Drugs, strippers, scams and nazis

Son of Perun and the Mexican. Divisions among Ukraine's neonazi community and hitlerite-liberal alliances. Sternenko vs Azov. NSFW

In this penultimate instalment (click here for part two and part one), we begin investigating just how powerful Ukraine’s scam call centres - Offices - have become in wartime. We will also find out that many of them are headed by nationalist neo-nazis.

Wartime Offices

In July 2023, the parliamentary investigative committee on fraudulent call-centers had yet another meeting. According to one of its members, parliamentarian Max Buzhansky, it found that the amount of call-center related fraud cases rose by 4 times in the first four months of 2023, as compared with same period in the previous year:

The Office of the Attorney General reports that call center fraudsters are massively robbing internally displaced persons, specifically in terms of e-assistance funds. Statements from prosecutors that call centers primarily target Ukrainian citizens are confirmed by cyber police representatives.

So much for the Offices as valiant patriots, attacking only pensioners of the ‘enemy country’. Office veterans also supposedly send part of their profits to the army. The semi-legal online betting company my girlfriend worked for said the same thing, ignoring the irony that it is precisely online gambling which is playing such a destructive role among frontline soldiers.

Buzhansky added that only 3.6 million hryvnia of fraudulent incomes were being investigated - ‘a drop in the ocean’, he wrote. Given that low-level employees can earn around 100 thousand hryvnia and up a month, it is hard not to reach the same conclusion.

In a July 2023 article, strana’s sources in law enforcement stated that scam call centres are one of the only remaining profitable businesses in wartime. The sources stated that the wartime revenues of Offices have reached ‘grandiose’ sums, and that they scam not only Russians, but also Ukrainians and Europeans.

Due to the huge money flows involved, all variety of vultures have swooped in for corruption rents, from organized crime to police. The law enforcement source stated that the recent spike in raids on Offices was a way to purge the market of competitors and show the necessity to pay demanded rackets.

A raid on a scam call centre in Kyiv in November 2022. The national police announced that the Office was involved in a transnational crime network that involved Albanians, Bulgarians, Georgians, and Macedonians. This scam call centre was particularly involved in bitcoin investments.

There was another large scale raid on one hundred Offices in December 2023 by the SBU, which stated that many of them preyed on internally displaced people, tricking them by promising government subsidies. I have written elsewhere on here on the immense challenges faced by IDPs, particularly in reaching any form of government assistance.

This increased competition in the scam call centre market also means that Offices have tightened their regulations for newcomers. Those wishing to work in this lucrative sector need to pass a variety of tests, including a lie detector. A source inside an Office told strana that there have been cases where competitor Offices sent spies to work at their office.

The former Office worker whose interview I discussed in the last article on this topic confirmed the difficult state of affairs in the industry. He says that due to harsh competition among scammers and increased awareness of scammers in Russia, it’s much harder to earn money. He recommends going into crypto. I would add that recent raids on Offices have highlighted that many of their new ventures involve cryptocurrency.

The Mexican

In late December 2023, Zelensky put in force another set of presidential sanctions. One of those hit was an important figure in transnational organized crime - Egor Burkin, or ‘the Mexican’. Strana argued that sanctions against Burkin were likely an imitation of effective work rather than a real crackdown.

In any case, 'the Mexican’s’ life story is a clear example of how the Offices have evolved - cast out of Russia, migrated to Ukraine.

Currently residing in Mexico, Burkin was born in Russia, imprisoned in 2014 for large scale drug trafficking, then allowed to leave on condition he never return. Naturally, he went to Ukraine, where he became one of the most important figures in the world of scam call centers and drugs.

An aside on drugs in Ukraine - if you know cyrillic, you may be astounded to see advertisements for meth, LSD, speed, and MDMA across Kyiv and any other city or town. They are graffitied everywhere, including in universities. Ukraine and Russia use a specific form of drug distribution - zakladchiki, or ‘hiders’, one might translate it.

These are the lowest level individuals in the drug world distribution network, who hide the drugs somewhere. If you want to get the drugs, you open up the telegrams advertised in graffiti, and pay for someone to send you the gps coordinates of drugs. The idea is to make it harder for dealers to get arrested while making drug deals.

But, of course, that also means they aren’t always easy to find. It’s a common sight to see trendy youth or bedraggled junkies haplessly searching in the dirt around a playground or any other public place. Furthermore, the job of the zakladchik is unenviable - they can often get caught while hiding the drugs, and are given harsh sentences.

Nazi stripper parties

‘The Mexican’ isn’t the only Russian who found Ukraine a safe haven. Many of Ukraine’s most famous rightwing nationalists were born and lived most of their lives in Russia. They were forced to leave after the Russian government cracked down on uncontrollable nationalists, particularly after 2014.

One example is the neo-nazi Denis Kapustin, or ‘white rex’, who is famous nowadays for his role in the ‘Russian Volunteer Corps’. Even Politico couldn’t bring themselves to whitewash him.

Another is Belarussian founder of the ‘National Socialist Society’, Sergei Korotkikh. He is one of the top figures in Azov, and has been written about in detail by Declassified UK.

That’s not the only thing some rightwingers in Ukraine have in common with ‘the Mexican’. in June 2023, some remarkable videos emerged of a corporate party for scam Offices at the Dnepr club ‘Lyagushka’.

Strana, which released the videos, commented them as follows:

In the videos, former members of "Azov" and activists of the "Honor" movement, Sergey Filimonov (also known as Son of Perun) and Igor Potashenkov (also known as Maliar), were spotted. Both participated in the well-known attack on the President's Office in support of Sergey Sternenko on March 20, 2021. Also in the video, according to "Strana" sources, a person allegedly resembling the son of Valery Kondratyev, the president of the "Dnipro" basketball club, also known by the nickname Gastello, was seen.

To begin with, Potashenkov or ‘Maliar’ is notable, among other things, for his swastica tattoos. Bellingcat did a big feature on him and his friends back in 2018. Bellingcat covered their many violent attacks on black people and their voyages around the world with the EU-based ‘European Security Academy’, a private military company with a particular love for eastern european neo-nazis.

‘Maliar’ at the hairdressers. He also has a massive grinning skull tattoo on his body.

Filimonov and Potashenkov both belong to the ‘Gonor’ organization, whose most well-known representative is Serhii Sternenko. As I wrote in my post about US citizens and former minister of health Ulyana Suprun, Sternenko is very close to western, NGO networks.

Above, you can see Sternenko sporting a ‘svastone’ t-shirt. Svastone is a fashion label owned by ‘Perun company’ - see my recent article on nazism and paganism. Their website sells t-shirts with the slogan ‘white boy’, black suns, and links to the founder of ‘Esoteric Hitlerism’. The company is owned by Arseny Bilobud, lead singer in the national socialist black metal group ‘Sokira Peruna’, and another close friend of Ulyana Suprun’s.

This alliance with liberals like Suprun (herself an outspoken supporter of patriotic neo-nazis) has led to Sternenko and his Gonor friends to be accused of ‘selling out to globohomo’, so to speak, by the more traditionally rightwing Azov, which until 2018 Gonor’s members were a part of. Azov was patronized by Arsen Avakov’s ministry of internal affairs under Avakov, though nowadays Azov seems quite independent. Filimonov, who was among those at the office stripper party, was banned from leaving the country until Avakov resigned in 2021.

Officially, Azov officially tries to keep its hands away from the Offices, which are definitely a Gonor feeding trough. A recent post of mine went into detail on a June interview made with the white supremacist Azovite, Dmytro Kukharchuk. In it, he urged the government mobilize Offices, and all the other young people engaging in criminal scammer activity. But in all honesty, I doubt that Azov’s hands are clean in this department, and even if they were, they definitely have their hands in other honeypots.

Filimonov and his liberal friends were the organizers of various protests against ‘the Devil Avakov’. Ukrainian liberals wrote about how they were glad to finally have some strong young men on their side, since previously they had no defense against Avakov’s ‘private armies’.

Filimonov. He also managed to find time to support the Hong Kong protests in 2019, personally spending time there. Even vice wrote about him and his ‘swastica tattoos’,

Cartel wars

As usual, I believe that division of criminal markets is the root of the disagreements. In late 2021, there were a series of attacks on liberal clubs, including some gay clubs. I even managed to accidentally film one such attack against the Khvylovy club while having a kebab with my girlfriend in a nearby park. You can see how uniformed policemen calmly stand by as the hooded youths throw noise grenades and firecrackers into the trendy club.

These attacks were conducted by pro-Avakov rightwingers such as Katarsis and C14, and protected by the police. They claimed to be cracking down on the drug trade at these clubs, which they claimed was organized by the famous ‘clubber politician’ and arch-sorosite Serhii Leshchenko. Gonor, as befitted their alliance with the pro-western liberals, criticized these actions, which earned them yet another accusation of globohomo betrayal by Azov and related organizations.

I’d urge against any over-ideologization of splits among the right. Generally, it’s all a matter of turf wars over criminal incomes. Gonor originally split from Azov in 2018 over a disagreement about an anti-construction action - it is well-known that practically all such ‘protests’ are paid for by rival construction firms. My first article in this call center series explored how Azov originally began as the street muscle for the Kharkov oligarch Arsen Avakov, and how a great deal of Azovites were uncovered running violent racketeering ‘business’ in the very same city in 2021.

Sternenko’s bright future

Note that Filimonov and Potashenkov participated in the infamous ‘pogrom of the president’s office’ back in August 2021, as a ‘protest’ against ‘government repression of the patriot Sternenko’. My article about Suprun went into her support of this cause. But I remind the reader that Sternenko was being charged with kidnapping and torture, with the aim of extortion.

The president’s office after Filimonov and his merry band visited it.

Even the pro-western, liberal nationalist Hromadske did a three-piece expose on Sternenko that he wasn’t too happy about it. For a taste, I’ll say that part two was about his self-professed role as a ‘lieutenant of the SBU’ - the Ukrainian secret services, whose deep criminality and involvement in rightwing politics I wrote about here and here. Part three of Hromadske’s series was about the various criminal cases brought against Sternenko for the role of right sector in Odessa - led by Mr Sternenko - in the distribution of narcotics.

Some time I hope to write something more detailed about the highly important figure of Sternenko, who many speculate is being prepared by influential factions domestically and in the USA for broader leadership roles, up to and including the presidency. He has skyrocketed in popularity during wartime, with a telegram following of almost 800,000. Naturally, any criminal charges that were once put against him have been long forgotten.

He is also fairly positive towards the Zelensky government, and is clearly among their preferred partners in the far right. His highly mediatized persona and extremely influential friends like Suprun mean that this star has certainly not yet reached his peak.

The fact that Gonor possesses such lucrative financial resources through its control of Dnepr’s scam Offices, as well as a range of battle-tested fighters, also gives him good chances in Ukraine’s political landscape.

The next and final article in this series will look at how Sternenko and his motley crew of state officials, nationalist allies, and pro-western liberals have joined forces to attack a rather comical attempt at stopping the new Office oligarchy. And we will finally find out who this strange warrior against the Office Oligarchy is: