A Dead Man's Donbass
A Dead Man's Donbass
Translation of a January 2022 Novaya Gazeta article about smuggling and corruption around the militarized 'grayzone'. Murdered detectives, Kurt Volker, Poroshenko, Akhmetov, officers, spooks....
The following is a translation. The original can be found here. The author lived in Ukraine until 2017, when he was forced to leave due to his journalistic work regarding smuggling - an article explaining why he left can be found here. For context, he is generally published in the most liberal, pro-EU, anti-Russian publications, such as ‘Ukrainskaya Pravda’ or ‘Novaya Gazeta’.
I chose to translate this piece of investigative journalism for the following threads:
the formation of an military-political-economic elite after 2014 whose privileged control over the Donbass militarized ‘gray zone’ netted them super-profits, and who were correspondingly disinclined to demilitarize the region.
behind the high-branded patriotic slogans, many nationalist paramilitaries were glorified tax officers controlling (and vying over control for, a competition which explains many of their ‘ideological conflicts’) smuggling routes
How the old Ukrainian economic elite reacted to the war. I have written on this topic here, and the following also goes into how Akhmetov funded forces both sides of the frontline to protect his economic assets. But maybe more important is the fact that the ‘hybrid war’ was a beast which, to an extent, was out of Akhmetov’s control - as the 2017 ‘blockade of the separatists’ would show, when enterprising ‘ordinary patriots’ imposed a rail blockade of the separatist republics, which in turn provoked the latter to nationalize Akhmetov’s assets. The blockade, in turn, was ‘reluctantly’ supported by Poroshenko’s government. After reading the following materials, it is hard to believe that Poroshenko (the only Ukrainian billionaire to increase his wealth after 2014) were all so reluctant to increase their control over the ‘gray zone’ controlled market, which yielded billions of dollars every year….
The increasing strength of entirely comprador agrobusiness magnates who received remarkable subsidies from the government and enjoyed important links with the White House
The head of the anti-smuggling investigation team in eastern Ukraine was killed. But journalists saved the archive of his records. What is being traded, who protects it, and who earns the most in the "gray zone"
17:06, January 24, 2022 Alexey Bobrovnikov , specially for Novaya Gazeta
“Under the coal dust”, in the railway cars that run through the “gray zone” of Donbass, is a quite real world of bootleggers hailing from the times of dry law, controlled by people who are directly related to the highest ranks of the state - the kings of its shadow world. All this is much more than the coal schemes the fifth president of Ukraine has been incriminated on, and much more terrible. Alexey Bobrovnikov recently completed his own investigation of the "gray zone", fragments of which we are publishing today for the first time.
Step into the gray
At the beginning of August 2015, I received an editorial assignment to check the rumors about drug trafficking through the war zone in the Donbass and at the same time draw a map of trade operations with the uncontrolled territories - at that time, and to this day, an illegal, purely bootlegging enclave controlled by the special services of both sides of the conflict.
In those days, we made lightning-quick marches between several cities and met with various people, most of whom avoided talking or openly asked not to publish anything that was said.
One of these people was a serviceman, who, according to him, detained a car with a very specific cargo at a checkpoint with the picturesque name “Motherland”:
it was a bag with bank cards transported from the territory of the “hybrid republics” to the “mainland”.
After the refusal of the military man to hand over the “courier” with hundreds of bank cards to his command, and his demand instead to call in the security services, the military authorities began to persecute him: from imprisonment in a guardhouse to criminal prosecution.
I recorded an interview with the soldier, but several hours passed, and he began to cut off my phone with requests not to publish these testimonies in any case: in his words, everything was already settled, there would be no more problems, just be silent for God's sake and never remember my name again .
In those days, the Ukrainian security service (SBU) decided to fight the military’s unexpected monopoly over illegal commodity flows in the war zone, where the price for a heavily loaded rangefinder to enter the “gray zone” often reached 5-10 thousand dollars.
Eyewitnesses recalled an episode when a soldier, caught by his commander in such a deal, stood at attention, confidently, defiantly, but with indescribable sadness in his eyes, looking into the officer’s eyes and to the question – “So what should I do with you for this, what ?!" – calmly replied:
“Shoot me, comrade lieutenant colonel. Demote me. Do what you want. I have never seen such money in my eyes and never will.”
Beaters
The President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko declared war on illegal trade under the slogan of "stopping the financing of terrorism". He did this remaining in the shadow, through the hands of his people, appointed as heads of military-civilian administrations.
Several volunteers from among the retired military and intelligence agencies have volunteered to lead monitoring teams designed to combat such activities.
They were the force alongside which, using the official mandate of the president and his secret services, I could travel around the front with my own mission: to try to figure out the supply channels and volumes of trade in anything.
On the morning of August 28, I received a call from my editor. The conversation was very strange.
“They say you're in trouble,” he said.
“We aren’t having any problems,” I replied.
- Are you sure?
Yes, I am absolutely sure of it.
There was a long silence in response.
I drank tea from a tin mug and stroked a cat, which was nailed to the location of the anti-aircraft brigade. I was in the shallow rear of the frontline.
Who is spreading such rumors? I asked.
The man on the other end of the line hesitated and turned the conversation to another topic.
“Nevertheless, take care over there,” he finished.
Rumors that my people and I were in some kind of trouble began to spread in the capital a day before we, without knowing it ourselves, ended up in the smugglers' den; exactly one day before I got in touch with my new informant and arrived at the place agreed on for the meeting.
On the day that word of my troubles began to circulate in Kiev, the anti-smuggling unit we were about to join was fired upon for the first time in the immediate vicinity of the military brigade headquarters, in whose zone of operations this anti-smuggling unit thunderously set about its mission.
Under the coal dust
That morning, waiting for the guys from the mobile group, we sat for several hours in the sun near the front line.
The store in front of the bridge leading to the territory of the “hybrid republic” of the “LPR” is a meeting place for people from various groups, something like an informal headquarters.
This place, as well as the road going further towards Lugansk; also the thermal power plant that supplies electricity to both sides of the river (the thermal power plant controlled by the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov) are all inviolable objects, much safer than cars with a red cross.
The war, which has already claimed several thousand lives and destroyed dozens of villages, has not touched the main objects of the energy and transport infrastructure.
The one who controlled admission into this zone was the customs office, the tax office, the police and the judiciary all rolled into one.
In this particular sector, such a force was the 92nd separate mechanized brigade (OMBR) of the armed forces of Ukraine, which controlled all the entrances and exits from the vicinity of the town of Shchastye (meaning ‘Happiness’), a stone's throw from the capital of the "LNR", with which it was connected by a perfectly clean, untouched road that had been fired on by no one. It resembled a metropolitan highway, straight as an arrow, leading to the very heart of the enclave.
Goods travelling on the asphalt surface were often controlled by the army. The goods that went by rail, with a transshipment point at the Thermal Power Plant (TPP), were completely controlled by the special services and the headquarters of Ukraine’s so-called anti-terrorist operation, headed by SBU (Secret Services of Ukraine) General Vitaly Malikov, a former policeman from Crimea.
In turn, the police, together with the military, controlled scrap metal and part of the smuggling that went overland and through the boat crossing.
Military intelligence was rumored to be in control of drugs.
Not ordinary or junior officers, but senior staff officers became the main beneficiaries of this trade.
Night on the front line
Outside the window, crickets or cicadas chirped in a thousand ways, but not a single sound, not a single rustle sounded from the front - the artillery was silent, the small arms were silent.
Here, at the very front line, the windows of a soldier's latrine look out exactly at the position of the enemy ... at shooting distance, not even of a sniper’s bullet, but of a hunting cartridge.
But the enemy was silent.
He was silent yesterday and the day before yesterday, he was silent on the day when we swam in the river, showing our bare backsides to the separatists who were dug in on the other side.
He was silent today also...
The headquarters was located less than a kilometer from us. Did we feel safe knowing this? Not a single minute ...
Just a few hundred meters from where we were now smoking cigarettes and getting ready for bed, several shots were fired at the anti-smuggling group’s vehicle.
These bullets came from a sniper's prone in the immediate vicinity of the headquarters of the Ukrainian military brigade that controlled the sector.
Second warning
The leader of the local anti-smuggling unit was Andrey Galushchenko .
I immediately liked him: tall, dry, lean, shaven bald, with quick reactions. He spoke briefly and clearly, military style.
He had been a military man in his past life: having fought his way through the first months of the war, while real hostilities continued, Andrey started helping evacuate civilians from shelling, then joined the project of investigating smuggling and money laundering.
In the last days of August, we recorded on camera several lengthy interviews with him and some of his people.
The intelligence agencies and the military, according to the analyses of these investigators, traded everything here: from Coca-Cola, alcohol, precious metals, baby diapers to drugs and dual-use goods -
raw materials for fiber optic networks, secure telephones, drug-containing medicines.
- It seems that we are witnessing some kind of birth of an empire based on smuggling goods from the “LPR” and “DPR”. With new princes, kings, dons of Corleone… ” I said then, uttering this phrase as a trigger, as a provocation: without a question mark, but with an ellipsis at the end.
“So far, the personalities themselves are remaining in the shadows,” Andrey answered after a short pause, “but I think that they will emerge . Perhaps they will come to us to negotiate.
The people I suspect have already told me that everyone has a price. Whoever sets a very high price for himself, I quote... " can buy a lead jacket for himself."
Andrei smiled, we both laughed.
On that day, we talked with him about that first, non-lethal shelling.
“If they attribute this to some kind of DRG ( sabotage and reconnaissance group. - A.B. ), which came from the LPR, this is complete nonsense,” Andrei said. - This was done by people whose presence in this place with weapons would not cause any suspicions in anyone ... And there are no witnesses - no one saw anything. That's why
I think that there are criminals among the border guards and the 92nd brigade who consider us a serious threat, and that they planned this action using their regular forces.
Andrei was right.
None of the Russians or Ukrainian separatists who fought on the other side could get to this place without being noticed. In the very heart of the location of the Ukrainian troops, any approach and imperceptible exit of the enemy sniper crew was impossible even theoretically.
Andrei said this on Saturday.
On Tuesday, four days after our first meeting and after several sorties into the smuggling "zone", Andrey Galushchenko , who gave the first and last documentary evidence of the black business of the "zone" of his life, was killed by a double explosion of an MON-50 anti-personnel mine, killed in territory controlled almost undividedly by the Kharkov brigade of the armed forces of Ukraine.
I was left with hours of recorded and not yet published interviews, as well as his personal gadgets, which turned out to be full of rough developments about the business of the “zone”.
Secret flows
I am reliably informed that generalized statistics on the performance of the so-called mobile groups (in total, seven of them were created to control the demarcation line) to this day is, from the point of view of the SBU, classified information and is not distributed even among senior officers of these special services.
The blockade of trade flows with the “LPR”, which was aimed at by the Galushchenko investigation team , was pure fiction: neither side planned to stop large-scale trade with the enemy, the only difference was that only people close to headquarters and the heads of the special services could be allowed access to this trade, allowed to earn on it.
Maybe they wanted to stop Andrei in this? Stop him from reaching out to his bosses, knowing that it would be impossible to stop this man?
The main principle of investigating organs in the post-Soviet zone, which every investigator of the special services or ordinary policeman will tell you half-jokingly, half-seriously, is that "the main thing in any investigation ... is not to come out on your own."
At the end of 2015, about a month after the death of Galushchenko, I tried to roughly estimate the scale of the shadow operations of the “gray zone”.
According to the roughest calculations, carried out by us together with the Ukrainian economist Pavlo Kukhta, the volume of trade with the non-government controlled provinces only for the first three quarters of 2015 (that is, approximately for the same period of time studied by the deceased Galushchenko and his group) amounted to, on average, from 35 to 50 billion hryvnias, or $1.4–2 billion.
These estimates are based on data from the Ukrainian State Statistics Committee, adjusted for the overall decline in the region's economy, recorded in connection with the war. However, these are only estimated volumes of trade in understandable, classically inherent goods in the region - food, coal, metal, additives for metallurgy, etc.
A detailed official analysis of even these financial flows does not exist to this day.
Taking into account the vague legal status of the occupied zones, against the backdrop of the complete absence of transparent taxation, juridical, or law enforcement systems in the East of Ukraine, plenty of stormy economic activity took place, absent any control by the state, or, more correctly, absent any visible and transparent control.
Kings of “the zone"
Climbing up the food chain of the "grey zone" business, one could reach one of the main beneficiaries and co-organizers of the separatist movement - the legendary shadow bigwig of Donbass Rinat Akhmetov , who maintained combat battalions on both sides of the front and was in a close political and economic alliance with then President Poroshenko, as well as Viktor Pinchuk , one of the country's largest metallurgical tycoons, who always played his own game.
But if Pinchuk distanced himself from the war and for the time being lay low, his counterpart Akhmetov played very dangerously.
Informally supporting the separatists (the Vostok battalion was his grouping in the so-called DPR), he was also behind part of the operations of a number of units of the far-right Azov battalion.
Part of the unit that wore these chevrons served the interests of Akhmetov, protecting his enterprises from marauders from the Ukrainian side of the conditional border.
Rinat Akhmetov, the owner of this Ukrainian business empire of steel and coal, played patriotism with both flags and tried at all costs to maintain control over the entire metallurgical vertical of power - from the extraction of coking coal to the main transport hub, the Mariupol port, which remained within the boundaries of Ukrainian-controlled land in those October 2014 days, when the map of the future enclaves of the Kremlin's satellites was still only being set in paper.
The difference with the pre-war situation for this oligarch was, in particular, that now he got involved in a curious business model. In order to match the spirit of the times and not fall out of fashion in a new, hybrid war, instead of traditional security services
he began to sponsor paramilitary groups on both sides of the front, mimicking popular ideologies there and playing on the strings of patriotism both in Ukraine and in the territory that received the name "DPR".
Ukraine, traditionally one of the ten largest global producers of rolled steel (as of 2017, according to the American ITA - International Trade Administration), in those years tried to maintain raw material supply channels within the enterprises of metallurgical holdings scattered on opposite sides of the conditional border.
However, the lower tiers of the Ukrainian metallurgical raw materials pyramid looked completely different from the map of mineral supply chains familiar to our eyes.
“The scrap metal market is three thousand tons a month,” Andrey Galushchenko told me in our last video-recorded interview. “Six hundred tons come in from the other side,” he pointed to the separatist enclaves on the map. “We are taking the initiative to the governor… There are objects in the zone that can be subject to looting, unguarded objects. They can simply be cut into scrap metal. Railway tracks are taken, quarry equipment.
A few days later, after Galushchenko had been taken care of, we, in the company of another member of the mobile anti-smuggling groups, made our way to the motor depot, which served in some way as a scrap metal warehouse and is located in a city which was the fiefdom of the military brigade.
Scrap metal, and there was a lot of it in the zone - not only abandoned factories were sawn into metal, but also old beds, cemetery fences, rusty agricultural implements, quarry equipment - was already the lot of the police.
Last Days of the ‘Beaters’
(two weeks after the murder)
One of the trucks intercepted by Andrey's group was still standing at this old motor depot.
But it was not very securely hidden there.
“Even before Andrey’s death, the truck escaped from “strict” police supervision several times and these attempts were stopped only after the driver was threatened that his wheels would get burned up,” the fighter with the call sign “Barmaley” jokes gloomily.
We tumble into the territory of the base with a quick step, our camera at the ready.
- Guys, wait! - shouts the woman who plays the role of a watchman here. - The chief went to the police! Give me the authorization, whatever you have, to inspect this area! — rushes after us. “You have no right to come in here!
In the meantime, we are already sitting astride a wagon, loaded to the top with what is called vtormet (second-grade metal) here - scrap metal of various calibers.
The dog barks, called to guard its simple belongings. And the watchman, disturbed by our visit, continues to lament:
Don't take pictures of me! You have no right! It's not nice, guys. Anyway we are, we too are hungry. It's not written anywhere what belongs to one person and what belongs to another .
Sitting on the edge of a loaded carriage and dangling my legs inward, I rest my soles against some kind of blue graveyard fence, cut down by looters from a nearby abandoned churchyard.
Below, under similar pieces of iron with layers of blue enamel paint peeled off dozens of times by one of the relatives of the silent owner of this last estate, there are sheets of rusted metal, sawn off at a mining and processing enterprise or at a neighboring quarry, where policemen – under guard at all times by the same local military from the Kharkov 92nd OMBR – neatly cut down to nothing the remnants of the old luxurious epoch of industrialization.
According to representatives of the Galushchenko mobile group, this grassroots segment of the local business was headed by police general Anatoly Naumenko , who was called in the sector Naum or Tolya Zhelezyakoy .
The local military princeling helped him in these matters - the commander of OMBR No. 92 Viktor "Wind" Nikolyuk, with whom, according to sources and informants working for Andrei Galushchenko and myself, they acted together.
Viktor Nikolyuk threatened Andrei Galushchenko before his death. "You’ll send DRG after me?" the investigator asked ironically. “Yes, yes,” Nikolyuk replied with a grin. I was also threatened by this officer, who told me he would send over his trusted people.
The "hybrid war" is a wasteless form of production, this is its advantage over the all-consuming meat grinder of an ideological war.
Here, in the "grayness", politics and the seeming differences between the colors of flags and shades of language have long been erased in those places where financial flows determined the locations of military clashes and a temporary, viscous, unfaithful world.
A direct threat
Two days after the murder of investigator Galushchenko , a man was waiting for me near the thermal power plant. He was a fairly reliable and trusted informant in the “gray zone”.
I had known this officer of the 92nd brigade for about a year. I will not reveal his name in this publication for reasons of his own safety.
He is of medium height, rather strong, a young, capable officer with a not particularly transparent past. From him I learned about expected military activity in the sector, as well as about the volume of coal supplies from the uncontrolled territory to the main territory of the country - what the Ukrainian State Bureau of Investigation is trying (or pretending to be trying) to investigate today.
There was absolutely nothing to investigate about the supply of coal in those days - everything happened transparently and openly. The most interesting thing was carried out under the cover of the coal trade, and I was going to talk to him about this.
So, that day we met in an industrial area near the river for the purpose of a conversation that strayed far from banal routine.
- Those who needed to be killed were killed. That’s the level of it all! - says my interlocutor from the 92nd brigade. “For me, there is only one person who could turn this around. Only one person could do this among us ... Only Typhoon had a similar level (gives the call sign of an officer who was killed the day after Galushchenko and who tried to be the first to investigate the circumstances of Galushchenko 's death . - A. B. ) and this man... No one else. There is preparation there. Intelligence... Information intelligence. Where will he depart from, where will he go, with whom will he work ...
“Smuggling is cooler than any army,” my interlocutor continues.
Suddenly, at some point, he stops speaking from the third person or plural. I wince as I feel the change.
At some point, and I missed this point, my informant ceases to be an informant.
In his speech about smugglers, addressed to me no longer in the third, but in the first person, there is a threat.
The voice of my interlocutor is the same - only the pronouns that hinted at his own involvement have changed.
“Smuggling cannot be stopped. Smuggling will crush everyone. The war will be real. Not like all this shit ... In houses, in apartments there will be a guerrilla war. If you declare war on the smugglers... But it won't come to that - to war...
I instinctively check the microphone, hidden from prying eyes and continuing to record.
Microphone in place...
“It will happens slowly... That one, this one ... If necessary - we will throw one out of the window, we have to do what we have to do… Eliminating a person is not a problem at all. I'm telling you this as a soldier. One shot, no one will hear. A click now - in the afternoon. No one will hear the shutter click. A man fell. Where did it come from - from over there... "
The Dead Man's Treasure Chest
Andrei Galushchenko 's computer came to me from the hands of his friend and one of his associates in the Debaltsevo operation to evacuate civilians.
At night, in drizzling rain, when I was staying up in the editorial office, looking through the materials already recorded, we met near my office, briefly exchanging news.
“Maybe you can recover something?” the man said, handing me a black piece of plastic, dusty and with a dead battery.
Before me, this gadget had already been in the hands of specialists from the "office": turning it on and checking it a few days later, I found an empty and cleaned piece of iron.
From a legal point of view, I had physical evidence before me - one of the key documents of the case: the personal computer of the investigator who had been killed a few weeks earlier.
In fact, I had a piece of metal, cleaned of everything that could carry value in the inquiry.
I started to recover and check the data found on the hard drive of Galushchenko 's computer with my good friend, a hacker from Denmark, who at various times helped various public organizations in projects - from Amnesty International to Wikileaks .
Jens (let's call him that; if he ever wants to reveal his true name and face, I'll leave that right to him) works with me on the gadgets of dead guys.
Jens is a Dane, equidistant from all groups in the Ukrainian "grey zone". Among my acquaintances, only he could unbiasedly analyze all the documents that came from me.
The dead speak slowly
Jokingly and behind my back, I call my hacker friend Harry Potter.
No, Jens doesn't wear glasses or use a magic wand as he flies about the city through between electrical wires in a rattling mini-cooper .
But Jens is a magical character for me, bringing to life what is dead.
Recordings, thousands of recordings, the crumbs of which are more than important.
Among these fragments – often half-wiped, sometimes leaving only the broken, mutilated file names – lies
my informant's file, "lost" by presidential officials.
The files were deleted in a hurry and without thinking that someone would look for them.
Jens is conjuring at the work table .
From time to time he shouts something like:
Look at this photo , are they friends?
— No, look at the text under it. There is Cyrillic text describing the details of complicity or potential complicity in some actions. These are enemy agents in the Ukrainian rear.
Jens nods his head and digs further.
Another of the victims of a series of terrorist attacks and murders was an airborne officer who worked under the auspices of the special services – more specifically, to identify separatists, embezzlers and smugglers.
Slowly, checking the "back doors" and areas that the investigator's foot has not set foot on, Jens does his own examination of the material evidence, checking those files that I ask him to take a closer look at.
Subsequently, the hacker Jens will help to establish the authenticity of the documents found by the dead investigators. The fugitive policeman Tsvetkov, then the dead Galushchenko , followed by the paratrooper Typhoon...
And a whole series of crimes before them and those that will come after.
"Who will be next?" I wondered while still in Ukraine. A few months later, not far from my last refuge at the westernmost Ukrainian border, I would meet people from one of the criminal gangs, who introduced themselves as the same 92nd brigade stationed in the town of Shchastye, Luhansk region.
The people I meet would discuss schemes to steal weapons from their military base, would discuss all this hundreds of kilometers from their own location and only an hour and a half from the Hungarian border.
The theft of weapons from military bases - massive, systemic - was another part of the Galushchenko investigation , the details of which we partially managed to recover.
Folder "Deleted Items"
There was no such folder. Or rather, there was, but it was just empty. The files we were restoring lay somewhere in the inter-file space, invisible to the naked eye. From there, my hacker friends pulled them out, first in Ukraine and then in Europe, restoring broken file structures bit by bit.
Murders, kidnappings, kidnappings with murders, gun thefts. Trade in gold and silver with separatist enclaves, covered by a military brigade and the local Luhansk SBU, and a series of crimes committed in another sector, this time controlled by police.
Dozens of unsolved crimes of this war opened before me. The whole front was entangled in a web of murders, smuggling and money laundering by corrupt politicians and security officials.
A series of seemingly unrelated crimes scattered along the entire line of demarcation - from the town of Shchastye to the seacoast, along roadblocks and fragments of the no man's land of the gray zone.
This time, it was no longer the 92nd Brigade, which controlled the sector of the Seversky Donets River, but a group of criminals from a police battalion on the borders with the so-called DPR, which was the key suspect in a series of crimes.
The murder of a civilian, executed in the fall of 2014 at a checkpoint near the town of Volnovakha, was presented on the same night by the “Kiev-2” police battalion as a terrorist attack and furnished with all the attributes of such an attack, falsified and simulated from the first to the last word, gesture, piece of metal.
Commercial, political, murders, often murders for the sake of killing, as in the case of the execution of a resident of Mariupol who accidentally drove through a police checkpoint, whose car they decided to blow up, imitating the combat activity of the enemy.
The circumstances of this massacre, at first glance senseless and not justified by anything, even financial motive, were investigated by the former sergeant of this battalion Dmitry Tsvetkov, who fled the country and handed over this and other cases to my informant Galushchenko, who was now also dead ...
The battalion commander of the unit where the fugitive sergeant served is a certain Bogdan Voitsekhovsky , a former agent of the GUR (Main Intelligence Directorate) of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, who was once associated with the (now located in Russia) Ukrainian President Yanukovych, and then became the commander of a police battalion. This former intelligence officer, according to sources in the unit, enjoyed the political patronage of the businessman Kosyuk , an ally and adviser to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
The pages devoted to the case of the police battalion and the connections of its commander, written by Andrey together with a group of his informants as part of this unit, contained one curious detail.
I will quote a fragment of the document:
“Connections.
Voitsekhovsky freely communicates with Tereshchuk ( the former head of the Kiev police, who, according to the Minister of the Interior Avakov, enjoyed the support of President Poroshenko. - A.B. ), has privileges regarding immunity from prosecution, etc.
If difficulties arise, he turns to Tereshchuk , Zvyagilsky ( deputy, coal tycoon, ally of Yanukovych. - A.B. ), Chalavan (Ministry of Internal Affairs), Kuznetsov (Ministry of Internal Affairs), Kosyuk (businessman) for help.
The files on Andriy Galushchenko 's computer helped to partially establish how a close associate of Poroshenko - also a businessman and exporter, like the president himself - turned out to be a defendant in the investigation materials destroyed by the Ukrainian special services.
The figure of the agrarian tycoon Yuri Kosyuk, casually mentioned in this document, led to very interesting places.
No insignia
The “gray zone”, cut off from legal supplies for most trade and service enterprises that are not included in the “special services pool”, was one of the juiciest markets. Transport corridors were organized by people from a wide variety of military and police units.
In the first months of the shaky truce that came after the signing of the Minsk agreements with the participation of Poroshenko, Putin, Merkel, Hollande and the puppet rulers of the "LPR" and "DPR" enclaves, columns of trucks loaded with goods began to ply the highways and country roads of the "zone".
Trains controlled by the anti-terrorist center, where Andrei Galushchenko also stuck his nose , became the largest channel for semi-legal trade or often criminal (as with precious metals) operations.
On a train, where, according to the documents, there was meant to be coal, anti-smuggling fighters found gold jewelry. Video from the Galushchenko archive
But there were hundreds of other land routes.
It was for this reason that the "beaters" were created - to prevent caravans of goods from passing "unbilled", "past the cash register".
The logistics service of the "gray zone" worked with front companies and forged documents. Or with none at all.
There are no branded vehicles of large monopolists in the “gray zone”: most often, trucks with goods were reloaded near the demarcation line, and already nameless small-tonnage trucks transported the goods to their destination.
Everything opened if Kosiuks companies and other beneficiaries of the "gray zone" knew which doors to knock on.
One of these episodes was described to me by Andrei's informant in one of the police battalions, who got in touch with me after the murder of the investigator:
- Almost everything went separately, "Sotka" (call sign of the battalion commander of the police battalion ‘Kiev-2” Voitsekhovsky - A.B. ) sent over the numbers of the trucks, and they were let through without inspection at all.
This was at the beginning of 2015. At the end of 2014, the volumes were not so significant and almost all cars were checked anyway. And in one of the cars - a ten-ton refrigerator - there was chicken, the driver said that it was Nasha Ryaba ( a company from the Kosyuk agricultural holding . - A.B. ). There were many such cars.
The shortage of any goods in the markets, closed to everyone who did not have exclusive access through roadblocks and illegal crossings, provoked a price difference of about 300 percent compared to the main territory of the country.
The smuggler transports goods through the Seversky Donets. The crossing is controlled by the Ukrainian military
A similar trend, only exactly the opposite, was with the goods exported from the zone.
Thanks to the materials from Andrei's "black boxes" - that part of his dossier that we managed to restore -
I now knew the rates of the requisitions, the scale of taxes placed on this ‘gray zone’ shadow economy, on which the octopus of the police and special services fed.
It was the first years of the hybrid war, 2014–2016, that became a real Klondike for the political and business elite.
Among the numerous beneficiaries of such trade was the adviser to the President of Ukraine mentioned in Galushchenko's documents and the owner of the largest agricultural holding.
A drop in overall demand for high-priced meat products caused a surge in demand for a product his companies produce, most notably frozen chicken.
Subsequently, loopholes in trade agreements with the European Union and exclusive access to the markets of enclaves partially controlled by Russians and partially by local tycoons allowed this businessman to stay in the top ten richest people in the country according to Forbes magazine.
It is noteworthy that the first and second places in the table of ranks remained unshakable in the Forbes rating: the Ukrainian metallurgical magnates Akhmetov and Pinchuk retained their positions.
Six years after the start of the war in Donbass,
in the spring of 2020, Petro Poroshenko finally became one of the three richest Ukrainians according to Forbes, becoming the only Ukrainian billionaire who strengthened his positions during the war.
For the first time in the history of his own business empire, he was in third place in the rankings, adding about $100 million to his net worth and growing his net worth to $1.4 billion.
Chickens, chocolate, Trump and the "room where it happened"
A few years after the end of the hot phase of hostilities and on the eve of the next presidential election, Poroshenko would persistently ask Washington to help him get re-elected for a second term.
Former White House security adviser John Bolton described one such conversation that took place during his visit to Ukraine in 2018 in his memoirs “The room where it happened”.
“Poroshenko took me to another room for a tête-à-tête, where he asked the US to support his re-election. He also made a number of other requests to which I responded, and this allowed me not to be too rude when I answered “no” to a request for support, ”Bolton recalls.
Without the support of the security adviser who then had direct access to the Oval Office of the American president (the same, to paraphrase Bolton, “room where everything happened”), Poroshenko continued to knock on other doors.
One of the most zealous defenders of the fifth president of Ukraine in Washington was the former American top diplomat Kurt Volker, whose quotes in support of the then Ukrainian leader were quoted by the Western media, which in turn was cited by Ukrainian media loyal to the president.
The appearance of the diplomat and businessman Kurt Volker in the orbit of Petro Poroshenko was related to the agrarian magnate Kosyuk .
According to an investigation by the English-language Kyiv-based newspaper Kyivpost , Kosiuk 's companies transferred $0.6 million to the public organization "Reform Support Fund in Ukraine". In turn, this organization paid for the services of American lobbyists on behalf of the National Reform Council organization created by Petro Poroshenko.
A member of the team sent by the American lobbying company BGR - the beneficiary of these funds - was precisely top diplomat Kurt Volker, who openly advertises his services as a lobbyist on the company's website.
A former envoy to NATO and a career diplomat, Volker was appointed special envoy to Ukraine in the summer of 2017. One of the key managers in the BGR lobbying company, Volker unexpectedly returned to the diplomatic corps in a rather atypical capacity for American diplomacy - an unpaid special envoy (in an unpaid capacity , as quoted by the State Department commentary on the NBC website).
Volker's role as a special envoy in Ukraine ended after another scandal surrounding Donald Trump, with leaks to the press of Volker's correspondence with Trump's personal consigliere Giuliani regarding informal contacts with the new Ukrainian government that had replaced Poroshenko in 2019.
BGR ceased cooperating with Ukraine after Poroshenko’s 2019 election defeat, NBC reported in a publication cited earlier, citing a figure that coincided with an investigation by the KyivPost, which had first published the amount that structures owned by the Ukrainian “chicken king” had transferred to a lobbying company for its services, namely - $ 600 thousand.
Poroshenko, in turn, again did not remain in debt: the firms of the agrarian magnate, who had previously received loopholes in the trading “gray zones” closed to mere mortals, have now become recipients of record subsidies from the state budget.
In particular, in 2017, the enterprises of the Kosyuk holding received subsidies from the budget to the amount of 1.4 billion hryvnia, or about 35% of the total state support for the agricultural industry.
The following year, 2018, companies belonging to this magnate received a quarter of the entire amount allocated from the Ukrainian budget to support the agricultural sector. The journalists of the Kiev office of “Radio Svoboda” published in their investigation details of how local officials provided privileges to Kosiuk 's companies, unreasonably, as the journalists write, refusing to provide subsidies to others.
What should have been an investigation by the antimonopoly committee at the top and an object of criminal investigation below was erased at the level of shadow cashiers and the illegal “customs” of the front. Erased, alongside hundreds of other files that the Ukrainian special services tried to forever shove under the rug.
In the meantime, I check the authenticity of files on the computer of my deceased informant, the place and time where they were created, by whom and when they were edited. I check them against the meta-data contained in them.
The file about the investigation of a series of murders by a group within a police battalion – where among connections held by the organizer of the criminal gang up ‘in the top’ there is also the name of an agrarian magnate and presidential adviser – was created on the computer of Andrei Galushchenko on June 10, 2015, three months before Andrei's death and shortly before he ended up in the sector of the city of Schastye, where at that moment another military-criminal group ruled.
“The conclusion is that everything is hushed up,” Andrey Galushchenko ends his text with these words.
This is the kind of war my friend researched.
Such a war, being in the past a specialist in hostile banking mergers and acquisitions, I have now been studying, plunging into it after Andrey.
But if his journey into “the gray” ended on September 2nd, mine was just beginning in those days.
Fascinating article. What would be very interesting is to unwrap how deep the United States involvement in Ukrainian corruption is. You can start with the American sitting president and his family enterprise. How about the former speaker of the House of Representatives and her family involvement.
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