conditions

The centers where the Ukrainians are kept are designed for short-term detention only. The conditions there are no better than in penal colonies — and sometimes even worse. The food supply and the access to personal hygiene and medical care are highly problematic issues there. 

In one of the regions of the North Caucasus, there are no vacant places in the foreign nationals detention center, so the Ukrainians awaiting deportation have been sent to a jail-type facility (а “detention center for people under administrative arrest” — Ed.). “It’s a regular jail with the bare minimum of amenities. No outdoor time, no medical facilities — nothing at all. No beds, just bunks. A cell for four people. Unsafe and unsanitary conditions. No soap, no toothbrushes, no hygiene products. No doctors. The food supply is terrible. They installed a shower in April; before that, we had to wash ourselves in a basin,” describes Mykola, one of the detainees.

According to Mykola, he had a blood pressure spike in winter; an ambulance was called, and the nurse administered his shot carelessly, which caused an abscess. The man had to be taken to the surgery room by ambulance again. He was soon discharged, even though the wound had not yet healed (the photos are at the disposal of the editorial staff). “They said that they wouldn’t give me any medication because I have no state health insurance. I offered to buy the medicines with my own money, but they kicked me out of the ward anyway. The wound is still bleeding,” the man says. The inmates at the facility are not provided with medical care although some of them suffer health issues including stomach ulcers, gastritis, and hypertension.

Another person IStories spoke with, Yaroslav, describes similar conditions at another detention center in one of Russia’s central regions. Yaroslav was released from a Russian prison in 2025 and has been held at the detention center for five months now; his cellmates have been there for over a year. The center is overcrowded.

“No one knows what to do with us; there is no more space,” says Yaroslav. “The police bring in new people. They are sent away. ‘Take them wherever you want,’ they say.” 

There are six Ukrainians in Yaroslav’s cell. Just one shower for 30 people. The inmates are only allowed to be outside (in a small courtyard with high walls and a metal grate overhead) for an hour a day and are allowed to use the phone for just an hour a day, too. “We’re just stuck in here, locked up” Yaroslav continues. – “We're asking them to maybe let us shovel snow in the winter, just to move around and stretch our legs.’ But no, they tell us we have no right to work.”

Yaroslav is HIV-positive and needs to take medication every day, but the police won't provide it: “I’m fighting [to be deported to Ukraine] because I feel trapped. Without treatment I’ll die here.” 

“Locked up for no reason and waiting for hell knows what.” How indefinite detention works

Once in three months, the Ukrainians are taken to a court that extends their detention at the request of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “We have a lawyer; he explains it all [why detention cannot be extended indefinitely] clearly, the judge agrees with him, leaves, comes back, and still orders the detention to be extended for another three months,” Serhii, one of our interviewees, describes the typical procedure. 

Oleksii Ladukhin explains that appeals do nothing to speed up the deportation process: “According to the Russian prosecutor’s office and the superior courts, if the number of possible detention extensions is not specified in the legislation, there's no limit. And so there are no violations.” 

Back in 2025, Serhii was to be deported to Ukraine via Georgia, but Georgian border guards did not let him pass because his passport had expired. The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs left him in a jail-type detention center in one of the North Caucasus regions, as there were no spots available at the local detention center. He has been there for a whole year since his release from prison. 

In his case, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the courts are at least trying to follow the formalities. Some detainees are even less lucky. Andriy, another Ukrainian currently kept at a foreigners detention center, told IStories that the order to place him there had expired back in August 2025: "I appealed to the administration, explaining that I have been kept here unlawfully. For me to stay here, there should be a court order with a specific term. They don’t understand. I have filed a lawsuit with the court. No response. Another lawsuit with the prosecutor’s office. No response. I called them. A prosecutor came here in the fall of 2025 and said they would look into it. They’re still looking into it.” 

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that keeping people in detention centers for foreign citizens long-term constitutes a violation of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits unlawful confinement, Oleksii Ladukhin explains. “Detention is permissible when they are actually carrying out the deportation, when the authorities are taking active and good-faith steps to implement it: transferring documents, coordinating the location and time of deportation and conducting negotiations. If the process has stalled, a person cannot be detained indefinitely. This is a severe violation of their rights,” he says. 

“It’s very hard: being locked up for no reason and waiting for hell knows what,” Serhii confides. “My family in Ukraine is having problems; I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again. It’s very difficult mentally. The prison walls are suffocating, and the whole situation is overwhelming.

“When they are fed up, they’ll sign up as cannon fodder.” War recruitment at the detention centers

All of our interviewees note that the former prisoners — and primarily those who had lived in the now-occupied territories of Ukraine before coming to Russia — are being recruited to fight against their own country. “We’re hearing that the general idea is 'let's keep them locked up, and when they are fed up, they’ll sign up for the ‘special military operation’ as cannon fodder,” says Yaroslav, who has been kept at the detention center for six months since his official release. 

At a detention center in one of the regions in Central Russia there are people who have been expecting deportation for over a year and a half, two Ukrainians told IStories. According to them, the only way to get out that was offered to those detainees was to sign a military contract with the Ministry of Defense and go to war against Ukraine. 

Andriy, our interviewee kept in the Caucasian jail-type detention center, confirms: “There are instructions from above to offer [the military contracts]. Right now, the guys are just losing their minds from the hopelessness and from no way out in sight, and they’re even ready to sign the contracts. But in the jail-type detention center, they aren’t even given that opportunity. In [another region], people have been taken away to fight in the ‘special military operation’; a couple of people left when I was there". 

Not all the Ukrainians interviewed by IStories want to return home. Many men are sure that upon their return they will be forcibly mobilized without being allowed to see their families. Those who do not want to return to Ukraine are either trying to seek asylum in Russia, are applying for Russian passports, or looking for opportunities to leave via a third country at a family invitation or for work, but all they get is detention extensions.

“He wasn’t even ill before, but now he’s disabled.” Fate of those stranded at the Russian-Georgian border

Men who do not want to return to Ukraine are citing the consequences of the August 2025 mass return, when Ukraine organized the evacuation of its citizens who had been stranded in a basement on the Russian-Georgian border through Moldova. 

A few days later, reports emerged that those who had returned were sent to TCRs (territorial recruitment centers, a Ukrainian name for military enlistment offices — Ed.) after a three-day quarantine. Those deemed fit for service were mobilized. Hanna Skrypka (Protection for Prisoners of Ukraine) confirmed IStories that 40 of the 65 returnees had been mobilized.  

Protection for Prisoners of Ukraine published an open letter calling on the Ministry of Defense and the Security Service of Ukraine, as well as other Ukrainian government agencies, to consider changing the return procedures. For example, they requested to allow people to see their families and receive medical and psychological assistance upon returning. According to Skrypka, they have not received any reaction to this letter. 

Currently, 19 of those who refused to return to Ukraine in August 2025 are remaining in the border gray zone. They are still living in a windowless basement and are entirely dependent on charities that occasionally bring them food and humanitarian aid.

“It’s a concrete room with no ventilation. We can’t predict when the next food supply will arrive, so we constantly have to save food. There have been times when we spent a whole week with no food,” says Oleksii, a Ukrainian citizen who has been living in the basement for nearly a year. 

The Georgian Red Cross branch told the Ukrainians that the aid program for them had ended. The branch’s deputy secretary-general, Kakha Mamuladze, confirmed IStories that the program had been shut down back in December because international donors had stopped funding it. The Tbilisi Volunteers organization, which supports Ukrainians in Georgia, cannot operate fully due to Georgia’s newly introduced “foreign agents” law and is forced to find workarounds to continue helping those stranded at the border, said Maria, its head.

The most serious problem is the lack of medical care. One man became disabled while stuck at the border. He had an eye infection, and his fellow basement dwellers tried to call an ambulance. They had reached out to the Ukrainian consulate, but no help arrived for several weeks. “By the time we managed to get him to the hospital, all that the doctors could do was remove his eye. He wasn’t even ill before, but now he’s disabled. What kind of medical care is this? We don’t even have painkillers for headaches and toothaches, not to mention those of us who need a more serious treatment or medications,” Oleksii says. 

Among those in the basement there are people with hepatitis and HIV. They need daily treatment, but it’s very difficult to access. “Antiretroviral therapy medication isn’t available over the counter, and the Georgian HIV care center can’t give medications out to unregistered and untested patients. But they can’t get tested at the border. We’ve managed to find a way to deliver the medications several times and we hope we’ll be able to do it again soon,” says Maria from Tbilisi Volunteers. 

In November 2025, Andriy Bilyk, a representative of the Ukrainian Embassy in Georgia, visited the Ukrainians remaining in the basement. He explained that technically the consulate could issue the new passports for them, but this would require approval from the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice as well as the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Security Service of Ukraine (a recording of the meeting is at IStories’ disposal). A month later, the embassy sent the approval document to the basement, but by that moment the Security Service of Ukraine had not issued passports to any of those citizens.

Pavlo has remained in the basement for almost a year. He says he is already losing hope of ever getting his passport and leaving. “They constantly throw something at us to keep us from bothering them. Two or three weeks go by, and we start calling and writing to them again. I wonder if I’ve got 50 kilos of weight left. I feel terrible. There’s no air here; we’re just suffocating. The only thing left to do is to shoot myself — I don’t know what other way out there is.” 

IStories have sent inquiries to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner of Russia, and the Presidential Council on Human Rights asking what steps the Russian authorities are taking to end the indefinite detention of Ukrainian citizens. We have not received any responses from these entities. The Office of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights and the Ukrainian Embassy in Georgia also have not responded to our inquiries as of the moment of publication.

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Since the invasion began, the Kremlin has spent years cultivating the image of a new elite, signaling that veterans of the “SMO” (Special Military Operation, the official Russian government term for the war in Ukraine) should take their rightful place alongside established technocrats and old-guard politicians.

Vladimir Putin has repeatedly hammered this theme, dubbing the military “the real elite” and emphasizing that they are the ones who should “rise to leading positions in the state.” To institutionalize this idea, the government launched the “Time of Heroes” program — a state-sponsored career elevator designed to fast-track yesterday’s soldiers into government posts.

The 2026 elections were supposed to mark another major milestone for this initiative, but even in the early preparatory stages, a stark reality emerged: integrating the military into the political system en masse simply will not work. This is not merely about electoral risks (will voters actually back SMO veterans?), but about the fact that the political system itself has no idea what to do with them.

As early as November 2025, according to IStories’ sources within the Kremlin and the State Duma, officials discussed a plan to usher up to 150 war participants into parliament — nearly a third of the entire chamber. However, that ambitious idea was swiftly scrapped. Insiders explained it bluntly: “You can’t bring these people in like that; they’re completely non-systemic.” Consequently, the target was slashed to 50–70 individuals. Now, sources’ estimates have grown even more cautious: the working figure is roughly 30 deputies, despite public declarations from United Russia (the ruling pro-Putin political party) about its desire to seat over 40 veterans in the Duma.

The prospect of a new bloc of military deputies clearly makes the Kremlin uneasy. Currently, the presidential administration and United Russia are debating exactly how to absorb veterans into the next Duma: should they create dedicated structures for them, or, conversely, disperse them across various committees to dilute their influence and ensure safety? Judging by the guarded commentary from pro-Kremlin political experts, it is glaringly obvious that the authorities are not confident in their ability to control them.

Take, for example, the case of Nikita Gorelov. In October 2024, this mobilized sergeant and sniper became the mayor of Sosnovka, a small village in the Kirov Oblast. He immediately began blowing the whistle on local government corruption, quickly clashing with regional United Russia functionaries. Officials attempted to ship the soldier back to the frontlines, but local residents rallied to his defense. Now imagine thirty such volatile scenarios playing out on the floor of the State Duma.

Unlike the typical careerists from the “Young Guard” (United Russia’s youth wing) or the graduates of Sergei Kiriyenko’s (first deputy chief of staff of the Presidential Administration) management competitions, war veterans simply do not fit into the established matrix of political subservience. According to insiders, they are widely perceived as “uncontrollable” — figures who might demand far more independence than is customary in Russia's tightly scripted political arena. The logic is straightforward: the less consolidated this group remains, the easier it will be to manage them.

Then there is another awkward question: exactly which veterans will the state designate for the Duma? The “veteran” category turns out to be politically murky. Frontline soldiers, rear-echelon officials, mobilized men, contract soldiers, pardoned ex-convicts, combat medics... Voters might reasonably ask: why does one “hero” get a Duma mandate while another is left rotting in the trenches? Furthermore, if these individuals wake up tomorrow and begin to see themselves as a unified political force, what then? Should they be pitted against one another just to ensure they don’t “eat United Russia alive”? This is why the Kremlin faces a dual, contradictory task: it must visibly bring veterans into the halls of power, while simultaneously preventing them from becoming an independent political actor.

The problem is that even at lower levels of government, the integration of veterans is already floundering. In recent regional elections, many military candidates lost their party primaries. In the Federation Council (the upper house of parliament), new colleagues drawn from the military have been unofficially branded as “black sheep” and mocked for their inability to “string two words together.”

Moreover, despite the high level of societal respect afforded to war participants, there is no reliable public data indicating how this reverence translates into actual votes at the ballot box. For political parties, running a veteran is a gamble that by no means guarantees victory. While parties publicly declare their enthusiasm for nominating SMO veterans, in practice, it seems everyone is searching for backdoor compromises.

Some are relying on party lists, where election outcomes are much easier to control. Others are placing them in single-mandate districts (where voters elect a specific candidate rather than voting for a party list), seemingly banking on the assumption that rival parties will refuse to campaign against “war heroes” out of ideological deference. Ultimately, the goal is performative participation with absolute minimum risk.

All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of rapidly deteriorating social sentiment. According to VCIOM (Russian Public Opinion Research Center, the state-owned polling agency), the happiness index of Russians in the spring of 2026 plummeted to its lowest level in fifteen years. The authorities are being forced to maneuver carefully: they are already purging overly radical deputies from the public sphere to avoid inflaming domestic tensions. Against this volatile backdrop, the prospect of introducing an unpredictable bloc of veterans suffering from PTSD into the new Duma looks exceptionally risky.

The Russian authorities have backed themselves into a tight corner of their own making: these “war heroes” are desperately needed as ideological symbols, but they are far too dangerous to be empowered as real political actors. As a result, the Kremlin is once again losing face, quietly retreating from its own fiercely declared principles.

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Symbolic Software reviewed the claims from last year’s IStories report regarding Telegram’s ties to the FSB, concluding that the vulnerability we detailed in 2025 poses a genuine threat to the privacy of all the app’s users, including those communicating in secret chats.

“We evaluate claims from public reporting about these vulnerabilities, finding the core technical assertions <...> to be accurate and reproducible. <...> The implications extend beyond theoretical concerns. <...> This is particularly significant given Telegrams adoption by journalists, activists, and other high-risk users,” the expert review states (the full Symbolic Software report can be read here).

The anatomy of the vulnerability

While working on last year’s investigation, IStories conducted an experiment: we asked people in various countries to send messages to each other via Telegram and record the network traffic using specialized software.

We then shared the results with cybersecurity experts, who discovered that during data transmission, the app sends an unencrypted header containing a unique device identifier: auth_key_id. Armed with this identifier, anyone with access to Telegram’s traffic can track users, analyze their online activity, and map their communication networks.

Symbolic Software experts reached the same conclusion:

“Our analysis confirms the core technical findings: Telegram clients <...> transmit messages over unencrypted TCP connections, exposing the auth_key_id in cleartext (or trivially obfuscated form) to any network intermediary. The auth_key_id functions as a persistent device identifier that remains constant across sessions, IP address changes, network switches, and geographic locations. This creates a technical capability for device tracking by any entity with passive network access, including Internet Service Provider (ISP)s, network administrators, government surveillance programs, and other adversaries positioned along the communication path.”

“All of these adversaries,” the review continues, “can collect auth_key_id values through entirely passive observation. No man-in-the-middle attack is required, no certificate compromise is necessary, and no active protocol manipulation is needed. Simple packet capture and trivial deobfuscation suffice to extract persistent device identifiers from Telegram traffic.

The persistence of auth_key_id values across sessions, network changes, and extended time periods enables long-term tracking of individual devices. An adversary who collects auth_key_id values from network traffic can build a comprehensive database associating specific auth_key_id values with observed network locations, timestamps, traffic patterns, and — when the user’s identity is known through other means — specific individuals.

Such a database could enable queries like: ‘Where has the device associated with auth_key_id X been observed over the past six months?’ or ‘Which auth_key_id values were present at network location Y during time period Z?’ The ability to track devices across IP address changes means that even users who employ dynamic IP addressing, regularly switch networks, or use mobile connections remain trackable through their persistent auth_key_id,” the experts emphasize.

The FSB connection and the origin of the report

This expert review is particularly valuable not only because it was conducted by an independent firm with a solid reputation in cybersecurity, but also because its initiator was apparently none other than Vladimir Vedeneev — one of the key figures in last year’s IStories investigation. In 2025, we revealed that Vedeneev had served for several years as Telegram’s chief financial officer, held power of attorney to sign documents on behalf of the company and Pavel Durov, and, moreover, maintains nearly the entirety of the app’s network infrastructure across multiple countries.

We also learned that Vedeneev’s former Russian company (he transferred ownership to a relative in 2024) services FSB operational and investigative systems used to surveil Russian citizens under a classified government contract. Most importantly, according to Vedeneev himself, he is assigned a dedicated FSB handler — a senior security service officer with whom Vedeneev has long cooperated and shared information: “I am overseen by a FSB guy, related to SORM (the System for Operative Investigative Activities, the technical specification for the targeted surveillance of telephone and Internet communications in Russia. — Ed.). He’s apparently trying to get promoted, so he tells everyone: ‘Access to Vladimir is only through me.’ He calls me and says: ‘Listen, Volodya, basically, you’ve got to somehow talk to them, to all of them [other FSB officers], and so on.’

They [the FSB officers] say: ‘So, we need this IP address at this time. Who is it?’ We understand that we can’t not answer, right? We quickly answer them. We have authorized emails from which they send requests. We quickly answer them. We say: ‘It’s Ivanov Ivan Ivanovich, apartment number 7, blah-blah-blah.’ They’re like: ‘All right, okay,’” Vedeneev told IStories in an interview.

Following the publication of the investigation, Vedeneev filed a lawsuit in Switzerland, where he resides, against the story’s lead author and IStories founder, Roman Anin. In the lawsuit, Vedeneev does not dispute the investigation’s claims; instead, he demands the removal of the interview in which he admits to cooperating with the FSB.

While reviewing the materials of the Swiss case, we discovered this very same technical review by Symbolic Software, which Vedeneev had apparently attached in hopes that the experts would refute the article’s technical findings. Instead, they confirmed them.

Global reach and the scale of the risk

“From a surveillance infrastructure perspective, ‘global’ reach depends on the extent of the adversary's network access. <...> Achieving truly global surveillance would require infrastructure access across multiple geographic regions and network paths,” the Symbolic Software review states.

Vladimir Vedeneev possesses exactly this level of access. For instance, here is what he said in an interview with IStories: “Telegram doesn’t have access to the data centers in Singapore or Miami: they’ve never been there. Four data centers have already been built. We (Vedeneev’s company GNM, which services Telegram’s network infrastructure. — Ed.) are present in all four. <...> At this point, I provide all communication channels. Not someone else — me! If I really wanted to, of course, I could capture this traffic.”

Vedeneev’s admission, coupled with the experts’ conclusions, indicates that a significant portion of Telegram’s traffic essentially flows through a single individual, and:

• this traffic contains unencrypted device identifiers that allow user tracking;
• this individual has an FSB handler with whom he has long cooperated and shared information.

In last year’s interview with IStories, Vladimir Vedeneev denied the vulnerability we described, claiming he only provides his FSB handler with information regarding Russian internet users from Russian companies, but not from Telegram. Whether this is true or not is a matter of faith.

The Symbolic Software expert notes that the vulnerability did not stem from a technical failing, but rather is the result of “a fundamental abdication of Telegram’s responsibility to protect user privacy through appropriate cryptographic measures. <...> The proper solution is <...> for Telegram to eliminate the vulnerability entirely through mandatory use of transport-layer encryption — a standard practice adopted by virtually every other major messaging platform. The technical implementation is straightforward, the performance impact negligible, and the privacy benefits substantial. Until Telegram implements proper TLS encryption, it continues to expose its users to unnecessary privacy risks,” the expert concludes.

The Symbolic Software review does not claim that malicious actors with access to Telegram traffic and device identifiers can decrypt messages. However, cybersecurity experts interviewed by IStories consider such a risk to be entirely possible.

The issue is that the auth_key_id identifier — which Telegram transmits openly over the network for some reason — is used to locate the specific user's key in the database, which the app then uses to decrypt messages on its servers. Thus, if someone like Vladimir Vedeneev or another passive traffic observer were to gain access to this database, it means they could potentially decrypt messages.

Telegram’s response

Telegram representative Remi Vaughn (whose actual existence remains unverified: there are no photos or other mentions of him online) sent the following response to the IStories editorial office: “Regarding the unpublished article, we reject its conclusions for the reasons outlined on this page.

The auth_key_id parameter changes regularly and does not reveal user information, message contents, recipients, or private data. Any observer able to see it would already have access to more reliable network-level signals for tracking. Telegram owns its infrastructure, which is configured, managed and controlled exclusively by Telegram’s internal engineering teams. GNM is a respected global infrastructure provider, and neither GNM nor its owner Mr. Vedeneev is connected to the FSB.

Since 2021, neither GNM nor any other company affiliated with Mr. Vedeneev has provided services in the Telegram data center that stores information of Russian and European citizens. This fact alone makes the entire FSB–Vedeneev conspiracy theory inconsistent with reality.”

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Five CCTV cameras are installed in front of the 1200 Guardsmen Memorial in Kaliningrad, the USSR's first monument to soldiers killed in the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945. In the center of the memorial is the Eternal Flame. From time to time, various incidents occur near the memorial, which are then widely reported in the local news, and their perpetrators become the subjects of criminal cases. Since last year, for the "desecration of war memorials," a sentence of up to five years in prison has been provided.

Thus, in February this year, a drunken Kaliningrad resident wanted to light a cigarette from the fire and warmed his feet over the flames. In January 2026, a couple of residents stole a basket of flowers from the monument. In September 2025, another couple had sex at the memorial.

Six months before that, around 5 am on February 24, 2025, 37-year-old Kaliningrad resident Alexander Okunev burned himself alive at the memorial to 1200 Guardsmen in protest against the war — and no one found out about it.

"He was sitting in a corner, not where all the people were"

In the 2010s, Kaliningrad earned the title of the protest capital of Russia, and a series of large-scale rallies even led to the replacement of Governor Georgy Boos.

However, since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the city has not exhibited any notable protest activity. In the first days of the invasion, a wave of anti-war actions swept through Kaliningrad. At one point, the city became a leader in the number of protocols issued for "discrediting" the army. But almost immediately, protests died down as they did throughout the country. Igor Luzin, a Kaliningrad activist and former employee of Navalny's local headquarters, explains that the "political field" in Kaliningrad has been cleaned up just like the rest of Russia.

Alexander Okunev was not an activist. He avoided talking politics at work (he was a sysadmin at a firm selling retail equipment), did not argue about the full-scale war with his family, and apparently was not active on social media. Okunev had almost no friends, had no girlfriend, and lived alone.

He practically did not talk to his colleagues, could ignore even his superiors: he could keep silent in response to a greeting or not answer the questions. At corporate parties, New Year's Eve, for example, he tried not to leave his office.

"Was sitting there in a corner, not where all the people ... Somehow always in himself, lived his own life," recalls his former colleague. "Closed. Strange." However, there were no complaints about his work: "His programmer's brains were cool". His colleague believes that Alexander could have made a good career, "but it feels like he didn't care much about money". When Okunev decided to quit (about six months before the incident), everyone was upset.

"We asked him, have you found another job? No. Are you going somewhere? Maybe. No one had any idea what or why he left," says his former colleague. Acquaintances call Okunev "kind, responsive, fair": "He always helped everyone". He was fond of origami, and when one of his colleagues had a birthday, he could secretly put "some flowers" on their table. Regarding his hobbies, people close to him say that he liked to watch movies and ride a bicycle.

After the dismissal, Okunev really did not find another job. "Sat at home, practically did not communicate with anyone," heard his ex-colleague.

Cleanup

Having decided on such a desperate protest act as self-immolation, Alexander Okunev did not seem to be trying to attract attention. Maybe he was afraid that someone could stop him. But he obviously chose the date (the anniversary of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine) and the place (the main war memorial in the city) for a reason. Perhaps the time too: the Russian missile struck Kyiv on February 24, 2022, began just about five in the morning.

Okunev's charred corpse, despite the numerous cameras at the memorial, was discovered by a random passerby only at around 6:40 am. The snow appears to have been spray-painted with the words "No to War". Employees of the investigative department for the Leninsky district of Kaliningrad went to the scene. In the report of the events of the night, Okunev's self-immolation is mentioned along with reports of two other corpses and a ninth-grade girl who had left home.

The incident was reported to the head of the city administration, Elena Dyatlova. She immediately took everything under her control, the European intelligence officer knows. She was assisted by Evgeny Maslov, head of the local service for the protection of cultural heritage. The main thing for them was to quickly get rid of the body and the words on the snow — the officials were worried mostly that journalists would know what happened. The Minister of Culture and Tourism of the Kaliningrad Oblast, Andrey Yermak, was especially worried that the self-immolation took place near the monument of the Great Patriotic War — too symbolic.

Everything was settled by 9:15 am. Traces of the incident were removed, and authorities were relieved to report to the local governor and other local officials that no one had seen anything, the source of IStories Media said.

Information about the self-immolation of an unnamed Kaliningrad resident first went public only along with a report by Estonian intelligence in the winter of 2026: "On the third anniversary of Russia's full-scale war, at five o'clock in the morning on February 24, 2025, a man born in 1988 wrote 'No to War' in the snow near the monument to a Russian soldier in Kaliningrad and set himself on fire in protest."

None of the Kaliningrad media ever reported the news. There were no local or propaganda Telegram channels or other social media posts about Okunev. The Alexanders' family did not spread the word about the incident either. "What's the point of somehow publicizing and telling all this? What for?" one of them told reporters.

"There is another way"

An acquaintance of Okunev says that on the eve of his suicide, he behaved "absolutely normally." There was no hint of what he was going to do, and "what happened came as a shock to everyone." Okunev's relatives speak of some "expert examinations" conducted as part of the investigation, which found that "there was no outside influence" on Aexander. The family was questioned by the local Investigative Committee; the police came to Okunev's former colleagues for a "characterization," but came away with "Worked well, did not communicate with anyone."

A close friend of Okunev recounted to IStories Media the content of his suicide note: "He wrote that there is another way. Apparently, he meant a world with peace. And he didn't want to live in the world we have, so he made this decision... But we are all aware that world peace is a utopia."

The note also shows that Okunev understood that "most likely, it will not be in the news anywhere, it will not be widely covered anywhere," the source tells IStories Media.

Elena Maslova, head of the Kaliningrad administration, and Evgeny Maslov, head of the cultural heritage protection service, have not responded to journalists' requests.

Culture Minister Andrei Yermak replied that he was not familiar with the results of the investigation of this "accident", so he would not comment on anything. He expressed confidence that law enforcement agencies "will comment on the situation as soon as the investigation is finalized."

"These people are afraid not of the people, but of their superiors"

In January 1969, the self-immolation of Jan Palach, a philosophy student at Charles University, brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets and became a symbol of resistance to the Soviet occupation in Czechoslovakia. The self-immolation of street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi provoked mass protests in Tunisia, which eventually led to the resignation of the country's president.

In Russia, the self-immolations of journalist Irina Slavina and Udmurt scientist Albert Razin did not lead to any notable collective action. Could Okunev's suicide have provoked some protest if people had learned about it?

Sociologist Margarita Zavadskaya thinks not. "Self-immolation is a powerful symbolic act," she says, "but public outrage alone is not enough to trigger large-scale collective action under conditions of severe repression and limited access to information."

So why did the Russian authorities try so hard to conceal information about what happened? To prevent "protest contagion" and imitation, she explains. Moreover, such an anti-war suicide contradicts the government's theory of a universal public consensus on war. And local officials would look incapable of maintaining control in the eyes of their superiors.

Political scientist Ekaterina Shulman also does not believe that fear of further protests was behind the Kaliningrad authorities' actions. "Local authorities are not afraid of the people, not of protests. They are afraid of their superiors," she says, "they were afraid to hear: 'You oversaw, allowed a scandal, there are media publications, what do you eat your bread for?'"

"Authoritarian regimes are afraid of symbolic sparks. They understand that a single act of protest may not cause an immediate mass movement, but can become a moral symbol around which scattered anxiety and discontent begin to crystallize," says Lithuanian political scientist Nerijus Malukiavicius. "That is why such regimes seek to 'clean up' the scene, silence history, and discredit the victim."

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It appears that we are witnessing the transition of the Russian regime into a fundamentally different state. The deadlock in the war in Ukraine, painful Ukrainian drone strikes on oil infrastructure, economic and social problems — all of these factors combined, as IStories has previously written, were bound sooner or later to lead to a struggle among Russia’s “siloviki” clans for the throne of a weakening dictator.

Putin, who himself built this system of power, understands well what awaits him — hence the growing paranoia, the unprecedented isolation from the public and from his own inner circle, and the attempt to create a new oprichnina in the form of the Federal Protective Service, endowed with unlimited coercive powers.

This means that in the short-term historical perspective, Russia has two paths left:

• The Iranian path. Putin will succeed in consolidating loyal security services around himself — primarily the FSO and the National Guard — which will form a Russian analogue of Iran’s IRGC. Through unprecedented repression, which will affect broader segments of the population and those who were previously considered untouchable, the dictator will retain power by force. This scenario would also imply further isolation of the country from the internet and the outside world: the oprichnina will not tolerate any critics.

• The Time of Troubles. Historians do not like analogies, but history does not stop reproducing them. The first oprichnina emerged as an attempt by Ivan the Terrible to maintain control over the elites and strengthen autocratic rule in conditions of a prolonged and destructive war and internal crisis. The terror of the oprichnina, economic exhaustion, and devastation led to the Time of Troubles and a civil war. 

Which of these scenarios is more likely in Russia is not so important. What matters is that each of them is highly likely.

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• it is of significant public interest;
• some of the information it contains has been independently verified;
• the source who provided the document holds an official position in the government of a European country and risks their reputation and career if the document is a deliberate disinformation campaign;

Here is the text of the document.

“The Kremlin on high alert

Since the beginning of March 2026, the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin have been concerned about a leak of sensitive information and, at the same time, about the risk of a plot or coup attempt against the Russian president. In particular, he fears the use of drones for a possible assassination attempt by members of the Russian political elite.

Strengthening security measures around the Russian president

In response, the Federal Protective Service (FSO), whose primary mission is to ensure the physical protection of the highest officials of the Russian state, has significantly tightened security measures around Vladimir Putin:

• Visitors to the Presidential Administration undergo two levels of screening, including a full body search by FSO officers.
• The FSO has significantly reduced the list of locations regularly visited by the president; neither he nor his family visit their usual residences in the Moscow region and Valdai anymore.
• Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Putin has often taken refuge in renovated bunkers, particularly in the Krasnodar region, where he may work for weeks, while Russian media continue public communication using pre-recorded footage.
• No visits to military infrastructure have been organized this year, in contrast to frequent trips in 2025.
• Communication networks in certain districts of Moscow are periodically shut down.
• FSO officers conduct large-scale checks using canine units and are also deployed along the Moscow River, ready to respond to possible drone attacks.
• The FSO now controls and approves any informational or media publication involving the president, relying on a secret presidential decree (apparently referring to announcements of Putin’s trips and participation in various events — Ed.)
• Personnel working near Putin are now prohibited from using mobile phones; they must use devices without internet access.
• These employees are also banned from using public transportation and move exclusively using FSO transport; surveillance systems have been installed in the homes of cooks, photographers, and bodyguards.
• 
  

Sergei Shoigu considered a potential destabilizing actor

Sergei Shoigu, former Minister of Defense and Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation since May 2024, who retains significant influence within the military command, is associated with the risk of a coup attempt.

The arrest of his former first deputy, Ruslan Tsalikov, on March 5, 2026, is seen as a violation of informal guarantees of safety for elites, weakening Shoigu’s position and increasing the likelihood that he himself may face criminal prosecution.

Rising tensions among security structures

The issue of the physical security of senior Russian Armed Forces officers has led to increased tensions among representatives of Russia’s security agencies.

After the killing of Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov in Moscow on December 22, 2025, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov proposed that Vladimir Putin convene a meeting of the permanent members of the Security Council to discuss the situation. However, Putin chose to hold a smaller meeting on December 25, 2025, the day after another attack on Russian security officials at the same location as the killing of Sarvarov.

During the meeting, representatives of the security agencies, the so-called “siloviki,” blamed one another for shortcomings in the security system revealed by Ukrainian attacks. Emphasizing that these attacks cause fear and disorganization within the ranks of the Russian Armed Forces, Valery Gerasimov sharply criticized his colleagues from the intelligence services for failing to anticipate them. The Chief of the General Staff also complained about a lack of personnel for the physical protection of officers in rear areas and drew the president’s attention to this issue.

The Director of the Federal Security Service, Alexander Bortnikov, in turn, defended himself by stressing the impossibility of systematically preventing such attacks. He criticized the Ministry of Defense for lacking a specialized unit responsible for the physical protection of top officials — similar to those in other security agencies.

The head of the National Guard, Viktor Zolotov, in turn, noted that the resources at his disposal cannot be allocated to protect officers of the Ministry of Defense. He also addressed operational security recommendations to Gerasimov for Ministry of Defense officers, which provoked the Chief of the General Staff’s anger.

At the end of this tense meeting, Vladimir Putin called for calm, proposing to change the format of the discussion. He instructed participants to submit their proposals for resolving the issues discussed within a week.

Expansion of security measures for ten senior Russian generals

After the meeting, Vladimir Putin met with Federal Protective Service Director Dmitry Kochnev, whose primary task is to ensure the physical security of top state officials. It was decided to amend the internal regulations of the FSO by expanding the list of individuals under its enhanced protection.

Previously, such protection applied only to Valery Gerasimov. Now it has been extended to ten senior generals, including three deputy chiefs of the General Staff. Vladimir Putin’s decision, made at the request of the General Staff, demonstrates the political weight of Valery Gerasimov, who succeeded in this “arbitration,” while other security agencies have so far failed to expand the FSO’s mandate in their interests.

List of generals placed under FSO protection:

• Colonel General Nikolai Bogdanovsky, First Deputy Chief of the General Staff;
• Colonel General Sergey Istrakov, Deputy Chief of the General Staff;
• Colonel General Alexey Kim, Deputy Chief of the General Staff;
• Colonel General Sergey Rudskoy, Head of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff;
• Colonel General Viktor Poznikhir, First Deputy Head of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff;
• Lieutenant General Stanislav Gadzhimagomedov, Head of the National Defense Management Center (NDMC RF);
• Admiral Igor Kostyukov, Head of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU);
• Colonel General Vladimir Zarudnitsky, Head of the Military Academy of the General Staff;
• Colonel General Alexander Chaiko;
• Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev.”

What is independently confirmed

Some of the information in this report is confirmed by independent sources. For example, that the large-scale internet shutdowns in Moscow are carried out by the FSO rather than the FSB, as reported by some media outlets, had been told to IStories a month earlier by a former FSB officer. However, we did not publish this at the time because we could not find a second source to confirm it. Now the same claim appears in the European intelligence report.

Several sources of IStories also confirm the increased fear of Putin over a plot or coup attempt. This is evidenced not only by heightened security measures around the Kremlin and other locations visited by the Russian president, but also by some indirect signs.

For example, a current FSB officer told IStories that it has become much more difficult for his unit to obtain authorization for wiretapping in non-political criminal cases because “all equipment has been redirected to monitor the government and other state bodies.”

The extreme level of Putin’s fear of an assassination attempt or conspiracy is also indirectly indicated by the fact that this year not a single deputy of the State Duma received an invitation to the Victory Day parade on Red Square.

Why this report is one of the most important recent stories about Russia — read in an opinion by IStories founder Roman Anin.

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Roskomnadzor is demanding that the companies immediately inform IStories “about the need for the prompt removal of information distributed in violation of the law” and remove the app from their stores if the demands are not met. It is unclear exactly what information we are supposed to delete. In its letters, Roskomnadzor accuses the IStories mobile app of “destabilizing the socio-political situation in the Russian Federation” and spreading “fakes.”

We launched our mobile app in February 2026 to share important news, research, and investigations despite widespread censorship and restrictions. It works in Russia without VPN.

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Zelenskyy did not specify what exactly could be the goal of this process, but there are two main scenarios:

• Either the Belarusian army itself joins Russia in the aggression and invades Ukraine;
• Or, just like it was in 2022, Belarus provides the Russian army with a foothold for invading Ukraine from the north.

IStories have requested experts to comment on how probable each scenario is. 

Military construction at the borderlands and its relevance

Soon after Zelenskyy’s statement, eRadar, a Ukrainian war analytics Telegram channel, published some of the satellite images taken in March in the border regions of Belarus. As reported by the channel, the pictures show a new border post, a military town, a training ground, a dam and an embankment to move military vehicles being built there. “It seems Belarus has indeed been tasked by Russia to keep our forces on alert ahead of their spring-summer offensive in the east and south,” Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, commented.

However, there has been no observed buildup of Belarusian or Russian troops near the border, Andriy Demchenko, Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service spokesperson, said on Monday. “As part of their information campaign, they (the Belarusians — Ed.) previously announced the creation of a Southern Operational Command — specifically along the border with Ukraine. The positions, training grounds, and access roads might be established within this framework,” Demchenko explained.

Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) (an OSINT project specialized in investigations into the activities of Russian Armed Forces — Ed.) suggests that the construction works are routine military activity and do not indicate preparations for a ground invasion of Ukraine. A source within CIT asked to remain anonymous comments, “we are not seeing artillery positions being set up or military vehicles concentrated.”

In recent years, Belarus has had little direct involvement in hostilities against Ukraine. The most recent known case involves repeaters used to control attack drones located on Belarusian territory.

In late December, Zelenskyy reported that antennas had been installed in Belarus near the Ukrainian border, some of them on the roofs of apartment buildings, which Russians were using to control drones attacking western regions of Ukraine. Two months later, Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov reported that a mesh network used to control the attacking UAVs in the north of Ukraine has been destroyed. Fedorov’s advisor, Serhii Beskrestnov, explained that there had been several locations in Belarus from which the drones would receive a signal they then retransmitted and amplified to one another (this is what constitutes a mesh network). The Ukrainian military did not specify how the Belarusian repeaters were destroyed. Since then, there have been no reports of their use.

Otherwise, Belarus’s military assistance to Russia can be described as less direct: it is wounded Russian soldiers' treatment and rehabilitation, military equipment parts production, combat helicopter maintenance, weapon parts supply chains that allow Russians circumvent the sanctions, etc.

May the Belarusian army join the fight itself?

“We estimate the prospect of the Belarusian Armed Forces joining the war as highly improbable,” the CIT expert says. He mentioned several reasons.

Belarusian army capabilities. According to Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, there are currently 70,000 active-duty soldiers. The total is around 100,000 if the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and certain other units are included. However, analysts’ estimates are more modest. According to the Global Military project, there are about 45,000 troops in the Belarusian army, while Latvian intelligence puts the figure at approximately 50,000. Taking civilian staff into account, the 70,000 figure cited by Lukashenko is quite realistic. At the same time, Russia has about 700,000 personnel “in the special military operation zone,” as Vladimir Putin claimed in December.

The combat readiness of the Belarusian army is also questionable. “It’s important to understand that the number of truly combat-ready units is measured in the thousands,” explains the CIT analyst. According to him, without a mobilization — which CIT considers impossible to happen — the Belarusian army will be unable to influence the course of hostilities in any way.

Lukashenko says that “in the event of war” and mobilization, he could expand the army to 500,000 troops. The opposition United Transitional Cabinet of Belarus believes that the army could be expanded to 140,000–200,000 troops at best through mobilization, and that number would include the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “Half a million, it seems to me, is just a mantra used for self-reassurance, or perhaps for intimidating neighbors,” says Vadzim Kabanchuk, representative of the defence committee within the Belarusian opposition. Besides, it would have to be figured out how to equip, accommodate, and train such a large number of recruits.

In terms of weapons and military equipment, Belarus has little to offer the Russian army. Most of its arsenal was inherited from the Soviet Union. During the war, these stocks may have been depleted: there is evidence of mothballed equipment having been transferred from Belarus to the Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine. At the start of the war, the Belarusian prime minister acknowledged that in Russia there was demand for weapons from Belarus.

The main achievement of the Belarusian defense industry since the end of the Soviet era is considered to be the Polonez multiple-launch rocket system, capable of hitting targets at a distance of up to 300 km. However the Belarusian army has few Polonez systems (estimated at six units as of 2022). Secondly, the Russian army possesses some significantly more powerful and longer-range weapons, such as the Iskander systems.

Ukraine’s preparedness. “If we were to go to war against Ukraine today, it would be pointless. Their border with Belarus is so heavily fortified that it’s impossible to approach it,” Belarus President Lukashenko said two years ago. According to Lukashenko, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have about 120,000 troops stationed along the Belarus border. However, the Belarusian Border Committee estimates the number of Ukrainian troops at the border as only 15,000.

Ukrainians, understandably, do not disclose the number of their troops at the border, but regularly report on new fortifications being built along the border.

Another significant factor is Ukraine’s ability to monitor troop and equipment movements. If the Belarusian army does begin to redeploy its units to the border, the Ukrainian Armed Forces will have the opportunity to send their own units there in advance and set up a "drone wall” Ukrainians used in 2026 to successfully slow down the Russian army’s advance.

Belarusian people oppose taking part in the war. The army likely does as well. Recent polls (in October and November) show that the majority of Belarusians don’t support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, a significant proportion (34–39%) chose not to answer the question. As for ending the war, more than 60% of respondents support an immediate ceasefire and negotiations.

The military isn’t eager to go to war either, according to the Belarusian opposition estimates. “The soldiers themselves lack the motivation — they need to be explained why they should invade and occupy a foreign country. There is no political ideology for that,” activist Ilya Dobrotvor, says. “In 2022, when the full-scale war began, it was the hesitation within the Belarusian army that effectively prevented Lukashenko from issuing an order for them to enter [Ukrainian territory] alongside the Russians,” Vadzim Kabanchuk from the United Transitional Cabinet says.

“Overall, Lukashenko is well aware that dragging Belarus into the war against Ukraine — let alone the hostilities on Belarus territory — would practically be a death sentence for him. Because there is public consensus on the idea he himself has been selling the idea to Belarusians in recent years : ‘I have ensured you peace, you are not fighting,’” Artsiom Brukhan, speaker of the Belarusian opposition Coordination Council, says.

Is Russia going to attack Ukraine from Belarus?

If Russians decide to attack Ukraine from Belarus using their own army like they did in 2022, they won't be able to expect to break through to the outskirts of Kyiv again. In 2026, the plausible objectives of another invasion from Belarus could be to stretch the front line and draw Ukrainian forces away from other sectors.

However, the Russian army currently significantly lacks the required resources, says the anonymous CIT analyst. “Such an operation would require at least several combined-arms armies. But then they would have to be withdrawn from the current front line, seriously weakening certain sectors,” the expert says. As of now, CIT has not detected Russian units being deployed to Belarus.

The State Border Service of Ukraine believes that Russia currently has no forces in Belarus that would be capable of carrying out a second invasion. 

However, Ukrainians do not rule out Russian provocations aimed at distracting Ukrainian forces units from other parts of the front. CIT believes that the Russian Armed Forces are already attempting to stretch the front by creating a “buffer zone” in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions. So far it has not been very successful, says the CIT expert: the Ukrainian Armed Forces withdrawing from border villages block the Russians’ advance deeper into the country. Moreover, the Ukrainians manage to do this without deploying reinforcements — mainly by the forces of territorial defense brigades.

Why is the threat from Belarus discussed now?

Zelensky has pointed out Russia’s attempts to make Belarus a bigger threat many times throughout the war. Here are the reasons why the President might be mentioning this possibility now, according to Anton Naumluck, a Russian journalist who had worked in Ukraine for many years and founded the Graty magazine.

“We cannot dismiss the possibility of Ukrainian intelligence learning that the Belarusian government is actually planning to take a bigger part in the war,” Naumluck says. “No matter what’s being said about Belarusians opposing the war, Lukashenko might simply decide that the people will tolerate any decision.”

On the other hand, the journalist thinks, “if the Office of the President of Ukraine is already thinking about the future electoral campaign, the threat of a new invasion might make people come to terms with such internal problems as forced mobilization or corruption.”

Another plausible explanation for speaking about the possible threat is Zelenskyy’s team “trying to strengthen the dialogue with the Belarusian opposition [Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and her Office],” Naumluck says.

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The association members requested a legal, prosecutorial, and antitrust examination of the initiatives as well as postponing their adoption and investigating the Ministry of Digital Development’s activities to ensure the anti-corruption legislation compliance.

The initiatives

Last week, it was reported that the Ministry of Digital Development is discussing toughening the licensing rules for Russian Internet providers. Essentially, this will result in a total elimination of small and medium-sized providers. As a result, only the state-controlled telecom companies will remain on the market.

The ministry wants to introduce three new types of licenses, with a cost ranging from 1 to 50 million rubles (from $13,000 to $665,000 approx.), which will not be issued to individual entrepreneurs.

The Ministry of Digital Development also wants to start revoking the providers’ licenses for repeated “major violations” and to introduce a 10-year ban on licensing the beneficiaries of the offending companies.

In addition, a minimum amount requirement for the providers' authorized capital will be established, ranging from 5 to 100 million rubles (depending on the type of license).

The Ministry of Digital Development stated that the proposals “have been received positively by the industry.” According to officials, their goal is to ensure that only the “reliable operators” remain as well as "to guarantee effective compliance with the law".

Earlier, the digital development minister Maksut Shadayev had claimed regional Internet providers were failing to comply with the obligatory installation of the TPSU tools (traffic filtering tools used by Roskomnadzor, Russia’s executive body responsible for censoring media, telecommunications, and internet content — Ed.) and the SORM system (interception interfaces used for surveillance — Ed.).

As part of this reform, the Ministry of Digital Development also plans to lift the moratorium on telcos inspections, which was set to last until 2030, RBC Russia reported. The sources explained that the moratorium is making it hard for authorities to verify whether the companies have installed the SORM system.

The companies reaction

The AMOR association has demanded that the Ministry of Digital Development be tasked with developing alternative mechanisms for modernizing the telecommunications sector which “would enable the government to achieve its objectives without destroying small and regional telecom businesses,” and has requested that its representatives be included in the process.

Not only will the reforms hinder the operations of small and regional telecom businesses, but will make them impossible, AMOR claims.

Consequences: from unemployment to price growth

According to the AMOR letter, the total number of employees of all the Russian telecom companies whose annual revenue amounts to 50 million rubles ($665,000 approx) and below is 15,200 people. The companies generating 50 to 500 million rubles ($665,000 and $7 million approx.) in revenue employ 21,800 people in the country. Therefore, tens of thousands of telecom industry employees might suddenly find themselves out of work.

Other consequences will include Internet cost growth. It is difficult to say precisely how much the prices will change, the telco sources interviewed by IStories say.

“I think the costs could change dramatically, even outrageously, since there won’t be any competition even in the long run,” says one of the Moscow oblast providers' owners.

In addition, the Ministry of Digital Development’s proposal could potentially leave some people without Internet at all, because major players haven’t entered some areas due to unprofitability, AMOR points out.

“The regional and municipal providers will suffer the most, especially those operating in the private housing areas and places where the requirements tied to the coverage rate of apartment buildings are basically impossible to meet,” the statement says.

This will cause the providers who have historically ensured Internet access in remote villages, hard-to-reach areas, and rural communities to quit , the association asserts. 

“The simultaneous layoff of tens of thousands of workers, the price growth and declining service quality will inevitably lead to increased social tension at the time when stability is the absolute priority for the state,” AMOR notes.

In addition, the reforms will negatively impact equipment suppliers and manufacturers, television service providers and broadcasters as well as software developers for billing, video surveillance and intercom systems, and so on. 

“Less independent providers means less customers, deployments and growth opportunities for the entire ecosystem. This means less orders, investments, and jobs far beyond the telecommunications industry. Additionally, it will lower the demand for Russian hardware and software,” the letter reads.

An AMOR source interviewed by IStories considers there is no ground for claiming that the independent providers are ignoring the requirements regarding the SORM and TSPU systems.

He notes that the FSB (Russian Federal Security Service — Ed.) frequently imposes massive fines on the non-compliant providers, including the numerous subsidiaries of major providers. A Leningrad oblast provider owner IStories have spoken to also confirms that the regulations are strict.

“It’s practically impossible to avoid setting the TSPU, and doing so would be very risky. They monitor it very closely and have everything they need to verify our compliance,” he asserts. 

The state Internet

AMOR states that the reforms are being pursued in the interests of the five biggest internet providers in the country (Rostelecom, VimpelCom, ER-Telecom, MTS, and MegaFon). These changes essentially create an oligopoly, when the whole industry is completely controlled by just a few companies.

“We believe that the motivation behind this reform does not reflect the interests of the industry or the country as a whole, but rather serves the interests of a very limited circle of large commercial entities,” the statement reads.

The Leningrad oblast provider owner agrees.

“None of the companies had ever doubted that the consolidation would happen. It’s just a matter of time and approach – whether they’ll buy us or just take the business. My view is that they’ll buy the medium-sized ones and simply press the small ones. We live in a capitalist system, where the big ones feed on the small ones. The only question is how civilized is our capitalism,” he says.

According to his predictions, the complete takeover of the small and medium providers will occur within three years, as the big players won’t be able to secure the services for all the clients at once. 

The consequences for Russian cybersecurity

The provider owners IStories have spoken to have admitted that telecom consolidation has taken place in many countries around the world a long time ago. However, they say that the unique situation in Russia makes the country’s entire network more resilient to cyberattacks and external threats.

According to them, the larger the number of independent providers, data transmission routes, and network control centers in Russia is, the easier it is to cope with the consequences of any crash, error, or attack, and the lower the importance of each single point of failure is to the system.

“The decentralized architecture of the Russian Internet segment is its fundamental advantage from a security standpoint. [...] Concentrating infrastructure management in the hands of five providers will sharply increase our vulnerability to DDoS attacks and targeted cyberattacks by unfriendly countries (Russia officially maintains a so-called "Unfriendly countries" list — Ed.). For a country with a vast territory and widely distributed infrastructure, decentralization is a factor of resilience, not a development obstacle,” the AMOR statement reads.

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Dubron is a former military who served in the US and in Israel. He described the differences he saw between the recruiting process in Russia and Ukraine — and between the two countries at war in general.

— As a citizen of the US, why did you choose the Russian invasion of Ukraine as the subject matter of the book? 

— First, I studied history. I do think that it is the most historically important thing to happen in the 21st century. I believe it destroys the world order that was established post 1946-1947, with the UN agreeing that we don't invade countries and we solve our problems through mediation or legal means. I do understand that people have broken that, but we've generally kept to that. And I think that the breaking of that is an extremely historical event, and I wanted to write about that as a historian. 

Number two, I would say that I was in a unique position because I did serve in the Israeli military, and in the Israel military, we have a lot of Ukrainians and a lot of Russians. So I actually did know people who were on both sides. And that's where the idea of the book came in, just telling what the normal person goes through. Yes. Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending the criminal soldiers that they (the Russians — Ed.) have, but I am saying that there are normal people who are forced to be there and it sucks. And the Ukrainians, on their side, you have normal people who just want to go home. And I can sympathize with that level of soldiering as a soldier.

I tried to approach writing a modern book in a historical context, and then I realized that the tragedy and suffering that is going on would not be told well in a non-fiction book. I realized that I wanted to tell a more personalized story about the war and be able to relate it more to Americans.

— How did you collect the information to write the part of the book telling the russian soldier story?

— 2022 was when I came up with the idea for the book and research. But what I wanted when I wrote the book — and I said that it's based on true stories — I didn't want to just be some idiot who just made up stories, or watched a YouTube video and said, “Okay, cool. I know exactly what's going on here guys”. No. I wanted to go there.

Because I have two passports and because I have friends from both sides, I was able to go in with an Israeli passport into Russia, use the American one to get around in case that gets flagged or in trouble, and then get out with an Israel passport. 

I already had the title, “the Volunteers”. The important part is volunteering, so I went to the recruitment center to look around. So, I went for a day. 

— What did you see in the Moscow recruitment center?

It's almost like an assembly line, and my book talks about it. You go in, you sit down, you talk. You get asked one question — “why do you want to be here?” Uh, money. Oh, okay. Cool. Goodbye. Next. 

If you replaced everything there with AI, nothing would change. They don't care. There's four or five guys sitting there, and there's a line up the door of people. 

Unfortunately, when you're an American there, everyone asks you what you think. So I had to keep it very, very pro-Russian. I don't want to end up like many Americans who've been arrested, including two or three former American Marines, anything like that. I always give the party line answer.

Their physical (checkup — Ed.) is… I didn't even realize I took a physical. I just talked to somebody and walked out.

They don't really check skills and things like this. The Americans or the Ukrainians will be like, oh, you're a programmer. OK, we can put you somewhere and use your skill sets. Whereas from what I saw, it seemed like they (Russians — Ed.) really didn't care at all. They just were like: oh, a person, cool.

[When it turned out it was time to sign the contract] I just said, “Oh, I didn't know it would be today. I want to go see the beauty of Russia. See you later. I'll come back”. And they were cool with that. They have so many people there. It's not even a concern for them.

Me being an American, they would never stop me from leaving. I just knew that. I don't think they'd cause an international incident this week. So I'll be OK.

I stayed for a little bit longer to arrange the interview. I really wanted to interview someone who was on the front. So my friend, who I met through my Israeli contacts, was able to set up the meeting with someone who was there (Dubron opted not to reveal the interviewee's name — Ed.)

Also I was able to arrange the interview with a person who lost a very close family member. And so I was able to ask them, why did they join? Were they some person who wants the Russian Empire back? Are they a person who is patriotic? Are they a person who was avoiding criminal (responsibility — Ed.)? And then they said, money. And that's where the character of my book came, with the money (as a motivation — Ed.)

— Why did you decide to go to the recruitment center if you had no intention to fight? 

I wanted to get something so that I could say “this is true”. I didn't want to just say that, I wanted to use some primary sources, going back to my historical training. I wanted to either be my primary source or talk to someone who was there. 

And the gentleman who I talked to, who was on the front, did not join through a recruiting center. He was a member of one of the, I would say PMCs, and then he ended up in the army when they switched over. 

— What surprised you the most in the Russian recruiting center? 

I was very surprised to see that it was a one stop shop. You just walk in and then that day they were leaving. I don't know if they do background checks. This is crazy! 

I served in the IDF. There is rubber stamping that happens where it's like, “Yeah, he's good, we swear”. But it's at least even then they go through the pretense. 

Even in what the Russians call elite units, which is VDV and the Morskaya Pekhota, they don't get that much training. From a direct source from someone who was there, their training was four to six weeks. (Russian BBC Service has also reported that the paratrooper training during the war has been taking just a couple of weeks — meanwhile before the war it would take 6 to 12 months to do the just basic training — Ed.).

In an elite unit in Israel you'd be training for 8 to 12 months before you're even allowed to take the training wheels off and go for a walk, whereas in the American military the fastest pipeline for a special operations soldier is still a year. 

But it may have changed again, it's been two years. But in 2024, they were doing a counter-offensive, so it must have been pretty manpower-heavy comparatively.

— Why do some foreigners — Americans included — decide to go to war on Russia’s side? 

— That's, actually — I wouldn't say “common — but it's a thing. Number one is Russian women, most likely, is where they go. Guys like girls, and that's a story as old as time. 

Number two, I would say, in their case, it would be... I can't speak for everyone else, but I would say veterans would probably feel a little betrayed after the collapse of Afghanistan and things like that. And they probably feel betrayed that certain social ideologies were being pushed in the US military.

And Russia claims to be this bastion of strong Christian nation, but what they portray themselves as and what they really are is a different world. And they're sending their guys to go die on the front when they have a huge demographic crisis. But I would say that this right-wing Christian nation ideology attracts a lot of, I would say, very disenfranchised Americans and Westerners. 

And I would say, people still, especially in the West, associate Russia with communism, being the successor state of the Soviet Union. So, it could attract the left-wing, too. 

— In your book, another part of the story is that of an American fighting for Ukraine. How did you collect the information for this part?

— After a month in Russia, I went back to the United States. I — again through contacts — arranged meetings in Ukraine. I went to Lviv and Kyiv. 

I went to the recruiting place in Kyiv in the old city hall. They gave me the number for the International Legion over regular brigades, as I am an American. 

What I noticed in Ukraine is that they care a lot more about skills. The difference is I saw the Ukrainians taking their time a little more with recruits. When I was there, they were talking to them, which is something that I know is shocking compared to the Russian side of the house, but they wanted to know a little bit more about you. Maybe, I can't say for certain, to place you where you may be the best for the Ukrainian military.

I would also say that the Ukrainian (recruiting office — Ed.) was a lot more upbeat. The Russian office looked like it was quite possibly the most depressing place I've ever been, and that includes a morgue. Everyone there was kind of in a bad mood.

— What else is different about the recruiting process in the two countries?

 From what I saw: (in Ukraine — Ed.) the people who joined got to choose. If you join and want to go to the 12th assault brigade or something like that, “Okay, cool. We're gonna send you there”. Oh, 95th air mobile. “Okay, cool”. 

I also feel that the Ukrainian one takes more time. It took four to six weeks for the Americans I interviewed, and they were actually angry about it. I met an American who came over and was ready to go fight for Ukraine. He walks in. They're like, “we'll call you”. And he never got a call for six weeks. He said he almost lost all his money.

Ukraine most likely wants to make sure the volunteer is not wanted by Interpol or something like this. (The official website of the International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine states that an application is reviewed by the Legion and the corresponding unit for 4 to 6 weeks — Ed.)

— How would you describe the mood in the two countries? 

They were very different.

The mood in Moscow was very serious (as of the beginning of 2024 — Ed.). There's propaganda posters everywhere for what they call a special military operation. They never use the term (war — Ed.), ever. I find it hilarious that you'll be talking to someone there and you'll like, “war”, and they'll be like, no, “call it whatever you want”. What do you want to call it, dude? It's a war. 

In Kyiv, people were still friendly. I accidentally walked into someone's home instead of a cafe and was like, I'm so sorry, I'm walking out. And they're like, “No no no, stay for tea!”.

And I would say that the narratives portrayed in the West on both sides are incorrect, from what I saw.

There was this narrative that “Ukraine is breaking”, but I didn't see that in 2024. I saw a very determined group of people. And that's impressive. The narrative also is that “Russia is breaking” and I don't see that either. In Russia, I just see people who are tired. And I'd say they are also tired in Kyiv, but there's hope. In Russia, it's just tiredness. I would say that's the big difference. 

— What's the motivation difference between the volunteers fighting for Russia and Ukraine you wrote about in the book?

Russians’ motivations are generally money. And unfortunately, from the start of the war, I think the true believers (among the volunteers — Ed.) on both sides are mostly gone — unfortunately, because they have fought bravely. Ukrainians are still getting high quality foreign volunteers, but the foreign volunteers don't come for money on the Ukrainian side. They come for their friends already there. They come because they want to help. They come because they're professionals and they say, “I believe in this. This is a true fight where I get to help”. And that's what I wrote about. 

But I wasn't trying to make the Russians characters. I wasn't trying to make Ukrainian characters. I was trying to make them as real as possible. 

The American was there for ideals. When people died, it was a little more hurtful, that kind of impact. The Russian was forced there for money. 

But you have to remember they are people. The second you start degrading your enemy as a caricature, or the second you start degrading your enemy as just evil, without understanding, you're not going to do well.

I think telling it from a humanistic perspective is able to, again, give that quality to the average Ukrainian soldier. If you keep saying, oh, these Russian soldiers suck, I think that takes away from some of the Ukrainian soldiers who've been fighting these guys for four years. When the Russians make gains, what does that say about you guys? That's really not fair. That's wrong. So you need to say, OK, yes, your average soldier quality goes to Ukraine. But the Russians still have combat-capable, decent units that are pushing, and actually sometimes getting repulsed (by Ukrainians — Ed.), which is beyond impressive for someone who's been fighting. 

I'm not trying to say anything other than war is hell, it sucks that people are there. It's just all of it is a tragedy on a level that is incomprehensible.

My family is a military family and I would say the majority of them are pretty anti-war overall. Going to wars, you have to brainwash 18 year old kids. “Go have fun”. But that's because you're drilled in your head. 

You can have guys who fought in a lot of elite units: Israel, America, Ukraine. And they did all the “cool things”, and they come back, and you ask them — “was it worth not seeing your family?” — and they will almost always say “no.”

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Sergei Magnitsky was an auditor at Hermitage Capital, who uncovered a 2007 scheme of a 5.4 billion rubles’ ($230 million approx. according to the exchange rates of 2007) embezzlement from the Russian federal budget. The funds obtained through illegal income tax refunds would be transferred to accounts at Universal Savings Bank owned by Klyuev. The money was then transferred abroad through a complex network of shell companies, with some of it ending up in Klyuev’s offshore accounts. After giving his testimony, Magnitsky himself was arrested and sent to a pretrial detention center. There, he died after being beaten and denied medical care. 

After reviewing the evidence gathered in the Magnitsky case, French prosecutors concluded that Klyuev was the mastermind behind the tax fraud scheme.

The money laundering charges are based on Klyuev’s bank accounts spendings. As French investigators discovered, between April 2008 and October 2012 Klyuev used his Cyprus bank accounts to spend over €2 million in France on luxury brand clothing, jewelry, art, and traveling. More than 127,000 euros were spent on paying for a vacation for Dmitry Savelyev, a then-Senator of the Russian State Duma, and his guests at the Courchevel ski resort in France, according to the transactions and invoices available to IStories.

In March 2025, Klyuev was placed on the international wanted list, according to the documents from the French prosecutor’s office (at the disposal of IStories). As the prosecutor’s office notes, Klyuev is likely to be residing in Russia, where he “is clearly enjoying the support of the authorities and is likely to be affiliated with organized crime.” However, Russia has been excluded from the list of countries notified of Klyuev’s arrest warrant being issued, as French law enforcement officials see no prospect of Russia extraditing him.

In Russia, Klyuev owns the Quorum Debt Management Group law firm—a partner of the Russian Deposit Insurance Agency in recovering assets from troubled banks. The Quorum group was founded by Andrei Pavlov, a person featured on the Magnitsky List (originally list of people sanctioned for their connection to Magnitsky's detention, abuse and death in detention in 2009, which has been updated with the names of those responsible for other human rights violations and corruption — Ed.). Klyuev also owns a hunting estate in Kaluga Oblast, which, according to an IStories source, is visited by high-ranking officials at his invitation.

The complaint against Klyuev was initially filed by the Hermitage Capital Foundation. Its CEO, Bill Browder, had launched a global campaign to investigate the Magnitsky case following Magnitsky’s death. As a result, in 2014 the United States imposed sanctions against Klyuev and other individuals involved in the fraudulent scheme.

According to the indictment, the maximum penalty facing Klyuev is 10 years in prison. The prosecution considers Klyuev's regular engagement in money laundering activity to be an aggravating factor. The documents note that he was also involved in laundering the Russian budget stolen funds in Cyprus and Switzerland.

Previously, IStories reported on Klyuev having invested in a luxury resort in Cyprus in 2009 — shortly after Magnitsky had accused him of the financial fraud. In 2012 and 2013, nearly $8 million (247 million rubles approx.) were transferred from an account allegedly linked to Klyuev’s offshore entity (into which money stolen from the Russian budget had previously been funneled) to the Swiss bank account of an offshore company owned by the aforementioned Dmitry Savelyev.

“It’s very encouraging to see that after years of going after those who profited from the $230 million fraud uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, the key perpetrator himself is now facing trial in Paris,” Bill Browder commented to IStories. “We hope that one day he will also be held accountable in Russia for what he has done to the Russian people.”

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Along a rugged, wind-swept shore in western Ireland stands Aughinish Alumina, the hulking industrial complex that is Europe's largest alumina refinery.

Inside the sprawling plant, heat and pressure are harnessed to transform bauxite — a reddish rock mined oceans away — into alumina, the main raw material needed to produce aluminum.

Strong and resistant to corrosion, aluminum is vital for manufacturing military hardware like missiles, drones, and aircraft. That’s one reason why the European Commission has called on member states to stockpile alumina as a defense against hostile powers.

Yet rather than remaining in the European Union, the majority of the Aughinish factory’s exports are shipped to Russia’s largest aluminum smelters. Those smelters, in turn, feed into a supply chain of sanctioned defense contractors whose weapons have killed thousands of civilians in Ukraine, a new investigation by OCCRP and partners has found.   

Reporters could not track the final destination of a specific batch of Aughinish’s alumina, as the powdery substance is typically mixed together with alumina from other sources in the smelting process. 

However, customs and trade data show that since 2023, more than half the Ireland-based refinery’s alumina exports have gone to smelters in Russia owned by the plant’s Russian parent company, United Company Rusal.

After processing the alumina into aluminum, the smelters have sold more than $650 million worth of the metal to a Moscow-based trader, Aluminium Sales Company (ASK), which supplies aluminum to clients that include dozens of EU-sanctioned Russian weapons manufacturers, according to leaked transaction data. (The data does not detail the volume of aluminum sold.)

Weapons made by these firms have leveled entire city blocks in Mariupol, struck a children’s hospital in Kyiv, and blown open an apartment building in western Ukraine, according to EU sanctions listings, Ukraine’s military intelligence, and the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). 

Aughinish Alumina’s exports to Russia — which have increased since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — are entirely legal under EU trade rules. That is because despite the bloc’s recognition of alumina’s importance, no restrictions have been placed on the product’s export to Russia.

“A strategic asset”

Aughinish Alumina’s Russian parent company, Rusal, is one of the world’s largest aluminum producers, with mines, refineries, and smelters across the globe. In Russia, it is the primary supplier of aluminum for the defense, transport, construction and electrical industries. 

After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the EU sanctioned Rusal’s founder and former top shareholder Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire and close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, for his alleged involvement in companies working with the Russian defense sector. (Deripaska did not respond to reporters’ request for comment, but has mounted failed legal challenges to U.S., EU, and Australian sanctions against him.)

Rusal, however, remained untouched, sparking a debate in the Irish parliament about the company’s plant in County Limerick, which produces around a third of the EU’s alumina. 

“We appear to be protecting the Aughinish Alumina plant from sanctions,” then-MP Thomas Pringle said in April 2022. “That is hypocritical of us. If we need to protect that plant, the Government should be considering taking it over straight away and…take it out of the hands of the oligarchs.” 

The country’s then minister of state, Patrick O’Donovan, responded by saying that the plant “is not connected…to any sort of Russian empire,” and that it was a major employer and supplier of alumina to European industries.

Rusal itself had actually been briefly sanctioned back in 2018 by the U.S. for its connection to Deripaska. The move sent shockwaves through the global aluminum industry and led to a surge in aluminum prices. Not long after, the U.S. agreed to delist the company after Deripaska reduced his shares in Rusal’s parent company to a minority stake. 

From Guinea to Siberia

To trace Russia’s aluminum supply chain, reporters started at the source. Trade data shows the bauxite refined by the Aughinish factory comes from the West African country Guinea, where Rusal owns three mines. It also comes from a Rusal-owned mine in the Brazilian Amazon whose largest shareholder is the mining and commodity trading giant Glencore. (When reached for comment Glencore, which owns a 10% stake in Rusal’s parent company, said it was “unable to comment on Aughinish’s commercial decisions.”)

After arriving by bulk carrier to Irish shores, the bauxite is transformed with heat, pressure, and caustic soda into alumina at the Aughinish facility. Since the 2022 invasion — after which one of Rusal’s Ukraine-based refineries was nationalized — Aughinish has become an increasingly important alumina supplier for the Russian conglomerate.

Trade data shows that starting in 2023, the Ireland-based plant has shipped the majority of its alumina exports to Rusal smelters in Russia. The bulk has gone to two smelters in particular: the Krasnoyarsk and Sayanogorsk facilities in Siberia.

In 2024, for instance, Aughinish sent around half of all its refined alumina produced that year — worth around $400 million — to Krasnoyarsk and Sayanogorsk, accounting for nearly 40% of the alumina imported by the smelters. That year, the two smelters produced over a third of Rusal’s entire aluminum output, according to annual reports.

But that’s where the public paper trail ends, with Rusal making no public mention of supplying Russian arms manufacturers. Leaked transaction data, however, allowed reporters to follow the aluminum’s path.

From Russian smelters to Ukraine’s frontlines

The leaked transaction data obtained by reporters shows ASK paid Rusal’s trading arm more than $640 million for aluminum from the company’s smelters between the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 to April 2025.

(While the data does not show the exact volumes ASK sourced from each smelter, it shows the trader also paid service fees to specific smelters for loading and unloading aluminum, some 40 percent of which went to Krasnoyarsk and Sayanogorsk.)

Throughout the same time period ASK, in turn, made approximately a third of its revenue — some $337 million — selling aluminum for the purpose of Russian defense contracts.

Reporters were unable to trace alumina from Aughinish to a specific product. However, ASK’s 2024 customer list included more than 40 EU-sanctioned companies — many owned by the Russian defense conglomerate Rostec — which produce weapons including anti-aircraft missiles, rocket systems, and long-range bombers, according to sanctions listings. 

Eighteen of these companies have built arms directly used in deadly attacks in Ukraine, said Andriy Yusov, an official from the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, which analyzes the debris of Russian weaponry found on Ukraine's battlefields. 

One of the trader’s biggest customers is Kamaz, a manufacturer of heavy-duty vehicles used by Russia’s armed forces in Ukraine, according to its EU sanctions listing. In 2024, Kamaz paid ASK $16 million for aluminum, the data shows. 

Another top ASK client is the U.S.- and EU-sanctioned Votkinsk Machine Building Plant, which bought $101,200 worth of aluminum from ASK in 2024.

According to EU authorities and Ukraine's military intelligence agency, the Votkinsk plant manufactures a range of armaments, including long-range missiles and the short-range Iskander ballistic missile — a weapon that reportedly killed 31 civilians in an attack in the northeastern city of Sumy in April 2025. 

Kamaz, Votkinsk, and eleven other sanctioned arms manufacturers that buy aluminum from ASK did not respond to requests to comment.

Export control issues

The EU banned imports of aluminum produced in Russia in February 2025 in an effort to sever an income stream that could be used to fund Moscow’s war. But it has not prohibited the export of alumina to Russia, despite calls from the Latvian government which argued that a ban would “weaken [Russia’s] war machine.” 

Supplies of EU-produced alumina to Russia “could undermine NATO’s stated goals of supporting Ukraine and deterring Russia,” Oleksandr V. Danylyuk, a former Ukraine defense official who is now a fellow at the think-tank RUSI, says.

Pavlo Shkurenko, a Sanctions Research Fellow at Kyiv School of Economics Institute, also warns that Europe’s “entanglement” with Russia’s metallurgical sector carries serious risks for the continent.

It enables “not only direct daily attacks on Ukrainian civilians, but also potential confrontation with Europe itself, as the development of Russian military industry suggests.”

When reached for comment, Aughinish told OCCRP that it operates “in strict compliance with all applicable European Union laws, including sanctions, export control measures and trade regulations.” The company said it had implemented “robust sanctions compliance and due diligence framework covering its entire supply chain,” though it did not respond to specific questions about whether its products might be used to build Russian weapons. 

The firm emphasized that alumina and aluminum are basic commodities serving “broad general purpose societal needs…vital for countless civilian industries.” 

Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade stressed that alumina is “not a sanctioned good” and “therefore its export to other countries, including Russia, is not restricted.”

A lack of data makes it “difficult to ascertain where Russia is sourcing its tools and weapons from,” a spokesperson said, adding that “Ireland remains unequivocal in its continuing support for Ukraine in light of Russia’s unjustified invasion.” 

The Russian Ministry of Defense, ASK, and Rusal and its parent company EN+ Group did not respond to reporters’ request for comment. 

Khadija Sharife, Alina Tsogoeva (OCCRP), Kaur Maran (Eesti Ekspress), Simon Goodley (The Guardian), Maksym Dudchenko (KibOrg), and Lars Bové (De Tijd) contributed reporting.

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Pozhidaeva was born and raised in Moscow in a well-off family. From an early age, Svetlana — her full name — played tennis, but ultimately chose a career in finance: she graduated from MGIMO with honors, learned English, French, Italian, and Spanish, interned at the Russian Foreign Ministry and at Lukoil, studied in France, and immediately after graduation began working as an analyst at Credit Europe Bank, later moving on to Russian investment firms.

However, in 2008, Pozhidaeva abruptly changed career paths and tried modeling: at age 24, she submitted photos to a Maxim magazine competition and unexpectedly reached the finals, she told journalists in 2018.

“My parents said: you’re crazy. When someone tells me I’m crazy, I take it as a compliment, because the worst thing for me is being told I’m boring or ordinary,” Pozhidaeva explained.

The MGIMO graduate signed her first modeling contract with the Milan-based agency Elite Models and then moved to Europe. At the same time, in the United States she was represented by MC2 Model Management, an agency founded with Epstein’s money by Jean-Luc Brunel, a close associate of the financier. Brunel was widely considered a key supplier of underage girls to Epstein’s network and was himself accused of raping minors. After Epstein’s death in 2019, Brunel was arrested in France and in 2022 was found dead in his prison cell.

Pozhidaeva’s introduction to Epstein took place in 2008: documents published by the U.S. Department of Justice include an email from Epstein’s assistant sending him Lana’s phone numbers and asking him to call the Russian model. From then on, Pozhidaeva became closely acquainted not only with Epstein but also with other influential figures in the United States. By at least 2010, she had begun helping the financier — accused of pedophilia — recruit young women in former Soviet countries.

After the U.S. Department of Justice released millions of documents from the Epstein case, Pozhidaeva drew attention from leading global media outlets. A week ago, she spoke publicly to reporters from The Wall Street Journal, saying she had been manipulated and abused by Epstein and that she recruited young women for his network against her will. She denied any ties to Russian authorities.

However, in that interview Pozhidaeva left out many details about her cooperation with Epstein, as well as aspects of her biography, which begins in Moscow’s notorious House on the Embankment — a building where many prominent Bolsheviks and security officials once lived before being sent to labor camps or executed.

Important Stories uncovered previously unreported details about Pozhidaeva’s life and explains how a woman from a family of Russian intelligence officers built a career within the sex-network of a powerful American financier.

House on the Embankment

Pozhidaeva was born and raised in Moscow in a Stalin-era apartment building near Begovaya, but part of her family has lived for generations in the House on the Embankment. The apartment there was allocated to her maternal grandfather, Colonel Marcel Platonov, a well-known Soviet military surgeon and gynecologist. Platonov worked in Kremlin and General Staff clinics and became one of the leading gynecologists of the Soviet Ministry of Defense.

Svetlana’s parents — Yuri and Irina — graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, colloquially known as a “spy school.”

Graduates of the institute often went on to serve in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence) or in the military attaché corps, a source who served alongside interpreters from the institute in conflict zones told Important Stories. The institute was also one of the few military schools that admitted women.

Among its well-known graduates are arms trafficker Viktor Bout and Yuri Drozdov, head of the KGB’s illegal intelligence network from 1979 to 1991 and deputy head of the First Chief Directorate, who in 1962 organized the exchange of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers.

Pozhidaeva’s father, Yuri Pozhidaev, trained as a Persian-language military interpreter and in 1978, on the eve of the Soviet invasion, was sent to Afghanistan as part of the military advisory corps. During the war, he remained in Kabul working within the office of the chief military adviser (a structure tied to the General Staff). Little is known about his later career except his rank — lieutenant colonel. It appears that both of Lana’s parents left service in the late 1990s.

As Pozhidaeva’s relationship with Epstein grew closer and her role in his network became more significant, she began introducing her relatives to her boss and his influential associates.

Her father and the FSB

In the spring of 2015, Pozhidaeva’s brother Sergey traveled to the United States. She tried to place him in companies linked to Epstein and to Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the former head of the global logistics giant DP World, who was dismissed earlier this year following reports about his ties to Epstein.

In December 2015, Pozhidaeva’s parents also traveled to the U.S., as confirmed by both correspondence and Russian border-crossing records. Ahead of their visit, Epstein transferred more than $237,000 from his offshore Butterfly Trust to Lana’s account “for the family.” The parents stayed with her in New York and later moved to Epstein’s Florida residence.

After visiting the mansion, Lana’s mother wrote to Epstein:

“My son asked me: "How's the house"? I said that it's like "Great Getsby"; "No,- he said,- it's not Great Getsby , it's Great Jeffry!" So, for our family you are a Great man!’”

A few days later, Lana told Epstein that she had introduced her parents to her then-boyfriend Pen King:

“Dad shared some stories from his FSB part, Pen loved it.”

After the family became close to Epstein, Yuri Pozhidaev’s career in Russia advanced rapidly. In December 2017, the retired lieutenant colonel began working at Technopromexport (part of the Rostec holding, the main producer of the Russian arms) and frequently traveled to Tehran, where the company was building energy infrastructure.

In 2018, while continuing to receive a salary from Technopromexport, he became deputy head of security in the Iranian division of Russian Railways International, which was building the “North–South” transport corridor linking Russia, Iran, and India — a major international government project involving billions of rubles in investment.

Moreover, in 2020, while still formally employed by Russian Railways, Pozhidaev became deputy general director for security at Caspian Services, the main contractor for Russia’s Ministry of Transport on the same corridor project. He remained in that role at least until early 2026.

The types of positions Yuri Pozhidaev held in state corporations are typically reserved for security service officers — often so-called “seconded personnel” (APS) from the FSB. Orders assigning such officers to companies, banks, and ministries are signed by the FSB director; the officers receive formal positions related to security but remain in active service and report back to the agency.

Investigative journalists from the Explainer project found that in 2022 Yuri Pozhidaev sent three letters to the address at 20/2 Bolshaya Lubyanka — home to the Moscow regional FSB pension department.

A family of recruiters

Correspondence between Epstein and Pozhidaeva differs from his communication with other models from the former Soviet Union: in his emails, Epstein does not flirt with Lana, and she, unlike many others, does not appear to harbor romantic illusions about their relationship.

At the beginning of their relationship in 2009, Epstein helped Lana with visa issues and invited her to events at the United Nations and the World Economic Forum in Davos alongside Maria Drokova, a former commissar of the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi who later worked as Epstein’s PR agent. But within a year, Pozhidaeva began sourcing young women for Epstein from post-Soviet countries, traveling to Kyiv and Moscow and introducing her friends to him.

In several emails, Epstein expressed dissatisfaction that the women she found appeared older than he preferred. In one case, Pozhidaeva offered to arrange a meeting with a 17-year-old girl (we are not publishing the link to that file because the U.S. Department of Justice did not redact the victim’s identifying details).

Before sending women to Epstein’s island, Lana arranged for some of them to take lessons in foot massage so they “would know how to do it.”

Starting in 2016, Pozhidaeva began recruiting under the alias “Julia Santos” — the name of a character from the popular American soap opera All My Children, played by Santa Barbara star Sydney Penny, a cultural reference familiar to a child growing up in 1990s Moscow.

Investigators were able to link the alias to Pozhidaeva by cross-referencing emails from “Santos” mentioning meetings with her parents, visits from her brother, or references to her boyfriend, and matching those details with travel records and emails sent under her real name.

We found messages indicating 18 women whom Pozhidaeva, under the name Julia Santos, recruited for sex parties or meetings with Epstein. The vast majority were from Russia and Ukraine. In one case, the woman was from Odesa and had been a victim of child pornography as a teenager. In another, Epstein instructed that a trafficking victim not be allowed to keep food in the refrigerator because she “needed to lose six kilos” to spend time with him.

In May 2017, Pozhidaeva sent Epstein a photograph from a party in Barbados: a Ukrainian woman is seen standing next to “A” — likely British Prince Andrew, who in 2025 was stripped of all titles due to his ties to Epstein.

“I have heard super druggy,” Pozhidaeva wrote of her.

After her parents met Epstein, they also began offering women for his network. For example, Lana’s mother attempted to “offer” a woman from Ukraine who, in her words, was “in a really bad situation.” Her father, Lieutenant Colonel Pozhidaev, sent Epstein photos of young women without comment (in both cases, victims’ names were not redacted in DOJ documents).

Feminism funded by a sex offender

“I feel ashamed and think about those other women all the time. That’s the hardest part of all of this — I was too consumed by my own abuse to see beyond it. I had to appear happy, to keep smiling, while privately I was battling eating disorders, depression, and insomnia,” Lana said in her interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Her work was well paid: Epstein wrote that at the beginning she earned about $30,000 per year after taxes — roughly the median salary in New York at the time. From at least 2017, DOJ materials show payments to Pozhidaeva of $8,333 per month through Epstein’s Enhanced Education foundation, set up as automatic transfers.

Over the years, Lana accumulated enough money to purchase two small apartments in central Moscow.

She now claims she was a victim like the underage girls, arguing that Epstein controlled her immigration status, housing, and finances. She says she could not leave because large payments were structured as loans. Important Stories found no confirmation of this in the available files.

Epstein also supported her business ventures. He donated more than $50,000 to the Education Advance foundation she co-founded in 2017 with her boyfriend, New York venture investor Pendleton King Jr. Investigative journalists later found that the funds went to a Buddhist organization at MIT. The ultimate purpose of the project remains unclear.

Another initiative she launched with Epstein’s support was WE Talks — a platform modeled on TED Talks, aimed at bringing together ambitious women. The name stood for “Women Empowerment.”

The project was registered at Epstein’s address, funded by him, and Lana discussed its operations with him directly.

Its co-director was Viktoria Drokova, sister of Maria Drokova. Maria herself also participated.

In correspondence, Lana described how they were brainstorming ways to reshape Epstein’s public image:

“We are brainstorming with Masha how we can turn the discussion around and ask why money should not be taken for a good cause just because sth had happened 10+ years ago and that you had funded great projects and probably saved many lives. Hope this can be good.”

In 2019, Pozhidaeva and the Drokova sisters began holding WE Talks events in Moscow, but Epstein’s death disrupted their plans.

Pozhidaeva also claimed she feared retaliation if she tried to leave Epstein — not for herself, but for her family in Russia. She suggested Epstein could pressure her parents through connections in Russian leadership, including Sergey Belyakov, an FSB officer and former deputy minister of economic development.

Belyakov was indeed a long-time contact of Epstein in Russia. According to the Dossier Center, Epstein advised him on economic issues and helped bring high-profile guests to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, while Belyakov introduced Epstein to senior officials in Russia’s Finance Ministry and Central Bank.

According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, Belyakov helped Epstein obtain a Russian visa in 2011 via an FSB veterans’ organization. Epstein wrote that he planned to visit Moscow, but there is no evidence he did.

Pozhidaeva herself helped facilitate contacts between Epstein and Russian officials, including preparations for meetings with Finance Ministry and Central Bank representatives. In 2014, Belyakov wrote a recommendation letter supporting her U.S. visa extension.

“Snow White” and America’s power elite

Over ten years working for Epstein, Pozhidaeva gained access to some of the most powerful people in the U.S. and globally.

In 2010, paparazzi photographed her leaving Epstein’s Manhattan mansion on a day when Prince Andrew was present. She later identified herself in photos with Bill Gates and Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, who also stepped down from positions after his ties to Epstein became public.

Their interactions appear to have been professional, including helping organize visits and meetings.

However, her name also appears in correspondence linked to sexual encounters involving prominent individuals.

In one email exchange, Epstein requested a Snow White costume for a party.

“Brett Rattner is going to film a big movie Snow White, I would love to take photos of you in a snow white costume. You can get it from the costume store,” he wrote.

Afterward, Barclays CEO Jes Staley wrote:

“That was fun. Say hi to Snow White.”

Pozhidaeva a few hours later reported:

“the snow white was f..ed twice as soon as she put her costume.”

In the early 2010s, Pozhidaeva had a relationship with Joshua Fink, son of BlackRock founder Larry Fink — one of the most powerful figures in global finance. 

In 2012, Epstein introduced her to Elon Musk and attempted to arrange meetings in Paris, promising Musk “a lot of fun” with her.

He also tried to match her with Saudi businessman Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, though unsuccessfully. However, Pozhidaeva later claimed she had a sexual relationship with his son, Hassan Jameel.

After Epstein

Six months after Epstein’s death, Pozhidaeva changed her identity. Now 42, she goes by Sofia Platt and has changed her name in her Russian passport.

She continues to work from the United States. In San Francisco, she co-founded Bridge Funding Global, a fundraising platform focused on women entrepreneurs, and contributes to business publications such as Forbes.

Melinda French Gates spoke at the opening of one of her events.

Pozhidaeva says she also mentors children in foster care and invests in private credit. She describes her past work as consulting for social enterprises.

She has largely withdrawn from public view and now identifies herself as a “victim of human trafficking.”

On her website, she states:

“I have already told my story. In order to preserve my mental well-being and the integrity of this process, I will not accept further media requests or give interviews.”

She says she is currently undergoing recovery through a mental health program in the U.S. Virgin Islands — where Epstein’s island is located.

Important Stories attempted to contact Pozhidaeva-Platt and her family. Her attorney, Kyle Stroup, responded:

“Ms. Pozhidaeva declines to provide any further comment or information at this time and is not looking to engage in further interviews. Accordingly, we respectfully request that you cease contacting her or her family.”

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Warning: This text contains descriptions of murder and violence as well as profanity and ethnic slurs.

A drone-filmed video shows a battle underway, and a soldier is taking an enemy captive. The captive has a yellow armband on his sleeve, worn by the Armed Forces of Ukraine; he has raised his hands and is not resisting. Off-camera, presumedly Russian soldiers are commenting on the footage in real time. “FInish him off,” a voice can be heard on the radio. “Don’t talk to him, just fucking kill him,” says another one. The video freezes for a few seconds; the commenters are confused. The next thing we see is the captive’s body falling. “Fuck it, that’s awesome,” the soldiers cheer. 

This video was posted on the “Video *** 18+” Telegram channel (here and further on, we hide the exact names of these channels not to give them publicity — Ed.) on January 2, 2026. “Our stormtrooper beats up a pig and captures it in hand-to-hand combat, then decides it’s useless and kills it,” the video caption reads. 

The channel has almost 40 thousand subscribers. The main content is the so-called snuff: videos of Ukrainian soldiers being killed, corpses torn to pieces or burned, bodies desecrated, all titled with offensive captions such as “the pigs who tried to surrender being shot.” Sometimes the channel author even specifies the “key moments” timecodes. “For The Hague,” he comments sarcastically.

“Video *** 18+” is an anonymous channel, but IStories managed to find the founder, Vladimir Grebennikov, 36, a refractory worker at the Volgograd Aluminum Plant. In his free time, he goes fishing with his father, an Afghan War vet. On his social media page, the father often recalls his service and posts the war photos, including the dead Soviet soldiers’ bodies. 

At night, Grebennikov participates in amateur car races. His social media avatar is Russia’s imperial flag with “We are Russians — God is with us” slogan written on it. On Telegram, the name “Vova” is accompanied by a Russian national flag icon.

Refractory workers in Volgograd are paid less than 80,000 rubles (approx. USD 1,000) per month. Most likely, Grebennikov earned more by selling ads on the channel. “Video *** 18+” publishes about 30 advertising posts per week, mostly promoting other channels, or sometimes counterfeit cigarettes shops and online casinos. According to IStories' estimate based on pricing in this kind of market, the channel might be bringing its owner about 200,000 rubles (approx. USD 2,500) per month.

Grebennikov tells IStories he “has been interested in the topic of war” his entire life. “I watch these videos myself,” he said. “And I decided: if I watch them, why not create a channel and start posting them? So I started doing this, and then somehow they ended up at the top of Google and Yandex (Russian search engine – Ed.) search results. Then people started following the channel. That’s basically it. I was never going to become a blogger or anything like that.” 

Grebennikov himself hasn’t fought and does not want to: “To be a soldier, a contract soldier, to go to war, you have to be brave, at least. I’m not.”

By early 2026, he had sold his channel because he had “burned out during all that time.” When asked how much he had managed to earn from the channel, Grebennikov refused to answer. 

What are snuff videos, and where are they coming from?

Before the Russo-Ukrainian war, no other conflict in history had been documented in such detail with photos and videos. Cameras are placed on hundreds of thousands of drones, which have become an indispensable warfare tool. Russian soldiers wear cameras on their helmets to record “the evidence of their heroism and the elimination of targets,” a former soldier told IStories on an anonymous basis. And, of course, soldiers also have cameras on their phones. 

The military immediately saw the potential of such footage. For example, the “Arkhangel Spetsnaza” (translated as “Special Forces Archangel” — Ed.) Telegram channel has been providing detailed operation coverage since the beginning of the invasion, starting with the Hostomel Airport air assault on February 24. As IStories found out, the channel was created by Yevgeny Zhulidov, an officer of the 45th Airborne Troops Special Purpose Brigade. He now has over 1.1 million subscribers and might earn up to 3.8 million rubles (approx. USD 48,000) a month from advertising, based on the rates provided by his advertising manager, multiplied by the number of such posts. 

There are also channels posting nothing but snuff content: photos and videos of murders, mutilated bodies, and desecration of corpses. Execution exclusives are popular, especially when filmed from a first-person perspective. A typical ad looks like this: “GoPro recordings of khokhols (derogatory slur meaning Ukrainians — Ed.) shot in the head, the wounded finished off, and whole groups killed: here you’ll find everything others don't dare to show on their channels.” 

IStories examined more than 50 war snuff Telegram channels. Most of them are run by civilians, not military personnel. For example, Grebennikov, an aluminum plant worker, has never been to the front himself, but would find the videos and the photos online: “Sometimes I indicated the source, sometimes I didn’t.” From time to time, Grebennikov would post messages of gratitude to the subscribers, posing as a member of the military. The credulous subscribers responded by wishing “our guys” good luck. 

According to a former Russian military officer interviewed by IStories, the footage of incidents that the soldiers send to the command posts often leaks from there. “Even if the video is highly classified, there will always be someone who will leak it for money or hype.”

Such videos and photos subsequently become war crimes evidence. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) has confirmed cases of executions of Ukrainian military personnel via this evidence. According to the latest report by the UN Human Rights Office, there have been no fewer than 96 executions of Ukrainian soldiers confirmed since 2022. The HRMMU told IStories they also keep an eye on the Russian snuff channels.

In just one of the channels, IStories found 51 videos of mass shootings and beheadings in the “Executions” section. In the “Executions (photos)” section, there are 53 more photos of corpses. Some of them have their hands tied. 

Sometimes the admins try to squeeze maximum profit out of such videos and ask subscribers for “donations.”

“Guys. Does anyone want to donate 1.000 rubles to our fighter for executing a khokhol?” a snuff channel admin wrote in a chat on December 3, 2025. “We have the footage,” another administrator wrote a few hours later. “We’ll post it on the channel soon.” The same day, a video titled “Awesome exclusive finishing off a foreign mercenary” was posted. The video shows a wounded soldier lying on the ground is executed with a gunshot to the head.

“We also thank our subscriber for financially supporting the soldier who finished this idiot off!” the video description reads. “Hear me out, executions are fucking awesome,” commented the admin in the chat.

On December 7, 2025, the same admin called on the subscribers to help with the content search: “The simplest and most effective way is to write to the soldiers and ask them to provide the footage [...] If a soldier asks for money in return, let us know.”

How teenagers monetize snuff

“Happy New Year, everyone. There were many sad events and things in 2022, but any disappointment is overshadowed by the pleasant fact that about 100,000 combat pigs (and thousands of civilians😁) have been killed. And in 2023, with God’s help, we'll kill at least as many more,” another Telegram channel, “*** slaughter”, the admin addressed his subscribers at the end of 2022. 

This channel has been around for more than three years. It is the largest war snuff content channel IStories has been able to find, with over 100,000 subscribers.

Since its launch, “*** slaughter” has published more than 15,000 photos and 20,000 videos. The channel publishes footage — both exclusive and taken from somewhere else — showing dead Ukrainian soldiers and moments of them being killed. Ads are also posted almost every day: military service campaign ads, online casinos, and AI bots for undressing girls in photos.

IStories found out that the channel has been monetized by teenagers. Their contact details have been listed for advertising inquiries right in the channel description next to the “18+” label.

Denis Bogolyubov is now 19 years old. He comes from the village of Korkatovo in the Republic of Mari El, with a population of about 500 people. In the neighboring village school, there are two memorial plaques to local residents who went to war and died, and Denis’ uncle is one of them. 

Denis was involved in advertising the “*** slaughter” channel during, at the very least, the summer and fall of 2023, when he was 16 years old. In addition to the snuff channel, Denis collaborated with educational and entertainment Telegram communities. “In more than two years of active work on Telegram, I have gained extensive experience in budget management and the implementation of successful cases,” Bogolyubov writes on his personal channel. Denis charges “15% to 25%, depending on the subject” for advertising services “with his trusted people” and more than 11,000 rubles for “consulting.” 

Bogolyubov did not respond to IStories’ inquiries.

The second teenage advertising manager had not even turned 16 when he started working for the “*** slaughter” channel in 2023. Artem Prigodin is from the village of Konosha in the Arkhangelsk Oblast. In 2023 and 2024, Artem appeared as the administrator or advertising manager of two other trash channels called “not for the faint-hearted” and “18+ strictly.” His advertising career has been interrupted by compulsory military service at the Russian border. 

Artem Prigodin confirmed to us that he worked for “*** slaughter” in 2023–2024, but then “had a beef with the owner and quit.” According to Prigodin, he did not meet the channel owner in person and “only saw him via camera.” He claims the owner is not a member of the military. After completing his compulsory military service, Prigodin has no intention of remaining in the army on a contract basis: “It’s a one-way ticket. You sign the contract, and tomorrow you’re cannon fodder.”

IStories weren’t able to identify the “*** slaughter” channel owner.

“Are we supposed to be ashamed to post and watch?”

As IStories found out, not only do teens manage the ads in snuff channels, but they also create and actively run their own violent footage communities. We know at least two channels like this. 

One of them, called “***’s Funny Corpses,” was created in 2022 and blocked in 2025 after gaining just over 8,000 subscribers. The owner recreated the channel, and 800 people subscribed to it. 

In the last few weeks alone, the channel has published a photo of a decapitated Ukrainian soldier whose head is impaled on a stick; a video of a Russian soldier urinating on a corpse; and a photo of a body with its hands tied and its skull crushed. The administrators made their own sticker pack from such photos of killed Ukrainian soldiers. 

IStories discovered that the founder of this channel is Artem Filippov, 18, from Kaluga. He calls himself the “Kaluga serial killer” and, according to his photos on social media, embraces neo-Nazi views. 

Filippov created the channel when he was just 15 years old. Among the other admins, we found four more teenagers who are now no older than 15 (their names are known to the newsroom, but we are not naming them since they are underage — Ed.). Their Telegram accounts are registered using the phone numbers of their older relatives. One of the teenagers, a 14-year-old eighth grader from Abakan, uses photos of Russian soldiers as userpics. “Mines, explosions, bloody smoke, we’ll wash away the enemy with blood, with our battle plan!” his account description reads. Information obtained from data leaks shows that, in seventh grade, he had applied to join Yunarmiya. This Russian youth organisation aims to prepare kids for future military service.

In a conversation with IStories, Artem Filippov confirmed that he founded the channel while still at school. “This channel was created in response to similar Ukrainian channels. It’s called information warfare,” Filippov claims. “I was just on the internet, arguing with some guy from Ukraine, I don’t remember the topic. He started showing me photos of our fallen soldiers, and I decided to find a channel with dead Ukrainians. At that time, there were practically none. So I decided to create my own channel.” 

Filippov came up with the “Funny Corpses” channel name himself: “I was just so angry that we didn’t have this kind of content, while the Ukrainians had a lot of it. That’s why I deliberately chose such a loud, provocative name.” According to Filippov, younger people are the channel’s main audience. 

Immediately after the conversation with IStories, Filippov announced on a backup channel that the main channel had allegedly been “blocked again,” but he would not recreate it.

Vladimir Grebennikov, the “Video *** 18+” snuff channel founder, also blames Ukrainians for provoking him to create hateful captions for his videos and photos. “I think it all started with the Ukrainians,” Grebennikov says. “Initially, there were no such [misanthropic] captions, but now 95% of them are like that.”

He noticed school kids were showing particular interest in his violent content. Nevertheless, he claims he would block minors if he identified them.

Grebennikov sees no moral contradiction in posting and sharing the violent content among mass audiences:

“What’s wrong with it? It’s our life, people are fighting there and dying, someone’s sisters, brothers, husbands, and so on. Do you think people shouldn’t know how it feels to them and how they died or whatever? Many people live here and don’t know that there is a war going on, figuratively speaking, they don’t give a shit, while someone else has been living in trenches for several years and so on. Do you think we shouldn’t be interested in this? Are we supposed to be ashamed to post and watch?”

How much the owners earn thanks to snuff content 

There are two main ways for snuff channel owners to make money: advertisement posts and collecting donations from subscribers.

Ads are present on almost all snuff channels studied by IStories: it could be online casinos, tech stores, counterfeit cigarettes stores, or the military service campaign ads. Snuff channels also often promote one another.

According to one of the administrators, the cost of an ad post depends on the reach, not on the number of subscribers. In the snuff content “market,” a thousand views cost 300–350 rubles (approx. USD 4). This indicator is known as CPM (cost per mille). Administrators of other channels estimate it more modestly: at 160 (approx. USD 2) or even just 70 (approx. USD 1) rubles per thousand views.

IStories discovered a 4-snuff-channel network that, at such rates, has a total audience of 115,000 subscribers and averages 12,000 views per post, earning about 200,000 rubles per month.

This network was administered by Robert Khaibullin, 24, from Magnitogorsk. Here is how he advertised one of the channels: “If you are weak-nerved, don’t enter. If you have a stable psyche, welcome to the real murders channel.” According to the information found in data leaks, Khaibullin has never been employed. His only official income comes from sports betting and stock trading. Khaibullin told IStories he was only responsible for advertising on these channels and “didn’t even know what the content was.” “At the moment, I have completely left this field,” Khaibullin added. 

Advertising in large communities is handled by special managers, with the same people often working for several ones. One of the manager’s contact details were listed in more than ten different channels, including the largest one, “*** slaughter.”

Most likely, this manager is Nikita Semenov, 23, from the Oryol Oblast. The phone number he registered the account with belongs to his girlfriend, but Semenov has used it when applying for loans, IStories found out. Until 2021, Semenov had worked as a handyman in the Oryol Oblast, then moved to Moscow, where he worked in a warehouse and had a side job as a taxi driver. Semenov did not respond to our request for comment.

The “*** slaughter” channel, with its 112,000 subscribers and nearly 30,000 views per post, publishes one ad per day on average and might be earning up to 260,000 rubles per month (approx. USD 3,250). When we contacted its owner, posing as potential ad buyers, he agreed to give us a “starter discount” and place an ad for a new military-themed Telegram channel for just 2,000 rubles (approx. USD 25). Even at this price, the channel can generate over 50,000 rubles (approx. USD 620) per month in revenue.

Apart from ads paid for directly by clients, automatically appearing in-app ads are also shown across channels. But channel creators don't get any money from these ads if they are in Russia.

The channels’ owners also earn decent money from collecting donations from subscribers. 

The “*** 21+” channel, with about 100,000 subscribers, posts videos of Ukrainians being murdered paired with reports on the money collected. “Thank you so much, friends, for your financial support 🙂 From the bottom of our hearts 👍,” the admins write, listing the amounts transferred to their cards. Judging by their posts, the channel has managed to collect almost 400,000 rubles (approx. USD 5,000) in three and a half years, with more than 800 people having contributed.

Female admins: Matryoshka, Goddess, and Snaky Girlboss

“Friends, do you like the violent footage we publish?”, the subscribers were asked in a poll published on several war snuff channels. Out of hundreds of answers, “Yes” and “We need the videos to be more violent” were the most popular options.

Many channels have their own chats and allow users to comment. In some of the channel chats, there are over 1,000 participants, with the largest one numbering almost 10,000 people. People chat all day and night: the participants either mock the Ukrainians or engage in heated discussions about the war, throwing insults at each other (as sometimes Ukraine supporters might join in the conversations). 

The chat admins do not restrict or moderate the constant stream of hateful comments; instead, they encourage it. 

We have identified more than 30 chat admins from various snuff channels. Although almost 90% of subscribers are male (according to TGStat data — Ed.), there are quite a few women among the admins.

The “*** SMO Snuff” (the “Special Military Operation” euphemism is the official term for the war in Russia — Ed.) channel's chat has a particularly high number of female admins: half of them are women. The channel itself boasts more than 50,000 subscribers, and the chat has just over a thousand members. The most active ones are the admins nicknamed “Masyanya” (Ekaterina Chrikyan, 36, from the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast), “The Angry Beastess” (Diana Loginova, 34, originally from Moldova), “Miss Sudarynya” (Ekaterina Selina, 40, from the Rostov Oblast), “Snaky Girlboss” (Natalya Abramova, 43, from the Novosibirsk Oblast), and “Goddess” (Natalya Alekhina, 39, from the Krasnodar Krai). 

They mainly discuss personal topics (such as one of the women’s troubled relationship) rather than the channel's snuff content. Sometimes, another female admin, nicknamed “Matryoshka,” would pop into the chat to share updates on her combatant husband.

The “Goddess” confirmed to us she moderates the chat, but she doesn’t know why she was put in charge: “Probably because I’ve been around for a while. I’ve been observing [the chat] for a long time.” “Masyanya” told IStories that the channel owner, whom she is familiar with, promoted her to chat admin “behind her back.” “I’m a frequent participant, that’s all,” she explains. “My brother is in the SMO zone.” “Miss Sudarynya” said she joined the group “just like everyone else,” and then hung up, saying, “How do I know you’re not a khokhol?” “The Angry Beastess” was out of reach. 

Why people are watching and talking about snuff videos

An interest in the theme of death is inherent to human nature, but it intensifies during certain historical periods, according to a criminal psychology expert interviewed by IStories on condition of anonymity. “During the periods of civil unrest, wars, and revolutions, people’s violence sensitivity threshold can shift,” the expert says.

However, the culture of mass consumption of snuff content is not a universal characteristic of human nature, Kirill Titaev, a sociologist and researcher in law enforcement and crime, points out in an interview with the “Stories and Facts” outlet. “Undoubtedly, various forms of violent content have accompanied humanity since ancient times. But it would be fundamentally wrong to try to link this exact phenomenon to the gladiatorial fighting culture or the Middle Ages' public executions,” the sociologist says. “It would imply that humans in general have some psychological predisposition to enjoy this kind of content and to seek it. But we know of many societies of other countries and eras where there is no snuff content available at all.” 

According to Titaev, for the mass consumption of snuff to take root in society, it must first be socially approved. “To take off, watching this would have to be culturally legitimized, because not only is one ready to watch it, but also to discuss it,” the sociologist explains. The second factor is the physical distancing from what is happening on the screen. “Typically, the murder act — with all its associated smells, sounds, and other physical sensations — is not experienced directly by the content consumer,” Titaev adds. 

Mass violent video consumption can be dangerous for society, according to the criminal psychology expert. “It doesn’t mean that people who become desensitized to violence will repeat it, but they will have fewer restraints,” he says.

Russian legislation on snuff videos

There are enough regulations in Russia to allow for the prosecution of snuff channel owners. For example, it’s the set of laws banning trash streams, signed by Russia's president in 2024. These laws ban the content that “is offensive to human dignity and public morality,” “contains depictions of activities that appear to be illegal, including violent ones, and is distributed with the intention of pranks, profit, or other low motives.” Exposing children to such content is prohibited distinctly. For such violations, the Administrative Code imposes heavy fines and confiscation of equipment used to create such videos.

There is a separate law on “inciting hatred or hostility,” which covers the derogatory captions that accompany the photos and videos. For example, in 2025, a Ulan-Ude resident was fined for using the word “khokhly” in his community chat. The court deemed her actions “aimed at humiliating human dignity based on nationality while committed publicly via the internet.”

“Under the ‘On Information’ law, social media page owners are required to independently monitor, promptly respond to, and remove the banned content, but few actually do so. Everyone has already gotten used to Roskomnadzor’s (Russian digital censoring body — Ed.) strict policies and bans,” says Sarkis Darbinyan, a cyberlaw attorney.

The Telegram app itself claims that it has taken down over 9 million groups and channels in 2026 alone. In 2025, the number was 44 million. However, the platform does not specify what exactly the kind of content banned was, except for terrorist groups and child pornography. Of all the snuff channels we examined, there was only one channel that would be blocked by Telegram, Artem Filippov’s “***’s Funny Corpses” channel. Darbinian believes that Telegram’s policy regarding similar content “echoes its founder’s (Pavel Durov — Ed.) libertarian approach”: “Durov has always stated that he is only willing to counter terrorism, which he has consistently done. It seems that if he weren’t required to, he wouldn’t remove anything at all.”

Authorities should intervene and seek out the distributors and producers of snuff content, Kirill Titaev believes. “This is a classic task for investigative and law enforcement units, which are supposed to identify the creators and the intermediaries. A person who films a homicide scene is clearly an accomplice in the homicide; moreover, it is supposed to mean aggravating circumstances and quite substantial prison terms,” he says. 

The Criminal Code was also amended by the legislative package banning “trash streams” in 2024. Posting violent videos depicting murders is now considered to be an aggravating circumstance and a qualifying element in ten Criminal Code articles, including murder, intentional bodily harm infliction, assault, and torture.

State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin had described the importance of banning the “trash streams” to his Telegram channel audience, naming them “online broadcasts during which unlawful acts are committed, demonstrating cruelty, sadism, and abuse of people and animals, usually to make money and increase one’s audience.” 

“The state should not persecute these platforms [Telegram, etc.], but rather be grateful to them. They enable investigators to identify specific individuals and hold them accountable under criminal law,” Titaev adds. “But the problem is, the people who should be doing this work are busy persecuting the very journalists who are doing their work instead.”

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Sixteen sailors boarded the ship, having arrived in the Primorsky Krai from every corner of Russia just the day before. This new crew was destined to be pioneers. Nearly two months later, the Angara would deliver the first containers of North Korean artillery shells to Russia. Three other bulk carriers — the Lady R, the Maia-1, and the Maria — later joined the transport operations.

IStories has obtained movement data for all Russian vessels involved in transporting munitions from the DPRK. Together with researchers from the Open Source Centre, we have determined that over the course of two and a half years, Moscow has received more than eight million shells from Pyongyang.

Our investigation also relied on the manifests of the sailors who participated in the arms transfers. We discovered that they left a trail of evidence across social media, posting photos and details of the operations even as official documentation meticulously obscured the cargo's trail.

Russia’s only ally

In the summer of 2023, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu traveled to the DPRK on an official visit. While there, he toured an arms exhibition and delivered a personal message from Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong Un.

Observers speculated whether the Russian and North Korean leaders would reach an agreement on munitions supplies and technology transfers. A month after Shoigu's visit, the White House announced that the parties had made significant progress in their negotiations.

“Any arms deal between the DPRK and Russia would directly violate a number of U.N. Security Council resolutions,” warned John Kirby, a spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council. As it turned out, the Angara had returned from its maiden North Korean voyage just the day before Kirby’s warning — and set sail on its second trip only 24 hours later.

By the time Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) reported on the arms shipments in September, the Angara had already established a steady operational rhythm. Every Monday or Tuesday, the vessel cleared customs in Vladivostok before proceeding to the Dunay military port — a former Soviet submarine base. There, containers of weaponry were offloaded onto a rail spur for transport to stockpiles in western Russia.

According to Ukrainian intelligence, starting in August 2023, the DPRK began supplying Russia with 122-mm and 152-mm shells for Soviet-era artillery, rockets for Grad multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), and tank ammunition. In October 2023, the United States tracked the movement of containers from the Dunay port to an ammunition depot near Tikhoretsk in the Krasnodar Krai — a facility that researchers from the British Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) noted had been prepared in advance for North Korean shipments.

Soon, North Korean weaponry began appearing on the front lines. Analysts from the Open Source Centre (OSC) identified numerous images of Pyongyang-sourced shells and rockets shared on social media by Russian servicemen.

By early 2025, North Korean munitions had become vital for the Russian military effort, accounting for 75% to 100% of all daily artillery fire, according to reports from Russian artillerymen obtained by Reuters. "Without help from the DPRK, the Russian army shelling of Ukrainian defensive positions would have been cut in half," GUR stated at the time.

Voyage to “Busan”

In the spring of 2025, analysts from the Open Source Centre (OSC) published a study based on satellite imagery of the Russian ports of Dunay and Vostochny, along with the North Korean port of Rajin. Their findings identified 64 voyages made by the four vessels — the Angara, the Lady R, the Maia-1, and the Maria. The OSC estimated that these shipments carried between 4.2 million and 5.8 million artillery shells and MLRS rockets.

The British analysts acknowledged, however, that these figures were conservative and contained significant gaps. The harsh weather of the Far East offers few clear days for reliable satellite surveillance of these maritime hubs.

IStories has bridged these intelligence gaps. We gained access to comprehensive movement logs for all vessels involved in the North Korean arms pipeline, identified individual crew members, and gathered firsthand evidence of their participation in operations that breached U.N. sanctions.

Working in tandem with the Open Source Centre, we have calculated that over a 2.5-year period, these four Russian ships conducted at least 112 voyages to North Korea. These shipments likely delivered between 8 million and 11 million pieces of ammunition to the Russian military.

The documents obtained by IStories list the vessels' stated destinations and general cargo information, but their actual arrival points and the true contents of the containers were deliberately concealed.

The South Korean port of Busan served as the primary “official” destination for the Angara, the Lady R, the Maia-1, and the Maria. According to the data set analyzed by IStories, these ships purportedly completed over 100 voyages to Busan since 2023.

Russian border guards helped maintain this fiction. If a ship’s documentation listed South Korea as its destination, the FSB Border Service database recorded the same information, as shown by border-crossing records for the crews of the Angara and the Maria. However, as the Open Source Centre points out, South Korean port registries contain no record of these vessels ever docking there.

The deception was occasionally undermined by the crews themselves. In February 2024, a sailor on the Maia-1 posted a video to social media with the caption “Let’s go home” and a geotag for “Busan, South Korea.” In reality, the vessel was near the North Korean port of Rajin at the time of filming; its true coordinates were visible on a navigation screen caught in the frame.

To mask its movements, the Angara utilized not only Busan but also the Chinese port of Qingdao. According to official logs, the vessel visited Qingdao at least twice, though it was likely in the DPRK instead: during one of these voyages, the Angara was spotted in Rajin, and the transit time for these trips would have been insufficient to reach the more distant Qingdao.

Throughout the North Korean munitions transport operations, the Angara concealed its location — its Automatic Identification System (AIS) was deactivated, and its true destination was masked in the paperwork. There was a single exception: from July 22 to August 10, 2023, the ship continuously transmitted its actual coordinates during a round trip to Tianjin, China. The Angara only disabled its AIS after arriving at the port of Korsakov on Sakhalin Island.

IStories has established that upon the vessel’s arrival in Korsakov, Alexander Borovik, a courier for Spetssvyaz (the Main Center for Special Communications), boarded the ship. This state enterprise is tasked with transporting secret and hazardous materials, weaponry, munitions, and other “defense-industrial products.” Borovik was listed in the documents as the cargo escort. He spent several days on board, disembarking in Nakhodka and flying to Moscow shortly thereafter; leaked travel records show that Spetssvyaz booked his flight.

Borovik has served as a courier for the state enterprise since at least 2009. His flight history includes travel on aircraft belonging to Roscosmos and a cargo carrier that the U.S. Treasury Department has linked to Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state arms exporter.

This voyage of the Angara was an anomaly. The movements of the other Russian vessels involved in the arms pipeline are masked. However, the documents obtained by IStories allow us to trace every voyage made by the Angara, the Lady R, the Maia-1, and the Maria to the DPRK and back.

The North Korean arms supply operation began in earnest in early September 2023, when the Angara arrived at the Dunay port directly from Rajin. This vessel accounts for one-third of all recorded voyages; the Maria handled a similar share, with the remaining trips split between the Lady R and the Maia-1.

Following December 2023, shipments through Dunay ceased, and all munitions containers were diverted to Vostochny Port, the largest facility on Russia’s Pacific coast.

On average, the DPRK supplied Russia with approximately 350,000 pieces of ammunition per month — a volume requiring five separate voyages. For context, this monthly supply is enough to sustain the Russian military’s offensive operations for roughly 30 days.

Loose feeds sink ships

IStories has identified 145 sailors in the records who served on the North Korean voyages. We verified the identities of more than 100 of them and tracked down their social media accounts.

While most crew members had backgrounds in traditional commercial shipping, the ranks also included recent maritime college graduates. For some of these young sailors, transporting weaponry from the DPRK marked their very first international assignment.

To lead the initial Angara shipments, the operation’s planners appointed a seasoned master: 52-year-old Andrey Grinko. By that time, Grinko had spent more than five years executing Ministry of Defense contracts that demanded the highest levels of secrecy.

Since 2017, Grinko has made at least eight voyages to Syria aboard the Pizhma, Sparta II, and Ursa Major — vessels tasked with supplying Russian forces. In late 2024, the Ursa Major sank off the coast of Spain. According to the Spanish investigation, the ship was transporting nuclear reactor components intended for a North Korean submarine.

On the Angara, Grinko was joined by two other sailors with experience on Ministry of Defense cargo ships: Enver Dudov and Vyacheslav Konovalov. These men had previously participated in transporting stolen Ukrainian grain from Sevastopol to Tartus, Syria, aboard the Matros Koshka and the Mikhail Nenashev. Five more sailors from MoD supply vessels and two individuals linked to illegal grain exports would later join the North Korean runs.

IStories reached out to the participants of the North Korean arms operations. Only one sailor from the Angara confirmed his involvement. He stated that the crew received their instructions from the vessel’s operator, MG-Flot, and noted that "mobile phones had to be surrendered for signature upon crossing the border."

Another sailor, when asked about the DPRK voyages, replied that he could not disclose any information because he had “signed a contract.” Other crew members either ignored inquiries regarding North Korea or failed to respond to requests for comment entirely.

It appears, however, that the requirement to "surrender mobile phones" was frequently ignored. Crew members published more than 60 photos and videos from their North Korean voyages online. Both veteran captains and recent graduates were eager to document their journeys on social media. For instance, Angara crew member Mikhail Lavrentyev captured what is perhaps the most picturesque shot of the Dunay military port to date.

In some instances, the same container-laden vessel was caught on camera by two different sailors in close succession. This occurred, for example, aboard the Lady R in February 2024.

Additionally, we identified a video believed to have been filmed in Rajin Bay — located seven kilometers from the North Korean port of Rajin, the primary loading site for the Russian ships. A crew member from the Maria uploaded the footage to social media on December 13, 2024.

Official records show that just one day earlier, on December 12, the vessel had departed Vladivostok, purportedly bound for Busan. Yet, by December 14, it was already heading back toward Russia, its deck stacked with containers.

“Vessel conditions leave much to be desired”

Two companies, MG-Flot and Sovfracht, are responsible for the North Korean supply line. According to records, these firms own the vessels and manage all aspects of their commercial operations.

Sovfracht owns the Maria and the Lady R, while MG-Flot owns the Angara and the Maia-1. Several sailors spoke to IStories about their experience working for MG-Flot.

“The condition of the ships, like the rest of the Russian fleet, leaves much to be desired — they are old vessels, roughly 30 years old, give or take,” shared one Angara crew member. “The pay is alright — higher than at other Russian companies — and the food is decent.”

Another sailor from the same ship offered a bleaker assessment: “Once the ships were transferred to MG-Flot’s management, supplies and spare parts stopped arriving. The company’s attitude toward provisions is poor.” He added that fuel was provided only at the “bare minimum,” and eventually, the company began refueling the Angara using fuel taken from other vessels.

Further evidence of the poor technical condition of the vessels used in the supply line can be found in legal records. In August 2023, shortly before its first voyage to the DPRK, the Maia-1 failed to fulfill a commercial contract due to its condition, according to an arbitration court ruling.

The vessel had been chartered for the Arctic LNG 2 project, carrying road slabs and paving stones in its hold. During the voyage, fuel oil leaked from a fuel tank into the cargo area due to corrosion, damaging the goods. A court ordered the owner of the Maia-1, Auto Ferry Cargo Terminal (Avtoparomny Gruzovoy Terminal LLC), to cover losses totaling 58 million rubles. However, by the summer of 2025, the cargo sender lowered its demands and re-engaged the vessel for further transport as a way to settle the debt.

In this ruling, the court identified the owner of the Maia-1 as a company that had previously managed to stay off sanctions lists. The same company appears in another document as the legal successor to MG-Flot in a separate legal dispute.

While ownership data for Avtoparomny Gruzovoy Terminal is largely obscured, records show that in 2021, businessman Dzhamaldin Pashaev acquired a 50% stake in the firm. Pashaev is also the sole owner of MG-Flot, a fact revealed in a separate criminal bribery case. In 2024, the United States sanctioned Pashaev for importing components from Iran to support Russian drone production at the Alabuga plant.

IStories also identified two shipping agencies that facilitated the port calls for the Maria, the Lady R, the Angara, and the Maia-1 as they delivered North Korean armaments. Sovfracht-Vostok (in which the sanctioned company Sovfracht holds a 24% stake) acted as the initial agent. All munitions deliveries through September 2023 involved this firm, which served as the intermediary between the vessel operators and port authorities, pilots, and other contractors.

The agency role later shifted to a company called DV Shipping. Financial documents show that this firm received tens of millions of rubles from Sovfracht, Sovfracht-Vostok, and Avtoparomny Gruzovoy Terminal. DV Shipping covered the costs for pilotage, water bunkering, diesel quality analysis, and port dues on at least one occasion for each of the four vessels: the Maria, the Lady R, the Angara, and the Maia-1.

Sailors working for MG-Flot told IStories that the North Korean runs paid above-average wages and were never delayed. The company made official payments — a rarity in an industry where, as one Maia-1 crew member put it, “elsewhere they pay less, or it's all under the table.”

The sailor described his time on the vessel as “satisfactory.” He added: “There were difficulties when I was there, but everything was paid. Don't forget what MG-Flot does and what is happening. We have the 'Special Military Operation' going on — a sort of war with the West — but our people are very weak; they're the 'Pepsi Generation.' If you want money, you work. If you don't like it, go somewhere else; no one is holding you back.”

By January 2026, the company’s financial stability was called into question. MG-Flot testified in court that it would be unable to pay salaries or settle accounts with contractors if the tax authorities enforced VAT collection. “MG-Flot is under sanctions from the U.S., E.U., and U.K. During the Special Military Operation, three of the company’s vessels sustained damage and one was sunk, forcing the company to incur additional expenses for their restoration,” a company representative explained.

What happened next

In November 2025, Ukraine’s GUR stated that ammunition shipments from the DPRK to Russia had plummeted by more than half. According to Ukrainian intelligence, North Korean stockpiles have been depleted to such an extent that Russia is now receiving obsolete, nearly unusable hardware. Every second shell is being sent to Russian factories for refurbishment to bring it up to operational standards.

IStories has found that the fleet involved in these shipments has also been halved, leaving only the Angara and the Lady R. The Angara’s most recent voyage to the DPRK occurred in January 2026, while the Lady R likely set off for a new consignment of shells in March 2026, just before this report’s publication.

Shipments began to dwindle as early as the autumn of 2024, when the average frequency of voyages dropped from five to three per month. Since the beginning of 2026, IStories and OSC have detected only a single delivery from the DPRK.

NK Pro, a project that monitors satellite imagery of North Korean ports, reached a similar conclusion. Their analysts suggested that the cargo flow might have been diverted to the rail link between Russia and North Korea.

However, analysts from the Open Source Centre believe other factors could also explain the decline. On one hand, Russia has exponentially scaled up its domestic ammunition production. According to Estonian intelligence estimates, Russian output grew from 1 million shells in 2022 to 7 million in 2025. Consequently, the Russian military may be becoming less reliant on imported munitions.

On the other hand, the exhaustion of the DPRK’s own stockpiles — the explanation favored by Ukrainian officials — remains a distinct possibility. North Korean manufacturing capacity may simply be insufficient to sustain Russia’s high rate of consumption. Tellingly, in December 2025, Kim Jong Un ordered the construction of new military facilities to ramp up the production of missiles and shells.

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One of the files was published on the website of the Vyazemsky Forestry College in Khabarovsk Krai — despite being marked “For Official Use Only.” IStories also located the document on the websites of two rural settlements in Rostov Oblast, though data regarding the size and composition of the VBS units had been entirely redacted from those versions. One was edited using the free online tool iLovePDF, indicating that the full text of the Ministry of Defense’s plans has resided on the servers of a foreign company since December 2025.

According to leaked data, the Unmanned Systems Forces of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation will consist of:

• 7 separate brigades;
• 15 regiments;
• 70 battalions;
• One division;
• 12 Rubicon detachments;
• 12 companies of “heavy” UAVs;
• 12 companies of ground robotic complexes.

The military seeks to recruit 58,000 personnel from among students, graduates of drone piloting courses, former aviation personnel, and “citizens of the female sex” with relevant training.

An additional 10,800 new recruits for the Unmanned Systems Forces will be secured by transitioning conscripts to professional contracts. The remaining 10,000 positions will be filled by reassigning active-duty personnel from other units.

By the end of 2025, the Ministry of Defense planned to attract 3,500 people to these new units, according to a presentation discovered on the website of a district administration in the Komi Republic.

The military department set a goal to “expeditiously staff from all sources” one separate brigade in each of the five military districts, as well as two separate brigades attached to the Rubicon Center for Advanced Unmanned Technologies.

Only 300 of these recruits were to be drawn from the existing ranks of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, with 600 coming from conscripts. Approximately 2,600 recruits were expected to be sourced from cadets at military training centers — the modern designation for military departments at civilian universities — as well as volunteers from BARS units and other categories.

The Ministry of Defense also compiled data on the number of students in technical majors at universities that train UAV pilots, alongside enrollment targets for military training centers and supplementary education programs for drone pilot instruction.

According to the table, UAV pilot courses at military training centers — the departments housed within civilian universities — were available at 32 institutions, with nearly 2,000 students enrolled. In 2026, more than 400 soldiers, sergeants, and reserve officers with drone piloting experience are expected to graduate from these military departments, followed by over 800 in 2027.

The table appears to set an annual recruitment target for the military training centers at 1,562 people — nearly four times the number of this year’s graduates. Each university on the list is assigned a “responsible central military command body.”

After signing a contract, recruits must undergo three stages, according to an internal Ministry of Defense document. First is preparation at educational institutions in Russian regions, followed by training within the Ministry of Defense’s instructional network and at its proving grounds. Finally, recruits undergo an evaluation for “compliance with qualification requirements.”

The military department’s presentation likely included an early version of the list of “educational institutions” where contract soldiers are sent during the first stage. This list comprises 61 organizations, though it remains unclear whether additional training centers were added later.

According to Ministry of Defense estimates from early December 2025, the organizations on the list could accommodate approximately 1,600 trainees simultaneously. The sites include Moscow universities, UAV manufacturing facilities, and training centers in occupied territories of Ukraine. At least five centers in Donetsk Oblast, four in Luhansk Oblast, two in Sevastopol, and one in Zaporizhzhia Oblast are engaged in training drone operators.

• In mid-November 2025, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation officially announced the formation of a new service branch — the Unmanned Systems Forces. By December, authorities had launched a massive campaign to recruit contract soldiers, and by February 2026, the effort had reached nearly every educational institution in the country.

• Russian authorities had not previously disclosed the size or composition of the new branch. Figures similar to those found in the Ministry of Defense documents were previously cited by Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who described them as a projected increase in units for 2026. According to Ukrainian data, the Russian Unmanned Systems Forces are expected to number 165,000 personnel by the end of the year.

• In late 2025, the government began an extensive drive to recruit civilian university students for contract service in the Unmanned Systems Forces. To date, the campaign has spread across all of Russia. Students are promised only a year of service far from the front lines, but contract addendums indicate they may be reassigned to the infantry at any time. Furthermore, the contracts are indefinite and cannot be rescinded. In some instances, students have been pressured to sign; IStories has previously detailed these students’ experiences and the legal methods available to counter such coercion.

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Currently, at least 83 universities and 24 colleges in 36 regions of Russia and annexed Crimea have joined the recruiting campaign in one form or another. The data has been provided to IStories by Timur Tukhvatullin, an education rights defender, and the Get Lost project. The Echo project also compiled a similar list.

The campaign spanned the entire country, from Kaliningrad (The Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University) to Vladivostok (The Far Eastern Federal University). Some universities have been given target quotas for the number of students to be sent to war. E.g., in February, Far Eastern Federal University planned to send more than 30 students to the military, and at Plekhanov University of Economics, the group leaders in one of the faculties were instructed to recruit two students per month. At Tomsk State University of Architecture and Building, they set up a special office to ensure that the military quotas were met.

Outright pressure isn't used at the moment and so far remains to be something of an exception: the only notable case involved the headmistress of the Novosibirsk Transport Technologies College who accused students of “cowardice” for their unwillingness to give their lives “for the fatherland.”

At the Russian Technological University (MIREA), the students in their final years falling behind have been sent one by one to the recruiters’ office. The recruiters tried to persuade them that signing a contract was their only chance to avoid being expelled from the university, one of the students told IStories. The university administration did not notify the students about the options to resit the failed exams, and threatened to expel those who refused to sign the military contract. After the media coverage, the university informed students about the opportunities to resit the exams, but would still call the students urging them to join the military.

Sometimes teachers and professors also get pressured by the administration. “One of my coworkers got mad and told the bosses, ‘You know what the goal is. You know we’ll be to blame if any of them signs the contract. We're basically the ones sending them into this crap [i.e. the war — Ed.].’ The administration responded that we had no choice because we work in a state institution and the order ‘came from above.’ They said, ‘If this doesn’t align with your moral principles, quit your job,’” a teacher at one of Moscow’s colleges told IStories.    

All the recruitment is done according to the Ministry of Defense’s guidelines: they offer students to sign a one-year contract to serve in the new unmanned aerial vehicle forces, take a sabbatical and serve as a UAV pilot away from the front lines, receiving millions in pay and then quickly returning to school with an opportunity to get state-funded education instead of having to pay for it.

Legally, none of these promises (except for the payments) are backed up by anything; on paper, the conditions look like a typical “cannon fodder” assault infantry ones (the tactics of using huge numbers of untrained soldiers during the assaults in the hope of exhausting Ukrainian ammunition has become widely used by Russian commanders during the war).

Speaking to IStories, many students emphasize that practically no one at their universities and colleges believes in what is said in the propaganda leaflets. Nevertheless, some educational institutions are already reporting the first students have enlisted to fight. The Kutafin Moscow State Law Academy “has sent the first students to serve in the UAV forces,” wrote Viktor Blazheev, the university's rector and Vladimir Putin's confidant. “I can see the great prospects and the great career growth,” said a Nizhnekamsk polytechnic college student when explaining his decision to sign a contract. A student at the Volzhsky branch of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute said that his decision to “take a year off from school, help the Motherland defeat the enemy and return to his place at the university in a year” was supported by both his parents and his girlfriend. Among the students who decided to go to war are two brothers from a college in Volzhsky.

Students told IStories how they manage to passively resist the coercion, and lawyers shared advice on how to defend one's right to complete the education and avoid military service if the school administration attempts to make one fail their exams to get them enlisted.

“Documenting the coercion is vital.” Why the student military contracts are a scam and how to legally resist pressure

In February, several regional educational institutions' websites posted the standard UAV forces contract appendix. These documents reveal how the actual conditions of service will differ from what agitators, recruiters, and school administrators say.

Lawyers from the Movement of Conscientious Objectors (stoparmy.org) examined the wording of the contract appendix and concluded that signing a contract while at school does not formally protect anyone from being forcibly transferred to the assault infantry.

E.g., the promise to make a student contract last for just one year goes against Vladimir Putin’s September 21, 2022 mobilization decree, which is still in effect. It means the contract won't expire until Putin's decree is declared invalid.

At the same time, it cannot be ruled out that in the future, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Education could come to an agreement and actually design a special program for students, Sergey Krivenko, the Citizen. Army. Law human rights group head tells IStories.

“Very often they start an illegal scheme and then find a way to legalize it after a while. This was the case with the year-round conscription. For a long time, they had been calling people to the conscription commissions before the conscription began, which we considered a violation, but now it has all been legalized. But for now, signing a contract remains a one-way ticket. The presidential decree is in force, and one cannot resign while it is,” the lawyer says.

The “guarantee” that the student will serve in unmanned forces, far away from the front line, are also invalidated by the wording of the contract appendix. The Movement of Conscientious Objectors lawyers point out that the Ministry of Defense reserves the right to transfer a new contractor to another branch or category of troops if the person is not suitable for the position of UAV pilot. In other words, it's the commanders who will determine the ex-student’s combat role, and it's not done before the contract is signed, but after, when it the contract is already impossible to terminate.

In addition, neither the appendix nor the existing law guarantees students they will study for free after the service. There's also no legislation to guarantee the admission to a state-funded master's or postgraduate program without competition for those students.

Timur Tukhvatullin, an education rights defender

— Some students are not given the opportunity to resit exams and are told that the alternative to signing a contract is expulsion. 

Not allowing students to resit exams is a legal violation. According to the law, students must be given two attempts to resit the exam. The first re-examination would happen with the professor who had administered the initial exam or test. The second re-examination is with a commission consisting of several teachers. Only if the student fails the commission resit can they be expelled.

And it should be a proper resit, where they don’t try to fail you and don’t stray from the topic. If there are violations during the resit, it is possible to appeal, which must be done on the same day.

If they do not allow you to resit the exam, you should contact Rosobrnadzor [Russian federal agency tasked with the supervision and control of national education and science — Ed.] and the prosecutor’s office. If they do not help, go to court. This is enough of a reason to initiate administrative proceedings for obstruction of education, and in some cases, it may be a criminal offense of abuse of official authority.

Documenting the coercion is vital: it can be done by using a voice recorder or taking chat messages screenshots.

At present, we are not aware of any cases where a university has expelled a student illegally. It is important to remember that if you have had two resits and they were unsuccessful, you can be expelled by law. But even in this case you shouldn’t sign the contract.

“Intimidating students by saying the military is inevitable.” The students’ experience

Alexander (all names have been changed — Ed.), The Bauman Moscow State Technical University

— They said there would be a meeting for the failing students. I understood that they would be trying to persuade us to sign contracts. About a hundred people from every class year were gathered.

The meeting was led by the recruitment office staff. One of them started intimidating the students by saying that military service is inevitable, that everyone would have to serve, and even called on the girls to join. Four people were interested in the contract and were sent to the recruitment office.

I doubt that the contract will actually last for just one year. I believe promising people a fortune for a year of service is just a way to lure them in.

My classmates and I don't discuss this [the war — Ed.], we just joke about it in a dark way. The idea to send young students to the “Special Military Operation” (a euphemism introduced by the Russian government to legally describe the Russo-Ukrainian war - Ed.) is terrible. I don’t see any active and open support for the “Special Military Operation” among my peers or at the institute in general. I’m not feeling worried about these meetings, but I absolutely do not like these plans. Then people wonder why the population is declining.

Ruslan, The Likhachev Moscow Technological College

— All final-year students were called to an urgent mandatory meeting in the assembly hall. Half of the people didn't show up anyway.

No one believed these promises; everyone understood what was going on. There are people whose relatives in the armed forces were supposed to be discharged two years ago, but their contracts are automatically extended every year. No one believes in this venture. 

At the end, they asked us to sign papers stating whether we were going to continue our studies, work in our field, or enlist in the military. The director’s deputy said that our country doesn’t need people just roaming around aimlessly, and that there are only two options: either fight or study.

They set up a room in a separate office where you can fly a drone on a simulator. They offered a three-day training course at some police college. They said that no one would be put on any lists there, that it was just like a game of paintball and drone training.

The next day, they gathered us again. They promised to tell us about the internship, but in the end, they invited us to work in some elite unit. They handed out pieces of paper with the information on the “special type of government service” and “work in the center of Moscow without participating in military operations or being sent anywhere.” Several people approached the recruiter to ask something, but I don’t know if they signed up or not.

Stepan, Russian Technological University (MIREA)

— We were supposed to have exam resits. The teacher first sent us the information, then said it had been canceled. The order came “from above”: don’t allow [resits] to take place. They said, “We’re not waiting for you, we won’t give you the permission to resit, so do whatever you want.”

They called and told us to come to the academic department. The deputy principal told us to go to room 212 and find out what our option was. There was a poster about contract military service hanging in front of the door, which made me nervous.

There were camouflage nets in the room and a laptop showing drone videos of people being blown up. A man sitting there didn’t introduce himself. He had no rank insignia and wore civilian clothes. I hadn’t seen him at the university before.  

He wrote down my details and said that I had no chance of retaking my exams and that I could either sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense and go to operate drones, or I would be sent to serve in the army. With the contract, I would get paid and be honored as a “hero.” He tried to convince me that the contract would last just a year. But I know that they don’t let anyone go easily. 

A lot of guys at the university are really worried. There are some guys who spend most of their time at their computers, they don’t socialize much, and the first, the academic department manages to pressure them a lot, then those from room 212. None of my friends have signed anything, but in general, it's such a sensitive topic that no one talks about it. 

After the fuss in the news, they allowed resits again, but people are still summoned to that room.

Igor, The Far Eastern Federal University 

— There really is a quota requirement [of 32 people per month]. But, thank God, there is no pressure to sign these contracts.

They don’t threaten us with the university expulsion, but they have shortened the period for the resits. Now the deadline is March 12, whereas it used to be a week or a week and a half later.

The mood is silent. Many students don’t like it and everyone understands how absurd it is, but no one will say so directly, as you understand. I haven't seen any active “Special Military Operation” supporters at the university and I doubt they even exist.

Looking at the quota numbers, it becomes clear that even the rector’s office does not expect crowds of students to sign contracts.

Students generally understand that they could be sent to the front lines, and that they will not actually be allowed to terminate their contracts after a year.

Sveta, The Ural State Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture

— Our university exclusively has creative majors, and the overwhelming majority of students are women. One boy I know makes no secret of the fact that he will do whatever it takes to avoid being drafted into the army, let alone going to war.

Two years ago, a similar campaign was held, but it was conducted more discreetly: they would send out invitations to a “mandatory event” with no further details. 

My classmate, who fell for it the first time, said that they talked to them like this: “It’s okay that you might be tired of studying. Your first priority should be to stand on your own two feet. We are offering you the opportunity to earn money and get a change of scenery. You can return to your studies at any time, having served your duty to the Motherland.”

My classmate said that at the end, two or three guys would approach the recruiters with their questions. At the time, in 2024, no one was talking about the UAVs; they simply offered students to make money doing some “easy work.” 

This time, the senior students understood why they were being gathered, and some of them boycotted the meeting. In another group, some got interested. They described the prospects like this: “It’s just a year, and they give you three million rubles (approx. USD 40 thousand) right away, you can do whatever you want with it.” 

With fewer options after getting a bachelor's degree, some people are really starting to think about taking this step. The lecturers say there won’t be any government-funded options to get a master’s degree. The number of programs is shrinking: our department has lost more than five master's programs. The ones that remain don't give you access to a job in the industry.

Those paying for their education who had hoped to get a state-funded master's degree are looking very lost. This includes my classmate, who was counting on getting a master's degree to keep his student deferment of military service.

If we were to characterize all students at the university in general terms, over the past year it has become more apparent who disagrees with the statements and requests made to students by the dean's office. Anyone who takes even the slightest militaristic stance receives mostly negative reactions. No one downloads the MAX app (a state-controlled messenger to replace the more popular Telegram and WhatsApp which are to be banned — Ed.), and the administration has not yet taken on the task of “re-educating” us.

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We have found the list in the recruiters' groups and chats on social media. The information has also been confirmed by one of the major regional recruitment centers.

In early January 2026, recruiters began distributing a list of countries whose citizens are banned from signing contracts with the Russian Armed Forces from 2026 on.

We found the earliest mention of the list on the TikTok account of Kelvin Egyir, a mercenary from Ghana. He had served in the Russian army and is now promoting the service to the African audience.

The 36 countries stoplist is being circulated among the recruiters working in Arabic-speaking regions. The list mainly includes African and Arab countries as well as other states officially listed as “friendly” to Russia: China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Cuba, Afghanistan, Iran, and Venezuela.

It is unknown who exactly made the decision to reduce the list of countries for recruitment and at what level it was done. The list is likely to have been a result of diplomatic contacts.

For example, Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka had appealed to the Russian authorities with requests and demands to stop recruiting their citizens to the war since mid-2024. Moscow pledged not to lure Indians and Sri Lankans into signing the military contracts.

In November 2025, Jordan made the same demand. Soon after, the country was added to the banning list.

Kenya, an important source of mercenaries for the Russian army, was also added to the list. According to the local authorities, more than 1,000 Kenyans ended up fighting on the frontlines in the ranks of the Russian army. In February 2026, the Kenyan government publicly called on Russia to stop its recruitment campaign in the country. However, Ben Stimson, a British instructor training African mercenaries in the Russian army, mentioned a ban on recruiting Kenyans and Nigerians back in January. 

According to media reports, most recruits from Africa ended up on the front lines in the summer and fall of 2025 as a result of deception. For example, 35-year-old Kenyan Francis Ndarua was offered a job as an electrical engineer in Russia, his mother said in a CNN interview. In October 2025, she lost contact with him, and later she recognized her son in a video circulating on social media, where a Black soldier in Russian military uniform is racially insulted and forced to storm the front lines with an anti-tank mine attached to his chest. The author of the video, presumably a Russian soldier, calls Francis a “can opener” and says that he would be "hopping around the woods.” His fate remains unknown.

In February, several more countries could have been added to the stop list, in addition to the 36 previously mentioned. The expanded list was published by Mustafa al-Yasari, an Iraqi blogger who exposes Russian recruitment networks in the country. According to him, Argentina, Iraq, Yemen, Cameroon, Colombia, Libya, and Somalia have also been banned. The information had been allegedly provided to the blogger by a Russian officer.

“Thanks to our government for contacting the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Iraqi embassy in Russia,” al-Yasari said. “Thank God, we have put an end to this issue: no more young men will be fighting in the Russian ranks. And those who left a week or two ago will return.”

The Iraqi blogger did not respond to our follow-up questions on social media.

The alleged agreement between Iraq and Russia has probably not affected the Iraqis who were already on the front lines. On February 19, it was reported that a popular Iraqi pop singer Hussein al-Turki had been killed. In his November video, he told his followers he had come to Moscow at an invitation to perform at a concert. Then he was taken to a city located 16 hours' drive from the Russian capital and asked to sign a Russian-language document which turned out to be a contract with the Russian Armed Forces.

The contract recruitment center which had previously distributed the 36 countries list, has not confirmed the expansion of the list. They have kept recruiting mercenaries from Colombia, for example, as confirmed by IStories.

According to “I Want to Live", a Ukrainian project allowing Russian servicemen to voluntarily surrender to Ukrainian forces, Russia had recruited more than 10,000 foreign mercenaries by the fall of 2025. The citizens of countries now included in the stop list accounted for 37% of the total number of foreigners. Among them, the leaders are Cuba (with over 1,000 people), Nepal (about 800 people), and Sri Lanka (over 700 people). The largest number of mercenaries come from the EAEU states: Tajikistan (with over 1,500 people), Belarus (over 1,300), and Kazakhstan (over 1,100).

In 2025, outside the EAEU, the Russian army was most active in recruiting citizens of Ghana, Cameroon, and Kenya — with at least 100 people from each country, according to the recent data provided to IStories by the “I Want to Live” project.

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We had planned to launch the app in March, but the Telegram crackdown in Russia changed our timeline. That's why we're releasing it now. Even though the app is missing some planned features, it's already doing a great job.

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“Our rally is meant to show support for the former US leader Donald Trump's candidacy. He didn’t meddle in African affairs during his presidency. Trump is the one who will lead the US forward. We also support the sovereignty of all African states," one of the participants said.

This event, which was widely covered in the media and on social networks, had been planned by an organization made up of ex-employees of the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner mercenary group. This information has been revealed in a more than 1,400 pages’ archive an anonymous source shared with The Continent, a pan-African media outlet. Among the documents there are lists of employees, invoices, airline tickets, and other evidence of the Russians’ propaganda and media activities abroad. 

The archive mainly covers the operations of the Company (as its employees refer to it) in the timeframe of January to October 2024. The documents contain information on the affairs in more than twenty African countries and several Latin American countries. IStories, The Continent, Forbidden Stories and the Dossier Center outlets, as well as the All Eyes On Wagner and openDemocracy projects, have confirmed the authenticity of the documents and found out what Yevgeny Prigozhin’s former employees have been working on after his death. 

The Company’s operations and their costs

According to the documents obtained, the organization’s expenses for just 10 months amounted to almost 660 million rubles (roughly $8.6 million). E.g., in February 2024, the pro-Trump rally organization in the Central African Republic, as well as several other similar events, cost around $57,000 (or more than 5 million rubles). The events included a “US Activities in the CAR Investigation Committee Round Table Meeting” and an anti-American influence flash mob. Part of the funds was spent on paying various African media outlets for the rally coverage (for each article, the Company would pay between $220 and $800). According to the documents, securing the media coverage is seen as an important part of the company's work, amounting to more than $300,000 of costs per month.

The Company has promoted its narratives in the African media under the guise of African sovereignty support. The document titled “Confederation of Independence” states that in the work with African countries the Company would exploit discontent with the former colonial powers, primarily France and Great Britain. The ultimate goal of the work is articulated in the document as follows: “The Company is working on a plan to reshape Africa by creating a belt of regimes friendly to the Russian Federation in the states above the equator, from Guinea-Conakry to Somalia.” 

For example, in Namibia, in an attempt to strengthen the position of the ruling party's candidate in the presidential election, the Company distributed a fake letter containing information on how the British government was allegedly financing the opposition. Later, in the internal reports, the Company employees bragged that the fake piece of news had been seen by 1.7 million people on social media and forced the British ambassador to Namibia to make a statement refuting the aforementioned claim on national television.

At least as of 2024, the Company paid particular attention to promoting the Russian-style “foreign agents” regulation. One report states that the political strategists recommended the authorities in Burkina Faso arrest the so-called “foreign agents” and shut down the French broadcasters. According to the documents, the Company has also widely promoted anti-Ukraine narratives, claiming, for example, that Ukraine “supported terrorism in Africa.”

The Company has also been involved in "pushing out the ‘unfriendly’ countries’ corporations” from the natural resource industry in Africa. The documents claim that it was the Company's employees who developed a draft of a new Mining Code that was later adopted by the Malian government, which ultimately led to a major conflict with a Canadian mining company. Meanwhile Mali's cooperation with Russia in gold mining continued to grow stronger.

Besides Africa, Prigozhin’s ex-associates got actively involved in Latin American affairs, according to the documents. For example, employees of the Company attempted to stabilize the regime of Bolivian President Luis Arce after a coup attempt in June 2024. The archive also contains evidence that some Argentinian media outlets had been paid for various publications.

The Company’s employees and the Russian foreign intelligence connection

According to the documents and information obtained by Forbidden Stories from their sources, at least 60 Russians have worked for the Company in Africa and Latin America. Some of them were the late Prigozhin’s ex-staffers, e.g., Sergei Mashkevich and Sergei Klyukin. 

Mashkevich ranked high in Prigozhin’s hierarchy and stayed the head of his African back office until 2022 at least. Sergei Klyukin worked for Prigozhin in Sudan, according to the Dossier Center: he was one of the leaders of the operational headquarters in Khartoum.

Another notable name mentioned in the documents is Maxim Shugaley, who had worked for Prigozhin as a political strategist. Among other things, he was involved in the election campaign of Mahamat Deby, the president of Chad. Shugaley promoted the narrative that Deby’s rival, Succes Masra, was allegedly supported by the US. 

Shugaley is best known for his arrest in Libya in 2019 on charges of attempted interference in the country’s presidential election. He spent a year and a half under arrest and was released after Prigozhin intervened. In September 2024, Shugaley was detained in the Chadian capital of N'Djamena but was soon released. 

Apart from the people working for the Company, the documents repeatedly mention the SVR. From the context, it is clear that this abbreviation refers to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. Forbidden Stories’ sources in European intelligence agencies have also confirmed to journalists that Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service “took the Company under its wing” at the end of 2023.

In the draft document on the “strategies for further work” in Africa, its authors repeatedly mention that the Company would be provided with the “assistance from the SVR”, for example, in “introducing the Russian influence agents” into the leadership of the UN mission in the Central African Republic, as well as in providing the information on France and the US plans on military and political presence in the Sahel. It is also mentioned that the SVR would ensure that “the Russian Ministry of Defense would not stand in the way of the Wagner PMC specialists” in the Central African Republic and Libya.

Earlier, the All Eyes On Wagner project and Radio Liberty reported that Vitaly Perfilev, Prigozhin's ex-mercenary in the CAR who was in charge of collaborating with the local police, had been replaced by Denis Pavlov, an employee of the SVR. One of the sources for All Eyes On Wagner believes that another person connected with the SVR is Bagrat Shinkuba, who was seen at a Malian Ministry of Foreign Affairs' meeting with a Russian delegation on August 31, 2023, and introduced as the “chargé d'affaires of the Russian Federation in Mali.”

None of the individuals mentioned, nor the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, have responded to inquiries from the journalists.

Earlier, IStories, Forbidden Stories and our colleagues reported on how a former Wagner staffer exposed Russian propaganda activities in the Central African Republic.

Read on istories.media →

A source close to the Kremlin and ruling United Russia party told IStories that the situation with Chechnya’s leadership is extremely serious, and the Kremlin is “working” on a solution. Another source close to the Kremlin says, “As long as Kadyrov is alive, nothing will happen.” “Everything that is happening in Chechnya right now is being carefully concealed, and very complicated processes are underway. The people have been seriously wound up, none of them are talking about what’s going on. The locals were told, ‘If there are any leaks — we’ll simply destroy everyone, the whole family down to the seventh generation,’” the Kremlin-linked source says.

Another reason to talk about a successor is the car crash involving Adam Kadyrov, Ramzan’s 18-year-old son, who is often named as the future head of Chechnya. However, by law, Adam cannot lead Chechnya before 2037, when he turns 30.

A likely scenario is the appointment of someone loyal to Kadyrov. That person will be from the largest Chechen teip (tribal organization or clan) Benoy, two IStories sources, a former FSB officer and a representative of the Chechen diaspora, say. Adam Delimkhanov (a State Duma deputy from Chechnya) and Magomed Daudov (chairman of the Chechen government), Kadyrov’s closest allies and long considered candidates for succession, both belong to this teip.

Political analysts, Chechen activists, and human rights defenders told IStories that two things are required from the new head of Chechnya. Kadyrov needs someone who will guarantee the security of his family and the preservation of their power. Moscow wants to maintain stability in the region, avoid clan infighting (especially armed conflict), and prevent uprisings by people who suffered under Kadyrov’s rule.

Here’s how Chechnya and Moscow are preparing for a change of power in the region after Ramzan’s death.

How Grozny is preparing

The main plan: to stay in Chechnya. To preserve his family’s power in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov is promoting his successor — his 18-year-old son Adam. Adam has two older brothers, Akhmat and Zelimkhan, but for some reason they did not live up to their father’s hopes.

Adam Kadyrov became widely known after he beat Nikita Zhuravel in a pretrial detention center in August 2023. Zhuravel was eventually imprisoned for blasphemy (he posted a video of himself burning a Qur’an with a mosque in the background and uttering words mocking Muslims) and treason. The entire story was a PR campaign to distract attention from news about Ramzan Kadyrov’s illness, Novaya Gazeta Europe wrote.

After the beating of Zhuravel, Adam began receiving numerous awards and positions in various Chechen structures. By April 2025, he had risen to the post of head of Chechnya’s Security Council, a position equivalent to a regional minister. Ramzan Kadyrov is building an informal power center around Adam. He instructed Adam Delimkhanov, one of his main allies, to “train” Adam and pass on his connections, including those in the criminal world. Kadyrov’s son has proven to be “a pretty good student.”

The appointment of a “regent” as head of Chechnya, who will act in the interests of the Kadyrov family, is quite realistic, Dmitry Dubrovsky, a political scientist and lecturer at Charles University in Prague, says. This person will lead the region until Adam Kadyrov turns 30. Adam’s young age and lack of personal authority will not be an obstacle, Dubrovsky believes: “Adam’s authority is his surname, his lineage. Within the Russian Federation, a region has emerged which is ruled by a personalist dictatorship with a dynastic method of transferring power.”

Another way Ramzan Kadyrov is protecting his children is by marrying them into loyal and influential families and friends.

The marriages of two sons ensured Kadyrov is related by blood to the Delimkhanov and Geremeyev families, who are themselves related to each other. On June 8, 2024, in a single day, Zelimkhan Kadyrov married the granddaughter of Adam Delimkhanov, while Adam Kadyrov married the daughter of the senator from Chechnya, Suleyman Geremeyev. The Delimkhanov-Geremeyevs are the second most influential family in Chechnya.

Kadyrov’s daughters — Aishat, Khadizhat, and Tabarik — are married to the children of people who were Ramzan’s close friends even before his rise to power, “clearly in the hope that they will be able to protect his daughters after his death,” as Novaya Gazeta Europe wrote.

In addition, Ramzan Kadyrov is expanding his personal army. In 2004, when Akhmat Kadyrov was killed, Ramzan headed his father’s security service. At that time, there were about 3,000 fighters under his command, formally assigned to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Over the next few years, Ramzan Kadyrov subordinated the detachments of other field commanders to himself.

The exact size of the army at Kadyrov’s disposal is unknown. In the summer of 2022, The Insider estimated the number of those at 18,000–20,000 people. In January 2024, 25,000 servicemen took part in a military parade in Grozny participated. Before the war in Chechnya, there were 7 Kadyrov’s people units; by the end of 2024, 10 new ones had appeared, Proekt wrote.

Ramzan Kadyrov is protective of his fighters. These detachments, which recruit fighters from Chechnya, actually participated in combat operations in Ukraine only during the first months of the war. On the Ukrainian front, Chechnya is represented by the Akhmat Special Forces, which recruits people from all over Russia. Much earlier than in other regions, Chechnya began luring volunteers with one-time payments of several hundred thousand rubles. Now, 80–85% of the Akhmat Special Forces are not Chechens.

The backup plan: to escape abroad. Ramzan Kadyrov cannot be sure that Putin will keep his promise regarding guarantees of safety for his family. Therefore, unbeknownst to Moscow, he held talks with representatives of Middle Eastern Muslim monarchies about the safety of his relatives and assets, sources told IStories. Kadyrov has real influence in the Middle East, including an established network of informal contacts, Novaya Gazeta Europe’s sources say.

In the United Arab Emirates, Kadyrov’s relatives and associates own a great deal of real estate. IStories reported about this here and here. Last year, Kadyrov’s nephew Khamzat was the first among Ramzan’s closest relatives to obtain citizenship of the UAE. After him, citizenship of this country was to be arranged for other relatives as well.

How Moscow is preparing

The main requirement from Moscow for Ramzan Kadyrov’s successor: Chechnya must not become a problem again, especially during the war with Ukraine.

Recently, Apti Alaudinov was removed from the list of candidates for the post of head of the region, a former FSB officer and a representative of the Chechen diaspora told IStories. The main reason is that Alaudinov and his entire family do not command the same authority in Chechnya and the diaspora as other clans.

The issue is that during the First Chechen War, Alaudinov’s relatives fought on the side of the federal forces. Alaudinov himself has said, that in that war he lost his father and older brother. While many Chechens switched to Russia’s side during the Second Chechen War, support for Moscow during the first one is still condemned by many in Chechnya. After the Second Chechen War, Alaudinov began working in the Chechen Ministry of Internal Affairs, rising to become head of the ministry by 2011. However, in 2019 he fell out of favor. After the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, Alaudinov returned to the fold, becoming commander of the Akhmat Special Forces — the very unit in which, for the most part, non-Chechens serve.

Thus, the best positions in the struggle for the post of Kadyrov’s successor are held by his two closest associates — Adam Delimkhanov and Magomed Daudov. Because of this rivalry, there is currently a conflict between them, sources told IStories.

Adam Delimkhanov. During the First Chechen War, Delimkhanov fought on the side of the separatists; in the Second Chechen War, he entered the service of Ramzan Kadyrov. Delimkhanov helped Kadyrov deal with his rivals. For example, in 2006 he led the operation to kill Movladi Baisarov in Moscow — a former Kadyrov bodyguard and commander of the Chechen Gorets detachment. In 2008–2009, Delimkhanov was involved in the killings of Ruslan and Sulim Yamadayev, representatives of a once-powerful Chechen family that had competed with the Kadyrovs in the 2000s.

Delimkhanov oversees people who engage in raiding operations throughout Russia. He also controls Chechen diasporas in Russia and abroad. Delimkhanov spends most of his time outside Chechnya; he is a State Duma deputy.

Magomed Daudov. During the Second Chechen War, Daudov fought on the side of the militants; during one of the battles, Kadyrov’s men captured him. Daudov agreed to serve Ramzan Kadyrov and earned his trust. Daudov brought Kadyrov the head of field commander Suleyman Elmurzayev, Kadyrov’s blood enemy, who had claimed responsibility for the murder of his father Akhmat. Daudov is now responsible for repressions in Chechnya, including personally torturing people. Last year, Kadyrov appointed him head of the Chechen government.

IStories reported in detail about Daudov here.

What will happen after Kadyrov’s death

After Kadyrov’s death, Chechnya’s governance system will remain unchanged, as during his reign, the Benoy teip has grown significantly and its representatives have infiltrated all the region’s power structures, according to a representative of the Chechen diaspora and a former FSB officer.

There will be no real struggle for power, mass protests, or destabilization of the situation in Chechnya, Dmitry Dubrovsky from Charles University in Prague argues. For Moscow, the main task will be to preserve the status quo, so no changes in the principles of regional governance are necessary: “Moscow, which is up to its ears in the war in Ukraine, doesn’t need unstable Chechnya on top of that. They will accept anyone who guarantees the status quo.”

Political analyst Abbas Gallyamov suggests that Kadyrov’s death could lead both to a struggle between clans for power and to mass protests. “There are many dissatisfied people in Chechnya, and many of them are in the Chechen elite. And if they feel that the system has weakened enough and it is possible to reveal themselves and start fighting it, they will definitely do so,” Gallyamov says. As for the choice of successor, Moscow will first and foremost look for a person who will minimize risks, the expert believes: “Chechnya is not the priority. The priority is not to waste resources. Everything is focused on the Ukrainian issue.”

Chechnya no longer poses either a military threat or a threat of separatism to Moscow, a Russian journalist who writes about Chechnya and asked not to be named notes. While Ramzan Kadyrov is alive, the federal authorities will not engage in a change of power in Chechnya. Moscow has its own candidates for the position of regional head, but they are not public figures, the journalist says. At the same time, Moscow still does not fully understand what challenges Kadyrov’s death might bring and what kind of Chechnya the federal authorities would like to see: “Everything is up in the air and will be decided on the fly.”

The journalist does not expect any serious struggle for power after Kadyrov’s death: “Any opposition will be dealt with easily by the new authorities, and, I suppose, with qualitatively new methods — through imprisonments, not killings. But I very much doubt that there will be anyone to deal with.”

“A very large number of residents of the Chechen Republic hope that this regime will collapse. They hope, but they don’t say it out loud. But if you take off the rose-colored glasses, many understand that absolutely nothing will change. The authorities already have a plan B, and a plan C, and so on. If it doesn’t get worse, it certainly won’t get better,” Amina Larsson from the Chechen human rights association Vayfond says.

Read on istories.media →

The seizure was carried out in May 2025. Le Monde claims that four villas and plots of land on the French “millionaire’s island” Saint Barthélemy (St. Barts) in the Caribbean Sea were confiscated from Akimov. The value of the seized property was estimated at €81.9 million.

At that time, the case was handled by the staff of the Office national anti-fraude (ONAF). It has now moved under the jurisdiction of the Parquet national anti-criminalité organisé (PNACO).

French investigators also seized the property of Gazprombank Deputy Chairman of the Management Board Alexey Matveev, Le Monde writes. His case is being handled by the Parquet national financier (PNF), since he is suspected of tax fraud in connection with the purchase of a villa.

Andrey Akimov is a person close to Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, an acquaintance and business partner of his longtime friends. He has headed Gazprombank for 20 years. IStories previously published a joint investigation with Le Monde about Akimov’s European assets.

We wrote that Akimov owns a total of four houses in France, and only one of them is located on Saint Barthélemy. This mansion, with terraces and swimming pools, once belonged to legendary ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev.

IStories also found that Akimov owns the “Aloha” villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, a villa in Chens-sur-Léman on the French shore of Lake Geneva, and a villa in Ramatuelle in the Provence region.

Akimov’s deputy, Matveev, owned a villa in Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the Riviera. Apparently, it is this mansion that is linked to the tax fraud investigation. Tax authorities value the villa at €29 million. Matveev’s son owns two more villas in Beaulieu-sur-Mer.

Akimov has property not only in France. He also owns luxury apartments and houses in Austria, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and invests in real estate in Cyprus. Read more about this here.

Read on istories.media →

“After reviewing the materials collected by the migration department staff of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for Yaroslavl Oblast [...] the previously acquired citizenship of the Russian Federation has been terminated for the citizen born in 1986,” the Ministry of Internal Affairs stated.

It is unknown when exactly the citizenship was annulled.

Anin was a naturalized Russian citizen; he was born and raised in Moldova and received a Russian passport only in 2006.

• Since October 2023, a law has been in force in Russia that allows a person to be deprived of acquired citizenship for “military fakes,” “discrediting the army,” calls for extremist activity, and so on. At the end of July this year, Putin signed a law under which acquired citizenship can be revoked for virtually any political crime.

• In March, a court sentenced Anin and former IStories reporter (now a TV Rain reporter) Ekaterina Fomina in absentia to 8.5 years in a penal colony in a case concerning “fakes” about the Russian Armed Forces. The case was based on three IStories videos — two news overviews by Anin and an investigation by Fomina about the killing of civilians in Bucha. You can read more about this case here.

• For the first time, a person was stripped of citizenship in March 2024 for “fakes” about the Russian Armed Forces. Aleksandr Somryakov from Kuban was sentenced to six years in a penal colony for reports about crimes committed by the Russian army in Mariupol and Bucha.

Read on istories.media →

“Seems like there's a reason why everything is down”, one of Mikord's testers wrote.

“You think so? Looks bad. [...] We're screwed”, replied a colleague.

“Who are the journalists they're going to pass the data to? No one is going to write about this”, the tester concluded.

The Kazan-based company Mikord is one of the key developers of the Unified Military Registry (UMR). Hackers gained access to its internal documents and passed the data to the Get Lost human rights project, which, in turn, passed it on to IStories.

We examined more than 100 gigabytes of Mikord's technical documentation and correspondence and spoke to its employees and government supervisors. Two independent technical experts also analyzed the data at our request.

We share the key details about how the registry works and how it was created.

“As soon as we started working on the military registry project, hackers were after us”. How did a company from Kazan become a key developer of the registry?

“As you know, we’ve been hacked. The breach is very serious. Our entire infrastructure has been taken down. They destroyed everything — Jira, Confluence, Git... There is nothing left. Only the source codes on your computers remain”, Ramil Gabdrakhmanov, the CEO of Mikord, said at the beginning of a conference call with his employees on December 8. “We used to work in peace. As soon as we started working on the military registry project, hackers were after us”.

Mikord spent 18 years operating smoothly. It was founded in 2007 by an IT entrepreneur from Kazan, Alexander Nikolaev. In its initial years of operation, the company would generate modest revenue from some government contracts in Tatarstan and its business products sales.

In 2016, Mikord was contracted to create a unified registry for the civil registry offices. This project automated the work of the civil registry offices in Russian regions and consolidated the once handwritten data into a single digital system. The company also worked on dozens of large government services, such as Russia’s state atomic corporation Rosatom's corporate system, the Tatarstan database of disabled people, the Work in Russia website, etc.

The secret to Mikord's success probably lies in the ties of the company's founder, Alexander Nikolaev, who owned it and served as its CEO until the end of 2017 (although the firm is still linked to his group of companies). He used to run a joint business with Nikolai Nikiforov's wife. Nikiforov was the Minister of Communications of Tatarstan, then held the same position at the federal level, and later became a board member of one of the biggest telecommunications companies in Russia, Rostelecom. It was during Nikiforov's tenure as the Russian Minister of Communications that Mikord got its first contracts for large government projects.

In 2024, Mikord was brought in to work on the military registry project. The contracts are not publicly available, but in the leak, IStories has found an additional agreement that suggests that Mikord effectively joined the development of the registry in February 2024. The agreement with Mikord was contracted by RT Communications Systems (RT SK), a Rostelecom subsidiary. During its work on the registry project, Mikord had received at least 377.5 million rubles ($5 million approx.) from RT SK.

Mikord's being selected as a subcontractor might be related to the company's previous projects: it had previously created a special module for the state security services in the civil registry that would allow to delete certain people from the database. This was discussed during a working conference call between Mikord, RT SK, and Solar, a subsidiary of Rostelecom responsible for the project's security.

Evgeny Bazarin, Solar Security: Have we ever worked with Mikord? How secure are they? How do they develop this code? Do they have any security policies? Is it a reliable, trusted company?

Alina Safiullina, project lead on behalf of Mikord: Yes, we are reliable and trusted.

Vladimir Korolev, Rostelecom Vice President: Our colleagues have the relevant experience, which is why we brought them onboard. They had participated in the civil registry project and created a linking module (a component that can be used for deleting the data about any person from the registry permanently — Ed.) for our ministries (meaning the intelligence and law enforcement agencies: FSB, FSO, SVR — Ed.). They will be doing roughly the same thing, which is why they're here.

As a result, Mikord started working on several components of the registry at once — a digital conscription notice service, the analytical reports for the military personnel at all levels up to the Ministry of Defense generals, and the module for the intelligence agencies. The registry component functionality is described according to the technical documentation. Some requests might have been altered upon the implementation or updating of technical specifications.

“They are not just another subcontractor; they provide Rostelecom with their technology. They have a product called Web-BPM (a low-code development platform — Ed.). Quite a few things have been done in the registry using it, including the stuff not developed straight by Mikord”, the hacker who has studied the registry's developer tools says. “The company is quite extensively involved in the development of the registry. Even the teams that are not directly related to what Mikord is currently doing include Mikord's testers”.

“It is prohibited to send documents in Telegram chats”. How the hacking happened

According to the government's schedule, the digital military registry was supposed to start operating in 2024, but its launch has been postponed several times. The Ministry of Digital Development explained this, among other things, by “the strict requirements for information security and the infrastructure being created”. 

The developers of the registry did not comply with these strict security requirements themselves. Back in July 2024, Mikord employees were asked not to share the working documents and access data in messengers, but the leaked materials show that both ordinary employees and project managers would ignore this request.

“Your boss makes you go to the office and clock in from there. So what do you do? You ask a colleague to log into your work computer with your password and clock in for you. They had been doing this so often that we got tired of logging into their computers with their passwords and downloading everything”, the hacker attack participant told IStories.

As a result of the attack, hackers gained access to Mikord's source code, working documentation, and correspondence, including that with Rostelecom and the clients from the defence ministry. They got the RT SK documents as well. 

The hacker group has destroyed Mikord's entire infrastructure — more than 80 servers and 43 terabytes of data (including 12 terabytes of backups) and left, in their words, “a couple of surprises in store for the future”. According to the hackers’ estimates, it could take months to restore Mikord's work to its previous stage.

The CEO of Mikord, Ramil Gabdrakhmanov, confirmed the destruction of the company's infrastructure in an internal conference call after the attack. He told employees that they would not be able to work until mid-December at least. Both Mikord employees and RT SK developers have been temporarily unable to continue working on the registry, as their access to the infrastructure has been disabled, according to this call.

If the employees have a local copy of the repository, it won't be that difficult to restore the code itself, an independent tech expert told IStories. But if the government customer refuses to keep working with Mikord because of the hack, it could slow the development down since they'll have to find a new contractor. They will have to either delve into the technology developed by Mikord or rebuild it using other frameworks.

The main reason for the success of the attack was the developers' and the management's low level of expertise, says one of the hackers: “There is a registry you want to develop at a cost of several billion rubles (tens of millions of dollars). It was due yesterday. So you find some random company in Kazan that pays its employees 30 to 60 thousand rubles ($400 to $800 approx.) a month and makes them work on weekends and at night. It can do it quickly and at a low cost”. 

An independent expert who examined the code at the request of IStories confirmed the low quality of Mikord's code. “The code is not very good and is poorly covered by tests”, he concluded. “There is little unique code there; everything is based on their internal framework, which has probably not been significantly updated”.

In addition, the sanctions contributed to the success of the hack. “Several vulnerabilities were solely there because of the sanctions. For example, after the invasion began (in February 2022), the firewall license (a subscription that activates additional device protection — Ed.) expired on their VPN gateway, and this was one of the reasons we were able to get into their network. Moreover, they use an outdated, no longer supported Windows 10 version and do not update it, probably also because of sanctions”, a member of the hacker group said.

“The bunker needs the dashboard by 5 p.m.” The “civilian” supervisors of the registry

The formal customer for the registry was the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media, while the functional customer — that is, the one that will use the finished system — was the Ministry of Defense. In reality, many more government agencies have been involved in the project. 

For example, the Analytical Center under the Russian government provided recommendations on the registry development. It would approve the matters of the project's architecture, personal data storage, etc. In the spring of 2024, the center conducted a confidential assessment of the user-friendliness of the registry. The reviewers rated the “level of compliance with the principles of customer focus and ergonomics” as ‘poor’: “The service evokes negative feelings when interacting with it. Approval for commercial operation: denied”. 

The work has been personally evaluated by the Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin (at least twice), Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, and Minister of Digital Development, Maksut Shadayev. The progress on the registry was also to be presented to the Presidential Administration.

“Hello everyone! There will potentially be a presentation at the Presidential Administration tomorrow! I'm figuring out the details. We're getting ready”, Rostelecom’s Alexander Martynchenko wrote to Mikord employees in May 2025.

The displays to government officials were tense and problematic. “Today's presentation might be delayed. For now, it's been postponed to 8:30 pm, because the presentation for the prime minister might not start at 6. The bunker (probably referring to the government's coordination center across the river from the Russian Government House building — Ed.) needs the dashboard by 5 pm”, wrote Yulia Levitskaya, the government's registry development supervisor.

The dashboard mentioned by Levitskaya would track the draft campaign status for each military enlistment office — the number of conscription notices sent, the appeals filed, etc. Following the presentation, the developers were reprimanded. “We just had a meeting with the government and got slammed, big time”, wrote Alina Safiullina, lead of the project development on behalf of Mikord.

Three weeks later, she sent a new schedule of government and defence ministry presentations to the work chat and asked the developers to speed up the fixing of the issues. “That's impossible, I'll say that right away...”, one of the developers replied.

Discussions among the registry development team indicate that Yulia Levitskaya, a head of the Department of Project Activities for monitoring the so-called “national projects” in the government, was one of the key decision-makers in the project:

Vladimir Korolev, Rostelecom: We haven't shown it to any of our customers yet. Who will be the main participant in the discussion here? 

Dmitry Kurochkin, project lead at RT Labs: Levitskaya and Biryukov [representative of the Ministry of Defense] will be involved. Any other working groups that do not include these people... their decisions will not be considered as requests.

Levitskaya was the one responsible for presenting the registry to senior officials. In a conversation with IStories, she denied her involvement at first, but then admitted that she was “involved with the registry”. She says this system will make life easier for Russians: “It will let people avoid going to the recruitment commission when they don't need to. It will make life much easier and reduce social tension. People don't understand why they are being called up and don't go because they are simply afraid that they will be taken somewhere. There is a lot written about this on the internet, I've read it”.

Levitskaya claims that the registry will not be used for mobilization. “The registry has nothing to do with war. It is a civil matter in peacetime. This has been written, spoken, and stated many times”, she told IStories.

“The business tasks of the Minister of Defense”. How the registry is being prepared for mobilization

In May 2024, the very same Yulia Levitskaya was giving developers the instructions that contradict her statements.

“The mobilized, the contract [soldiers], and [soldier] volunteers are the three business tasks that the Minister of Defense may need to deal with (in the latest versions available in the leak, the 'volunteers' category has been dropped — Ed.). Therefore, it would be good for us to show the potential number of those who could be conscripted during the mobilization, those who are potentially eligible for contracts [to take part in the war], and those who could potentially volunteer [as soldiers]”, she would describe the desired functionality of the dashboard “for the General”. This is a component of the registry that was created specifically for the Minister of Defense. 

The possibility of using the registry for future mobilization is also specified in the latest available version of the technical specs for the registry, written in August 2024. The notice to come to the draft board during the mobilization can be sent to men aged 18 to 70 and women aged 18 to 50, except for those imprisoned. “The number of conscription notices that can be sent should be unlimited”, the document states.

The “general's” dashboard, so much anticipated by the authorities, was also developed by Mikord. Its development has been in progress since May 2024, at least. One of the biggest challenges for the team was the functionality of searching for citizens by full name and various criteria. The search feature had already been available in the registry, but the Ministry of Defense demanded that it be reimplemented in the “general's” dashboard. “This is an interface for the big bosses who think it's beneath them to use a regular interface”, Rostelecom Vice President Martynchenko explained to the Mikord team.

The main page of this dashboard contains the key indicators for the Ministry of Defense: how many Russians are subject to mobilization and conscription for military service, and how many meet the criteria to sign a contract to participate in the war.

The criteria for displaying the number of those mobilized on the “general” dashboard are stricter than the criteria specified in the technical specifications. Men are supposed to be aged 30 to 50 and women aged 30 to 45; they must have fewer than five children under the age of 16 (in case they do have more than 5 children, their mobilization is to be deferred). Presumably, in case of mobilization, they are the first to be called up. The criteria for the contract soldiers are also simple: men between the ages of 18 and 50 who are not registered with a psychoneurological dispensary or as HIV-positive.

With the dashboard, the Defense Ministry can quickly check how many conscription notices have been sent out, how many deferrals have been granted, and how many recruits have shown up.  

However, the overly sensitive data is not displayed even in the Ministry of Defense's internal system. The registry developers are prohibited from displaying the data on the number of Russians removed from the registry due to leaving the country and losing their citizenship. “This is classified information, which, as we were told, cannot be stored or displayed on dashboards either”, said Dmitry Kurochkin, project lead at RT Labs, during one of the conference calls.

“We got slammed this morning”. How the tests went at the Ministry of Defense

“They want to sign me up for some bullshit. ‘Writing requests based on criteria we can't cross-check with the system data.’ [...] Why do they need me for this? I don't get it. Just to sit around and watch, instead of doing something useful”, Ruslan Gaztdinov, an analyst for the project, said during one of his working trips to the Ministry of Defense where he went to test the registry. 

The RT SK and Mikord employees started going to the ministry regularly to do the early tests of the registry back in 2024. The tests were to be conducted at three locations:

• GOMU (Main Organizational-Mobilizational Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces) — Moscow, Frunzenskaya Embankment, 22/2; 
• TSOD-1 (Ministry of Defense data center in Moscow) — same address;
• TSOD-2 (Data center in Yekaterinburg, Vostochnaya Street, 60).

According to the correspondence, it was the Frunzenskaya Embankment where Mikord employees went to demonstrate and test the registry components.

At the Ministry of Defense, they would report to Andrei Biryukov, head of the GOMU and the husband of Yulia Levitskaya, who oversees the registry on behalf of the government. According to the leaked correspondence, the developers seemed to be afraid of it. But it did not prevent them from being careless about security while testing the registry at the ministry.

“Dear colleagues, the Ministry of Defense has uploaded the personal data [to the registry]. The 8th [Eighth Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, which is in charge of protecting state secrets] prohibited working on [unprotected] laptops (yesterday), but the testers still do. There's a scandal brewing at the Biryukov level”, the developers discussed. 

From April to November 2025, Ruslan Gaztdinov traveled to Moscow on business trips at least four times. He even spent his 28th birthday at the Ministry of Defense. “Happy birthday, Ruslan! I wish you to be happy. You are a great guy!” wrote his project lead, Alina Safiullina, just to immediately bring him back to reality: “Yesterday’s edit needs to be checked again in the presence of the military. We got in trouble for it this morning”.

Gazdinov's last business trip to the Ministry of Defense of those known from the leak, took place at the end of November 2025. The Mikord employees went to Moscow without a ticket back. “Well, I guess I'll go on Monday and stay for two days (there's no fucking way it's going to be just two days)”, Gaztdinov complained to a colleague. On November 19, he left the Ministry of Defense at 2 a.m., and on November 21, at 4 a.m. 

Mikord’s deputy director, Natalia Soboleva, promised Gaztdinov a bonus for the overtime:

“It needs to be merged by morning [...] Let's try, please. I'll talk to Ramil [Gabdrakhmanov, CEO of Mikord] about the bonus, but we need to finish the DB [dashboard]”.

“Well, I hope it won't take long, I just haven't slept properly for three days”, Gaztdinov wrote. 

“I haven't slept properly for three months”, Soboleva replied. “We just need to submit the 12 criteria, and they'll leave us alone [...] we'll get Biryukov's signature”.

A couple of days after returning from this business trip, Gaztdinov spoke to Soboleva about a raise — he asked for his monthly salary to be increased from 100,000 rubles (approx. $1300) to 135,000 rubles (approx. $1700).

“People we would rather not expose”. How the “right people” are removed from the registry

“Our highly respected supervisory agencies”, as Rostelecom Deputy Vice President Vladimir Korolev repeatedly referred to the intelligence services in conference calls, “operate with the concept of personal data, and with sensitive data as well. Some analytical reports may expose people [in the registry] we would rather not expose”.

In order not to “expose” such individuals, the registry has a special module called the Unified Linking Component (ULC). This tool was created to verify and process information added to the registry from external databases. The module allows to remove certain individuals from the registry without a trace, anonymize them, or replace their data with fabricated information, as well as to cancel the conscription notices sent to them and the restrictions, usually applicable to the conscriptees, imposed on them, or to hide them from the draft lists.

On January 9, 2025, an explanatory note describing the implementation of the module in detail was approved. It states that all data submitted to the registry must first be blocked for three days. During this time, the module operators check the data and, if necessary, change the person's details so that they cannot be identified, or remove the people they want. “If we need to delete or disguise data about a particular citizen, we go through all the records and change their surname everywhere”, Yuri Kiryanov, the chief architect of the registry, explained while describing the principle of “editing or depersonalizing” data during the development stage. People can be deleted either en masse, by uploading an entire list, or selectively.

The documents do not explicitly state who exactly is to be protected from conscription with the help of the module. The government decree on the creation of the registry states that work with the data must take into account the security of the Ministry of Defense, the FSB, the FSO, the SVR, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs personnel, as well as people subject to state security and their family members. This is a wide circle including judges, prosecutors, investigative officers, active military personnel, customs and tax officers, members of the government, and their families. The technical specifications for the registry also state that it must not contain records on security service personnel.

Military registration for the employees of law enforcement bodies (the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Rosgvardia, the Federal Penitentiary Service, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, etc) has been separate for a long time. The concept of separate military registration first appeared in Russian legislation in 1995, but the practice of exempting the security and intelligence personnel from registration within the recruitment offices was first introduced in the USSR era. 

The module is designed to ensure that any manipulation of data cannot be traced: even the information about the records being deleted is subject to deletion. The customer and the project team call this “evidence-free” processing of “protected individuals”. This makes the process uncontrollable, which means that, in theory, anyone can be hidden from the registry.

“The module ensures complete invisibility of the interactions with the subsystem”, explains the hacker attack participant who examined the registry development architecture. “All the audit and logging functions are disabled both in the registry code itself and in the third-party components (e.g., the cryptographic gateway, the databases, the network equipment). It is done to ensure that working with the module leaves absolutely no trace of who manipulated the registry or what data was manipulated. This is primarily protection from the internal staff: usually, the logs are read by security administrators and other internal personnel”.

The requirements for the “no-evidence integrity” even led to disputes between the security services and the Ministry of Defense. “The regulators (as the security bodies are called in conference calls — Ed.) are eager to discuss this with the Minister of Defense and say: 'Guys, leave no history in the logs, there should be no fucking trace left'. But the opinions of the supervising agencies were divided”, said Vladimir Korolev, Rostelecom's deputy vice president, in a conference call with developers in July 2024. 

Mikord joined the development of the module no later than May 2024. That's when a chart showing how this module is supposed to work appeared in their internal knowledge base in Confluence. The name of the Ministry of Defense department responsible for monitoring and analyzing incidents can be seen there.

It is this department that will be examining all data entered into the registry and removing the required individuals from there. The information on who needs to be removed is sent to the department by the FSB, FSO, and SVR. In one version of the documentation, Rosgvardia is also listed among the security agencies. At work meetings, the developers of the registry directly refer to the ULC as a module for the “supervising agencies” — the security services.

One can only access the module while physically present at the Ministry of Defense. One of the latest versions of the technical specifications mentions that to ensure this, seven computers will be installed in the ministry's data centers, five in Moscow and two in Yekaterinburg.

The implementation of this module has affected the work of virtually all parts of the registry. It has even made the developers of the legal entities' personal account section unhappy (the personal account is where companies are supposed to submit info about their employees to the registry). 

During one of the conference calls, they discussed that an employer might potentially try to add a person that the security services do not want to see in the registry. At the same time, the feedback about which employees are accepted by the system and which are not could compromise the “protected individuals”.

“They [legal entities] will find themselves in a trap. [...] Six million organizations will complain that we have created a shitty system [...] the developer will always be the scapegoat”, argued Alina Safiullina, project lead on behalf of Mikord.

Vladimir Korolev, Rostelecom's deputy vice president, replied: “You're looking at it from the user's point of view, but when the Ministry of Defense looks at it, the supervising authorities [In this context, the security services] are added to the picture. Their positions are contradictory: the Ministry of Defense wants to thoroughly count everyone, but the regulators don't want it to happen”. 

“I'm just shocked by what they're doing”, Alina Safiullina later complained to the Mikord staff. “In the end, they'll have to go on walking there [to the military registration office to submit information about employees for military registration] physically just as they did before”, Bulat Khairullin replied. However, Mikord employees decided not oppose the customer actively nor stop working on the “shitty system”.

In April 2025, the module functionality was demonstrated to the government, including the data deletion feature. “We'll need to put the module on a separate machine, a laptop, and show it from there: show the visuals and the data deletion feature”, said Yulia Levitskaya. A month later, the module was being prepared for submission to the Ministry of Defense. 

The current status of the module is “in development”, according to the RT SK (another developer of the registry) Confluence knowledge base. 

“It’s not about ‘whether’ it leaks, It’s about ‘when’ it leaks”. Is the data in the registry itself protected well? 

The Mikord hacker attack does not mean that hackers have penetrated the military registration registry itself and can delete data on conscripts from it, as there is no external access to it. The registry data is stored separately from Mikord in a closed network that cannot be accessed directly from the internet or from a regular office network, and all entries and exits are filtered and recorded, explains a member of the hacker group. To gain access to this network, you need to go through an interview with an FSB employee and obtain a special laptop and flash drive.

From this description, it might seem that the data in the registry is securely protected, but this is not actually the case. The way the registry works has two serious vulnerabilities.

The first is the excessive amount of information stored, which makes it an attractive target for fraudsters, debt collectors, security services, and anyone else interested in the personal data of tens of millions of Russians.

“The main principle that determines the security of such systems is the principle of minimal sufficiency”, the expert says. “That is, the system should collect, store, and process only the data necessary for its operation. In this registry, all imaginable data is collected. Therefore, if you have physical access to the closed part of the registry and, for example, the passwords to its backup database, you can simply download all this data. It's not about ‘whether’ it leaks, it's about ‘when’ it leaks”. 

The second vulnerability is the ULC module itself, as the people with access to it can download any data from the registry with no fear of being noticed, because no traces of these actions remain in the system. 

The hacker attack on Mikord probably affected the client side of the registry — the website where Russians can find out about the conscription notices issued to them and the restrictions imposed. On December 5, after the company's infrastructure was compromised, a message about ongoing “technical works” appeared on the website. By the evening of December 10, the conscription notices registry was back up and running. Get Lost, an organization helping Russians evade conscription, reported that during these 5 days, it didn't receive a single message about anyone receiving a digital conscription notice.

“Digital Gulag” at a click. How the military registration registry works

The mobilization campaign in the fall of 2022 clearly showed the Russian authorities the weaknesses of the analog military registration system. Military registration offices did not have up-to-date information about Russians; it was not possible to deliver conscription notices to everyone, and it proved impossible to control those called up leaving the country. Over the past three years, Russia has almost completed the development of a system that can be used for a new and more effective mobilization campaign. 

The leaked documents show that the digital military registration system is designed to store the data on 25 million citizens — Russia's entire mobilization capacity. The registry contains more than 300 different fields of information about each person: education, place of work and residence, information about children, illnesses, property, etc. The registry's capacity allows it to send up to one million conscription notices per year, and 600,000 requests to impose and lift restrictions on citizens who have not appeared at the enlistment offices after getting the notice. Human rights activists call this system a “digital Gulag”.

“Once the registry is fully operational, it will be impossible to do anything in your life without leaving a trace there”, one of the hackers interviewed by IStories commented. “Every action will result in the enlistment office receiving [the up-to-date] information about you. It will become very difficult to evade conscription”.

IStories had a look at the guidelines that RT Labs developers wrote for the enlistment office staff in February 2024. Back then, the digital registry was being tested in the Lipetsk, Ryazan, and Sakhalin regions. These documents show how Russians should be registered for military service, sent conscription notices, prevented from leaving the country, and subjected to other restrictions.

Despite the digitization of the registration system, the conscription activities cannot be carried out without human involvement. The military registration office employees manually select the conscripts who will get the conscription notices. According to the documentation for the registry, there is no mechanism provided to automate this process. To send the draft notices to conscripts, the military commissar has to make a few more clicks—he signs the notices electronically, and then citizens receive notifications in their accounts in the conscription registry and on the Russian public services portal Gosuslugi.

According to the law, a person is prohibited from leaving the country as soon as a conscription notice in their name appears in the registry. For this, the military commissar must digitally sign the travel ban and send it to the FSB, according to the technical specifications and instructions for the enlistment offices. At the same time, certain wording in the technical specifications suggests that the restrictions could be automated.

Currently, the automatic ban on leaving the country has not yet been implemented — the enlistment offices and the FSB have not yet established the necessary data exchange. According to the Get Lost information, people can still cross the border even with a conscription notice and a ban on leaving the country in the registry.

The Ministry of Defense managed to introduce the registry in the enlistment offices before the 2025 autumn draft campaign started. Residents of more than 60 regions of Russia received digital conscription notices, according to the messages the Get Lost charity has been getting. According to the human rights advocates, basically all Russian regions have had a chance to try sending out the conscription notices through the registry.

“Right now, the registry is almost ready (meaning the current functionality of the registry, not the automatic restrictions implementation — Ed.)”, one of the hackers says. “Most developers are still submitting the work they are required to do under some initial contracts, but it's not the critical work anymore. So if they are required to perform a major draft campaign using the register tomorrow, the only thing that will stop them is the scale of the campaign, because such scales haven't been tested yet. But the main part of the functionality, importing and exporting data, is ready”.

“I don’t want to be working on the registry, please”. Who are the people developing the registry?

“The atmosphere was tense”, a source familiar with the development of the registry told IStories. “The project was implemented on a very tight schedule, in a rush”.

Before the invasion of Ukraine, Rostelecom’s subsidiary RT Labs, which worked on the registry in the first stage, was a client of Luxoft, an international IT company. In 2022, Luxoft left Russia. Some of the employees emigrated, while the rest switched to working for Luxoft’s clients. “So several hundred highly professional people, who know how to build large, complex services, ended up working for Rostelecom”, the source said. According to him, about half of the original team quit because they did not want to work on such a project. 

“Imagine: there was a good company with some very professional people, about a hundred of them. Then they were given this project. When they understood the nature of the project, about 50 people quit. There was a large drain of people, precisely for moral reasons. Some were persuaded to stay by providing good mortgages, and others were talked to and given a raise. [Many] were ashamed, and they still are”, he says. 

The Mikord leak reveals that some employees did not want to participate in the project. 

“Ramil, I don’t want to be working on the registry, please, don’t put me there... [...] You’re joking, right?” one tester asked the company CEO. Right before the attack, several people quit. One of them, as colleagues later discussed, “left beautifully” — he told the deputy director, Natalia Soboleva, that he “didn't like her as a person”. His colleagues decided that “he could be understood”.

The leaked correspondence suggests that people would quit regularly. In January 2025, employees were asked to share the phrases they associated with the company brand. One of them replied: “According to the chat, the most common phrase is ‘it was my last day at Mikord today’”.

When a colleague asked Ruslan Gaztdinov, an analyst, about the nature of the registry project, he briefly replied: “Filth”. The leaked materials show that Gaztdinov had served in the army in 2020 and has hated everything related to it ever since. In one of his messages, he described his army experience as “fucking hell” and “prison”. “I will spend the rest of my life telling people no one needs this shit”, he wrote. Gaztdinov did not respond to questions from IStories, hanging up the phone.

Mikord is one of the IT companies “accredited” by the government, which allows its employees to claim exemption from mobilization and military service. They are not ready to go to war themselves. For example, in the spring of 2023, one of Mikord's testers, Lenar Aituganov, was in Thailand and asked his colleague if conscription notices were being handed out back home; otherwise, he would have stayed in Asia. 

Mikord employees are not allowed to discuss war and politics in work chat rooms. When drones attacked the region where one of the developers lived, the company's deputy director, Natalia Soboleva, interrupted the discussion of the incident and told everyone to communicate via private messages.

About 60 people work at Mikord. The registry is being developed by a young team: their average age is 33. Most of the developers, testers, and analysts graduated from technical universities in the Russian regions of Tatarstan and neighboring Bashkortostan. The company actively hires inexperienced people at minimum wages: developers interviewed by IStories say that for many, Mikord was their first job in the IT sector, immediately after graduation.

Many Mikord employees earn less than the average salary in the IT industry in Kazan, Tatarstan. For example, testers were offered monthly salaries ranging from 30,000 to 60,000 rubles ($400-800 approx.),and developers and systems analysts would get 40,000 to 80,000 rubles ($500-1000 approx.). They were promised “interesting tasks”, as well as “tea, goodies, grain coffee, a break room and a game room”, 200 rubles ($2.5) a day for lunch, and corporate activities — for example, the padel game. 

The head of the department at Mikord is offered 250,000 rubles ($3000 approx.) per month. According to other leaks, Mikord's deputy director, Natalia Soboleva, who is the immediate supervisor of everyone involved in the military registry project, earned about 350,000 rubles a month ($4500 approx.) in 2025, while the company's CEO, Ramil Gabdrakhmanov, earned an average of 1.5 million rubles ($19000 approx.) a month. His wife, Albina, receives about half a million rubles ($6400 approx.) a month. She was a co-owner of Mikord from 2017 to 2023 and is still listed as an employee of the company, but there is no trace of her work activity in the documents we received. 

After the mobilization was announced in 2022, Gabdrakhmanov almost immediately left for Kazakhstan and spent about a month there, according to leaked information. Albina, meanwhile, was preparing a backup plan for her family: in December 2022, she obtained Kyrgyz citizenship. At the same time, several hundred other Russians, including many of those called elites, did the same. Anti-corruption expert Ilya Shumanov noted that these passports were most likely obtained through corruption, with a service fee ranging from $5,000 to $30,000. 

One of the development managers on the Mikord side is a 33-year-old Alina Safiullina. Formally, she does not work for the company, but she has received a total of about two million rubles ($25500 approx.) from it under the contracts for the registry architecture development services. Before Mikord joined the registry project, Alina had worked at the Analytical Center under the Russian government, which was also involved in the registry development.

In the summer of 2025, Safiullina's husband, Timur, told a Tatarstan newspaper that the spouses would often travel all over Europe and that they had lived in Vienna for three years. From the interview and Timur's resume, it appears that Alina Safiullina was actively working on the military registry while living a vibrant life in Europe. Although the Safiullins returned to Russia in 2025, Vienna remains their favorite city. 

“[Vienna] is probably my favorite city”, Timur Safiullin said in the interview. “Everything here meets my inner needs, and I dare say the same for my significant other. I am impressed by the lifestyle of the people here. Vienna is a safe and peaceful place to live. It has a well-developed public transportation system and a very comfortable urban environment”. 

***** 

A few days after the hack, Mikord updated its website. The company's values appeared on the home page, including “a special approach to security issues”. The company wrote that it “exclusively uses Russian software solutions” and is “trusted by law enforcement agencies and state-owned companies”. 

Soon, the mention of this commitment disappeared from the website.

When asked about the reasons for the hack, Mikord CEO Ramil Gabdrakhmanov responded philosophically: “Listen, it happens to everyone. Many are being attacked right now”. For several days after compromising the company’s infrastructure, the hackers remained in the system and were able to read the internal correspondence.

Throughout the day on Saturday, December 6, Mikord’s management collected logs from employees’ computers to investigate the incident. Ruslan Gaztdinov hadn’t even read these messages until his colleague Timur Absatrov wrote that the FSB was brought in because of the hack.

Absatrov was worried that the client wouldn't continue working with Mikord: “I think they might not renew the contract”. “It’s fine”, Gaztdinov replied. They agreed to spend Sunday playing Dota together against the “soldiers” from the Ministry of Defense team, as Mikord employees referred to them in their correspondence. 

Get Lost has made the array it received from the hackers publicly available. The first part of the documents and source code can be viewed at the link.

Read on istories.media →

The reason for the eviction was nonpayment of rent. Previously, IStories and the German media outlet CORRECTIV reported that Dadaev, a functionary of the far-right AfD with ties among Kadyrov’s people and ultra-nationalists, had effectively seized the villa — ignoring the eviction lawsuit and failing to pay rent. He turned the mansion into a meeting place for the local AfD cell, which is headed by deputy chairman of the party’s Bundestag faction Jörn König.

On the night before the eviction, a fire broke out in the protected historic mansion. Police have not yet commented on the causes of the arson. Previously, local antifascists had thrown paint at the villa several times. Dadaev himself was not in the city — on the night of the arson and just before the eviction, he announced on his Instagram that he had left for Dortmund.

• Who is Dadaev. IStories and CORRECTIV discovered that under the name of the AfD member from Hanover, Noah Krieger, is actually 36-year-old Murad Dadaev, a native of Chechnya. In the party, he is promoting an image of a Chechen integrated into German society, while at the same time using ultra-nationalist rhetoric and promoting Kremlin narratives about the need for economic cooperation between Germany and Vladimir Putin.

• Kadyrov’s people and far-rightists. Murad’s brother is Suleiman Dadaev. In 2009, he participated in the murder of former Ramzan Kadyrov bodyguard Umar Israilov in Vienna. Israilov had fled to the EU to testify about torture and extrajudicial executions in Chechnya. The investigation concluded that his murder was ordered by Kadyrov. Suleiman Dadaev was sentenced to 19 years in prison in Austria, but for unclear reasons he was released early — in 2022, he flew direct from Vienna to Moscow and later received a passport under a new name, IStories found.

• Murad Dadaev claims that he does not communicate with his brother. As Chechen opposition figure Tumso Abdurakhmanov noted, in reality, after his release Suleiman Dadaev has visited his brother’s villa in Hanover. How he was able to enter the EU after his release and deportation remains unknown.

• Among the frequent guests at Dadaev’s villa is Said-Magomed Ibragimov. He was a bodyguard for two of Kadyrov’s closest associates, Magomed Daudov and Abuzayed Vismuradov (the current prime minister and deputy prime minister of Chechnya, respectively), and is also included in the network of “official representatives” of Kadyrov in Europe. He has been linked to pro-Kadyrov criminal groups in Germany.

• At the same time, Dadaev’s circle includes not only moderate AfD deputies like Jörn König, but also members of the party’s ultra-nationalist wing such as Stephan Brandner and Mischa Fere. Dadaev also claims that he is in contact with Markus Frohnmaier, one of the most fervent Vladimir Putin apologists within the party.

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The hackers had been inside the system for several months. They gained access to the source code, technical documents, and internal correspondence of Mikord. The group claims it destroyed the company’s infrastructure.

IStories contacted Mikord director Ramil Gabdrakhmanov, who confirmed the hack: “Listen, well, who hasn’t been hacked? These days, a lot of people are under attack.” When asked whether the company is involved in the development of the UMR, Gabdrakhmanov declined to answer. “I can’t comment on anything. We work on several projects,” he said.

Go by the Forest provided the documents received from the hackers to IStories journalists; the newsroom verified their authenticity and confirmed Mikord’s involvement in the development of the UMR. Soon, we will tell you how the registry and its main components work.

Plans by the Russian authorities to create a digital military registry became known in April 2023, when the corresponding bill was adopted by the State Duma in a single day, passing both the second and third readings at once. At that time, Meduza first named one of the registry’s developers — according to the publication, it was RT Labs, a subsidiary of Rostelecom.

In February 2024, the government designated Rostelecom as the sole contractor for the Ministry of Digital Development’s contracts to create the Unified Military Registry. The deadline for completion of the state contracts was set for December 31, 2024. From Putin’s orders it also followed that the UMR and the summons registry were planned to be used already in the fall 2024 draft, but the full launch of the new system took place a year later. Since October 2025, draft notices in the electronic registry began to be posted by military commissariats in dozens of regions across the country, and in four of them, they even abandoned paper draft notices altogether.

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“A soldier is not a profession, but a calling. There is no foreign land for those who fight for justice <...> May the heroes be glorified!” — reads the plaque attached to the bust.

Next to Gloss’s monument, a bust of Corporal Ivan Kokovin was also installed; they died together while carrying out a combat mission.

In September, School No. 115 also was named after Gloss and Kokovin.

Michael Gloss was the son of CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Juliana Gloss and Larry Gloss, a developer of software for the U.S. Department of Defense and NATO. In 2023, Michael dropped out of school in the United States, joined the hippies, and set off to travel the world. That summer, he ended up in Russia, and by fall he had signed a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense. On April 4, 2024, he was killed near Chasiv Yar. He was 21 years old.

Putin posthumously awarded Gloss the Order of Courage, which was presented to the parents of the deceased through U.S. presidential envoy Steven Whitkoff.

During his speech at the “Valdai” forum in October 2025, Putin commented on Gloss’s death in the war.

“How does the anthem go? The United States — the home of the brave. Well, he was a brave man. He truly proved it with his actions, with his life. <...> Even though he was an American, he was a Russian soldier,” he said.

The fate of Gloss was first reported by IStories in April 2025; the full investigation can be read here.

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He calls himself Noah Krieger — Noah the Warrior — and claims to be the first Chechen in German politics (although at least one Chechen, Bela Bach, has even been a member of parliament before).

Krieger is a member of Alternative for Germany (AfD), the populist right-wing party. It is the largest opposition force in the parliament and the most popular party at the moment. 

According to Noah himself, in the AfD he is promoting an image of an integrated German Muslim, debunking harmful stereotypes about Chechens. Noah wears elegant coats and fedoras, smokes cigars and hosts musical soirées at a luxurious villa in Hanover. In short, he aspires to live a fancy lifestyle of a Weimar Republic bourgeois.

Krieger joined the AfD over a year ago, but only came to prominence on social media this summer. He now has 435,000 followers on Instagram — more than almost any of Germany’s top politicians.

Calling himself a proud Chechen and a devout Muslim, Krieger considers Germany his homeland and is not averse to German nationalist kitsch — at times, of the Nazi kind. He wears German camouflage, uses the Wehrmacht motto Gott mit uns (“God with us”) in his publications, as well as the phrase Deutschland über alles (“Germany above all”), which used to be the first verse of the national anthem during the Third Reich. Krieger likes to talk about the “heritage of the German nation” and addresses his supporters by the word Kameraden, just like the NSDAP members used to (which is why this word is nearly taboo nowadays).

In his Instagram posts, the German flag appears alongside the Russian flag. 

“Our party is pro-Russian, and I personally am very pleased that it is pro-Russian,” Krieger says of the AfD. 

He speaks out in favor of Russia, praises Vladimir Putin, likes videos of raids on migrants on social media and talks a lot about the benefits of cheap Russian gas. Krieger laments the “stupid policy” of sanctions and the U.S. pressure: “Our country is under a thumb. It’s not cool to talk about it, but our country is under America. <...> We have a NATO base, Ramstein, where American soldiers live off our money, which we pay in taxes. Our taxes — their salaries.”

Krieger openly opposes the current German government. He advocates for a “strong German nation”. In his eyes, Nazism in Germany and Islam in Arab countries are similar in some ways — “strict rules” help to “overcome anarchy”.

Despite his provocative rhetoric, the kind that sometimes leads even the high-ranking AfD members to persecution, Krieger has managed to establish himself in the party in a very short time. Now he stands shoulder to shoulder with high-ranking politicians while maintaining ties with Ramzan Kadyrov’s inner circle. IStories and CORRECTIV tell the story of Noah Krieger.

Older brother: Taliban training and an assassination case

Noah Krieger is a pseudonym: the actual name is Murad Salmanovich Dadaev. He was born in Grozny in 1989 and grew up in the village of Samashki. It is notorious for the massacre carried out by the paramilitary units of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in April 1995, when about 100 civilians were killed. A little later, one of Dadaev’s brothers, Zelimkhan, was also injured during the federal troops’ mop-up operation.

“It was our village that faced the worst. It was completely destroyed. On the night of April 7, there was an assault which they called a ‘mop-up operation’. There were a lot of deaths. I was hiding in the basements at the time and saw it all with my own eyes. I was also there during the second war,” Krieger-Dadaev tells IStories.

Murad himself claimed he had changed his name after marrying a German woman: “It’s easier to live and work in Germany with a German surname.” However, according to the Russian registry office data, Dadaev is married to a woman from his village. And while Dadaev himself has stopped traveling to Russia, his wife visits Chechnya often, according to the data on border crossing, and even the war isn’t a hindrance.

“I left in May 2006, when [Ramzan] Kadyrov had already come to power,” Dadaev says. It was thanks to his older brother Suleiman that he got to Europe. Suleiman is better known in the Austrian press as Muslim Dadaev, a party in a contract killing case.   

On January 13, 2009, Umar Israilov, Ramzan Kadyrov’s former bodyguard, was shot dead in Vienna. Israilov had fought on the side of Ichkeria until the end and was captured by Kadyrov’s forces in 2003. After being tortured in captivity, he went to work for Kadyrov’s security service. Back then, Kadyrov wasn’t the president of Chechnya yet, but the head of security for his father, Akhmad Kadyrov. These details of Israilov’s life are mentioned in the indictment by the Vienna prosecutor’s office and confirmed by two independent sources of the New York Times.

In 2004, Israilov fled Chechnya for Europe and was granted asylum in Austria. In exile, he filed lawsuits with the European Court of Human Rights and testified that Ramzan Kadyrov was personally involved in the tortures and extrajudicial executions of Chechens. Back in the 2000s, when Russia and the world were still largely unaware of the Kadyrov clan, Israilov’s testimony was valuable material.

Three people ended up in the dock in the Israilov murder case: Kadyrov’s associate Ramzan Edilov (known as Otto Kaltenbrunner in Austria), Turpal-Ali Yeshurkaev, and Suleiman (Muslim) Dadaev. The actual executor of the murder, Lecha Bogatyrev, fled to Chechnya and joined Kadyrov’s police force as a commander of a special unit. 

The investigation established that Suleiman, Murad Dadayev’s older brother, and Kadyrov’s associate Edilov had run the Chechen Cultural Society in Austria, an establishment created to gather information about their compatriots living in the country. In the Israilov operation, the older Dadayev’s task was to conduct external surveillance. The plan was to kidnap Israilov and take him to Chechnya; killing him was just plan B. The Vienna prosecutor’s office considered Ramzan Kadyrov to be the mastermind behind the assassination.

During the trial, the older Dadaev said that he had graduated from a military academy in Volgograd and, after the First Chechen War, had worked in the security forces of Ichkeria. In 1998, Dokka Umarov, the future “terrorist number one” in Russia, invited him to a Taliban training camp in Pakistan. After the training, he was recruited to the “special department” of the Supreme Sharia Court of Ichkeria — the name given to the internal intelligence service in the unrecognized republic, similar to Russia’s FSB.

In 2003, he was sent on a mission to Europe to investigate the disappearance of the funds Ichkerian fighters had been supposed to receive from Saudi Arabia. On the orders of Umarov, Suleiman stayed: he changed his name to Muslim Dadayev, was granted asylum in Austria, and brought his brothers to Europe.

Murad told IStories that the brothers moved to Europe after one of their family members had been killed in the war while fighting for Ichkeria. On the day of the murder, it was also one of Murad’s brothers that Suleiman called several times. However, the prosecutor’s office was unable to prove whether he knew about Suleiman’s intentions or whether he was even involved in planning the crime. Murad was summoned to court back then, but he declined to testify against his relative. According to the younger Dadaev, when Israilov was killed, Murad himself wasn’t even in Austria.

The Austrian authorities questioned Suleiman Dadaev’s full testimony, but acknowledged that he had definitely undergone intelligence training. The older Dadaev called himself an Islamist and Kadyrov’s opponent, but, according to the witnesses’ testimony, he was not a strict observer of Islamic dogma — in the evenings he would sometimes enjoy a glass of beer in Vienna. 

And although during the interrogations Suleiman insisted he still supported Dokka Umarov, whom he called the president of Chechnya, this did not deter him from traveling to Russia. As IStories discovered from the leaked Russian databases, in 2008, immediately before the Israilov assassination, the older Dadaev traveled to Chechnya and got a Russian passport, even though he had already been registered as a terrorist in Russia by that time.

In 2011, Suleiman Dadaev was sentenced to 19 years in prison in Austria for his involvement in the Israilov assassination, and would be supposed to be serving his sentence as of today. However, as IStories have discovered, on February 24, 2022, he flew to Moscow straight from Vienna. Then he obtained a new driver’s license in Chechnya and a residence permit in Moscow, divorced and recently received a new passport in the name of Surkho Shikaro — his nickname among the Chechens in Austria.

The Austrian Ministry of Justice did not provide any substantial comment regarding Suleiman Dadaev’s release. In response to our request they stated that, in accordance with the law, they can release convicts in such cases on parole after serving half of their sentence, provided that the convict agrees to leave the country.

“I heard they had planned to deport him,” Amina Larsson, a lawyer with Vayfond, a Chechen human rights organization in Sweden, told IStories. “But have they really done it? That’s obviously terrible. It gives other killers the green light. Kadyrov will now say [to his killers]: ’We’ll bail you out, just do this and that, and everything will be fine.’"

“It can all be found online. What could I possibly be hiding? Yes, my brother was imprisoned for this... is imprisoned, to be more precise, for his crime. What does this have to do with me?” Murad Dadaev responds to a question about his brother, but corrects himself after a follow-up question. “Well, yes, he’s been released... He’s living his life. He has served his sentence. He’s not on the run and isn’t hiding from anyone. To be honest, I’m not really keeping in touch with him now. He’s living his own life and has distanced himself from us.”

IStories did not succeed in contacting Suleiman Dadaev.

Villa for the AfD

Murad Dadaev does not hide his real name. In 2020, he established a company under his initials, DMS, in Hanover. According to Murad himself, this brand encompasses an aesthetic medicine clinic, a construction business, a legal service for car owners, and a historic villa near the city center that can be rented for coworking and events.

Dadaev says that he registers his businesses under his wife’s name. However, IStories have been unable to find any evidence that the companies under his management or under the management of a woman named Stefanie Krieger are conducting any business or showing any financial results. The only thing that stands out is his 19th-century neo-baroque mansion, measuring about 850 square meters, once built for Karl Haake, a piano manufacturer. Inside one can find heavy wooden panels, numerous moldings, and marble staircases.

The villa is leased to Dadaev, according to the court documents available to IStories and CORRECTIV. In our conversation, he insists the villa belongs to him: “I lease it to myself.”

According to the estimates by the Hanover real estate agents we spoke to, the rent could cost Dadaev around €17,000-25,000 per month excluding utilities — an unaffordable amount for someone whose businesses are effectively defunct (according to the latest available data from 2023, Dadaev’s company reported a loss of more than €200,000 back then). 

According to a source familiar with the financial situation surrounding Dadaev’s villa, two years ago DMS did indeed rent the mansion to sublet it as workspace, but the business did not take off.

Dadaev then informed the villa’s owner that he would now be holding Alternative for Germany meetings there, the source said. The owner warned that in that case he would evict Dadaev’s company from the mansion. 

It didn’t work. Now the villa has effectively been seized, according to our sources in the real estate market: while Dadaev’s company would initially pay the rent regularly, it now fails to, and it is also ignoring the eviction lawsuit (the court ruling is at the disposal of IStories and CORRECTIV). Meanwhile, the mansion has been turned into a kind of headquarters for the AfD Hanover branch. Dadaev says that he rents the premises to the AfD, and the party members come to the villa to various gatherings as guests.    

The leadership of the Hanover AfD cell sometimes meets at Dadaev’s house in its entirety, led by Jörn König, the deputy chairman of the AfD faction in the Bundestag. The meetings spark local anti-fascists’ protests — they throw paint at the villa and break windows there, much to the owner’s displeasure. Dadaev himself is already calling on his supporters to organize a “hunt for anti-fascists”. “If anyone throws anything [at the villa’s windows] again, I’ll take my gun and shoot them in the head,” he says to IStories, supposedly half-jokingly.

Next to Dadaev, one can often see a 28-year-old Bundestag deputy Micha Fehre, a supporter of Björn Höcke, the leader of the AfD ultra-nationalist wing, which is recognized as extremist by the German intelligence agencies. Höcke’s team are the most fervent Putin apologists within the AfD. They advocate for halting arms supplies to Ukraine and for maintaining the purchases of Russian gas, as well as justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as Putin’s right to “secure a buffer zone.”

According to Dadaev, he has long been acquainted with another high-ranking representative of the AfD’s ultra-nationalist wing, Höcke’s confidant and an MP, Stephan Brandner.

The Chechen AfD functionary probably also maintains contact with 

Markus Frohnmaier, a Bundestag deputy closest to the Russian leadership. The deputy mentions Dadaev in his Instagram posts and follows him on social media despite not following many accounts overall.

Frohnmaier used to visit Russia regularly and, according to a Dossier Center investigation based on the leaked correspondence involving a Russian presidential administration employee, was considered a MP “completely under the Kremlin control”. In the fall of 2025, Frohnmaier decided to visit Russia again, which caused a scandal in the Bundestag — other German politicians believe that he might be passing secret information on to the Kremlin, which is particularly sensitive in the context of the Putin — NATO confrontation.

“Yes, Marcus and I are very close. We talk a lot, he’s a very nice, smart, intelligent guy. I like his policies,” says Dadaev. “On Saturday, I was in Prague with my family, and they invited me over when they saw that I was in Prague: ’Oh, we’re here, come to our event. I came, Alice Weidel [co-chair of the AfD] was there, we hugged. Markus was there too. He said to her, ’Oh, this is Herr Krieger, our Chechen warrior.’”

Frohnmaier himself, in response to a request from IStories and CORRECTIV, stated that he didn’t work with or talk to Dadayev-Krieger personally and only knows him from his social media activity.

No public AfD meetings in Prague had been announced on the dates mentioned by Dadayev. We have sent inquiries to the party’s deputies.

Villa for Kadyrov’s people

“He emerged somewhat unexpectedly. In fact, he did not start out as a politician. We thought he was a lawyer. Many open dissidents would even take photos with him,” Vayfond sources say about Dadaev. According to the human rights activists, Dadaev would meet those coming from Chechnya to Europe and “help them start off” — at the same time, according to Vayfond sources, "trying to lure them over to Kadyrov’s side". In the conversation with IStories, Dadaev himself says that he is simply happy to have an opportunity to chat with fellow Chechens of any political convictions and invite them over for tea.

In Dadaev’s circle the human rights activists have noticed people they tried to protect from deportation as those faced real danger in their home country, says Vayfond lawyer Amina Larsson. For example, Ali Bataev, who sought political asylum in Switzerland as an opponent of Kadyrov in 2022, appears in a photo from Dadaev’s villa on his Instagram, as noted by IStories.  

"I help anyone who asks me to. I never refuse. Even if these people oppose Russia - if they come to live here, I welcome them too. It’s my duty to help people. I’m like a doctor: I can treat anyone. People think I’ve taken a side. That’s not true," Dadaev replies.

He does indeed present himself as a lawyer on social media. In the conversation with IStories, Dadaev says that he graduated from the University of Hanover with a law degree. However, in the autobiographical information forms he submitted when applying for a Russian passport, he only indicated a year he spent studying at Chechen State University in Grozny (this information is at the disposal of IStories and CORRECTIV). 

Murad used to have a thick beard and practise martial arts in Grozny with Kadyrov’s Akhmat club fighters. He still practices in Germany. Combat sports are an important element of pro-Kadyrov propaganda in Europe. “Kadyrov’s athletes played a very big role in deceiving many young people and turning them to Kadyrov’s side,” says Larsson.

Dadaev tells IStories about his long-standing friendship with Khamzat Chimaev, the UFC star middleweight champion and Ramzan Kadyrov’s favorite fighter who is also a coach of the Chechen leader’s children.

In Germany, Dadaev remains close to Kadyrov’s circle. Khamzat Kadyrov, Ramzan Kadyrov’s nephew and security issues advisor to the Chechen leader, leaves encouraging comments on Dadaev’s Instagram page. A source in the diaspora says that Dadaev is close friends with Hussein Agayev, a member of the Chechen diaspora in Europe who is said to be Kadyrov’s new representative in Germany. 

Agaev is a co-founder of the Terek Cultural Center in Hamburg. According to Reinhard Bingener and Markus Wehner, authors of “The Silent War: How Autocrats Attack Germany” book, the real purpose of this organization is to monitor the Chechen diaspora on behalf of Ramzan Kadyrov.

Dadaev himself says that he does not know Hussein Agayev. He says a lot of people comment on his social media pages. “I know Selim Agayev, he’s an athlete,” he clarifies.

Selim Agayev is Hussein’s son, who performs for Ramzan Kadyrov’s fighting club. The head of Chechnya even personally congratulates Agayev Jr. on his victories.

Other co-founders of the Terek center are Timur Dugazaev and Said-Magomed Ibragimov. Dugazaev is a well-known athlete and European champion in mixed martial arts, who has been awarded the Akhmat Kadyrov Order, the highest award of Chechnya. He was added to the U.S. sanctions list due to his proximity to Kadyrov. In 2018, according to a Spiegel investigation, he received an order to kidnap Kadyrov’s bodyguard Mansur S., who had fled in 2012, from Berlin. A few weeks later, Mansur appeared in an Instagram photo in the military uniform, in a Chechen special forces unit. 

It was Dugazayev who was previously referred to as Kadyrov’s representative in Europe. However, according to the sources in the diaspora interviewed by IStories, he has been recently sent away from Germany and is now living either in the UAE or in Saudi Arabia. Earlier, the Spiegel investigation revealed that Dugazaev had obtained German citizenship illegally (he used the personal data of his younger brother, Islam).

Vayfond members have also heard about Dugazayev’s expulsion, although they emphasize the information is not yet confirmed.

Said-Magomed Ibragimov, a Chechen from Hamburg, is a close friend of Dadaev and a frequent guest at the villa where AfD meets. He used to run a security company and a Chechen fight club, Team Wolf Hamburg, which human rights activists link to the pro-Kadyrov Guerilla Vaynakh Nation biker gang. The gang members have several times been suspected of involvement in violent crime. Ironically, Ibragimov himself has played a Chechen mafioso in 4 Blocks, a hugely popular German series about the drug cartels of Berlin’s Neukölln district. 

Ibragimov’s “fighters,” along with Ibragimov himself, would wear the emblem of the Bergmann (“Highlander”) special forces battalion, a unit of Hitler’s army commanded by Theodor Oberländer and consisting of people from Caucasus regions. Ibragimov was born in 1972, but his nickname on social media contains the numbers “88,” which is a widely used code for "Heil Hitler".

Ibragimov has been several times seen in the company of Chechnya’s deputy prime minister and former commander of the Akhmat special forces unit, Abuzayed Vismuradov, and the current head of the Chechen government, Magomed Daudov. They would regularly visit Europe between 2012 and 2017. Vismuradov is now under EU sanctions for torture of LGBT people and Kadyrov’s critics, while Daudov is under the sanctions of the Baltic states, Poland and the U.S.

“They come to me when they have problems. I provide legal services. I have my own law office here. When we need security, I ask those who have security companies. They come and provide security. When a person from Kadyrov came to the Netherlands, they were also part of his security detail there. I am open-minded, I am not afraid to work with different people. As a lawyer, I have every right to do so,” Dadaev tells IStories about his acquaintances.

Due to the nature of his work, he explains, he is not accustomed to paying attention to people’s criminal past or present and views members of organized crime groups as just clients who are willing to pay large sums of money.

"Maybe he’s a member of some mafia group, but... we do deal with criminal law here, and I’ve dealt with the criminal bosses. <...> I don’t deny that he might have some connections. Maybe. As Chechens, we keep in touch, despite our different walks of life. <...> We work with anyone who comes to us. Kurds, Albanians, all kinds of groups. Hells Angels, bikers. They often have problems because they are involved in security businesses and lead a nocturnal lifestyle," Dadaev says about his work.

The Hells Angels biker gang, mentioned by the AfD member, is also considered an organized crime group by the German authorities. They have been linked to the aforementioned Guerrilla Nation gang.

“There are many people involved in crime who nevertheless lead decent lives,” says the Hanover politician.

Right now, the Kadyrov community in Europe is undergoing a kind of a restructuring under the leadership of Agaev, and Murad Dadaev is playing a significant role in this, the diaspora believes. Vayfond members are also convinced that it was Kadyrov’s decision to bring Murad Dadaev into German politics. 

“They accuse me [both Chechens and Germans] of being some kind of agent. And I say, I don’t mind being an agent, so would you pay me instead of spreading these rumors? But no one pays me. I live on my own, I work long hours. These accusations against me are just talk,” Dadaev comments. "I have never been involved in any clans and do not intend to be. I remain neutral. I tell all Chechens: don’t argue, don’t quarrel. My position is neutral, everyone knows that. Some people don’t like the fact that I support the Russian authorities and Kadyrov. I believe that this man has achieved a lot, and that is a fact. The fact that he built a republic deserves respect."

Dadaev-Kriger is now unsure whether he should continue his career in the AfD. He complains that his party peers often ask him to refrain from making overly radical statements, and his support for Russia is no longer met with unconditional approval (Alice Weidel, for example, is now criticising MPs for travelling to Russia). “To be honest, war isn’t so scary for me. When you know you have enemies, you can and you must defend yourself. It’s a little different than when you are surrounded by lip servers. German politicians hate me simply because I’m from Russia,” he says.

AfD failed to respond to CORRECTIV and IStories’ inquiries about Murad Dadaev-Kriger.

German-language version (CORRECTIV)

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