The role of the Russian mafia in the war against Ukraine - 2022

The twin mafias of Ukraine and Russia and drug, gas and gold trafficking

By Roberto Saviano / 28. February 2022 Corriere della Sera, Milan, Italy

link to the ORIGINAL ITALIAN VERSION

Seeing how clans behave means understanding war. For decades, what has held the two countries together is organized crime, with billionaire proceeds. The admixture with Putin's politics and methods of controlling the overwhelming power of the bosses.

When in March 2016 I asked Gary Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players in history, about the role of the Russian mafia, he replied: «In any case, on fundamental issues they always act on the orders from the top». And who is the top, I hastened to ask? "Obviously, Vladimir Putin," Kasparov replied, astonished to have to repeat it.

I wonder how it is possible that the fundamental question is completely absent from the international debate: what is the role of mafia organizations in this war? Nobody wonders how it is possible that, in a territory that has always been completely hegemonized by criminal cartels, these are neither mentioned, nor known, nor considered by reporters and the political debate.

What has kept Ukraine and Russia together for decades is the mafia. And this war is a war that has its mafia vocation behind the geopolitical masking with Europe of the conflict with NATO.

Seeing how the mafia clans are behaving means understanding the war. It is always like this: in Afghanistan, in the war in Yugoslavia, in Syria, in the Congo. Identify the mafias, observe them and find the real interests.

«Michas» and «The Brain»

Despite the memory of the Holodomor, the terrible holocaust of hunger that the Russian Bolshevik government perpetrated on the Ukrainians between 1932 and 1933 (killing six million people), Russian and Ukrainian organized crime have always been twins. The most important Russian mafia organization, the Solntsevskaya Bratva (Russian: Солнцевская братва), or the Sun Brigade, is governed by a diarchy: the Russian Sergej Michajlov, called "Michas", and the Ukrainian Semion Yudkovich Mogilevich (Ukrainian: Семен Юдкович Могилевич), called "The Brain".

To immediately understand their economic power, I report below some data from various studies conducted between 1996 and 2011 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: 1 billion dollars is the annual earnings from the export of heroin in China, 8 billion dollars are the proceeds from the mediation of the sale of Afghan heroin, 620 million dollars the profit from Russian timber illegally harvested for the Chinese construction market. These listed are only the surface of their business. The mass of money the organization raises, is recycled and invested in Europe, the US and Israel.

In 2018 alone, for example, he laundered 50 million euros of real estate in Spain, a favorite destination for Solntsevskaya affiliates along with Switzerland, where Michajlov "Michas" is the owner of a luxurious villa (after all he is listed as a businessman on Wikipedia; the one who is considered the head of one of the most powerful organizations in the world from 1991 to 1994 worked at Parma Foods, a Russian-Italian joint venture).

The gas alliance

What has allowed the great Russian-Ukrainian political alliance delegated to the mafias, to be created in the past decades? The answer is: gas. The gas brokerage firm, RosUkrEnergo (which is headquartered in Switzerland and whose 50% share is in the Russian gas giant Gazprom), was created in 2004 by former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma and Vladimir Putin.

It transported gas from Turkmenistan to Naftogaz, the Ukrainian national oil and gas company; Naftogaz had to buy from this Russian brokerage firm and had to sell gas only in Ukraine. RosUkrEnergo, which sold gas to Ukrainians (and not only, also to various Eastern countries), sold it at a higher price than the market price, and informally obliged, among other things, to give it free of charge to the pro-Russian areas of Crimea and Donbass.

The alliance was essentially based on three pillars: Mogilevich, the Ukrainian boss at the top of the Russian mafia, the support of Vladimir Putin and that of Dmytro Firtash. The latter was the intermediary between the Ukrainian government, Gazprom and the Ukrainian Prime Minister (from 2002 to 2007 and then from 2010 to 2014) Viktor Janukovyč.  In 2009, officers of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) investigated the misappropriation of 6.3 billion cubic meters of transit natural gas, accusing Naftogaz Ukrainy of stealing those 6.3 billion cubic meters of gas .

Yes, because the mafia alliance under the power of the Solntsevskaya bratva not only guaranteed the distribution of the dividends of RosUkrEnergo (from 2005 to 2007 1.753 billion dollars) but, by stealing the gas in transit through Ukraine to other countries, it allowed the various bratvas mafia to smuggle it to gas importing companies around the world. They made money from legal gas and from stolen gas (which went to the Ukrainian taxpayers who had to pay for it).

The mediator on the run

Ukraine was treated as a colony from which to extract large rents without paying taxes; the funds were deposited in offshore tax havens. Dymitri Firtash, the great gas broker has fled Ukraine, taking refuge in Austria to avoid extradition, and is accused in the United States of corruption amounting to 500 million dollars. Firtash was linked to Trump's campaign president, Paul Manafort, and has as his lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, Trump's lawyer convicted in 2021 for having "communicated manifestly false and misleading statements to courts, legislators and to public opinion in general (...) in relation to Trump's failed re-election attempt in 2020 ".

It is Firtash himself who revealed that the Russian-Ukrainian alliance was based on a mafia agreement, and we know this thanks to the precious documents published by Wikileaks: during a confidential meeting with the US ambassador William Taylor, in 2008, he admitted that it was Mogilevich the real power of the brokerage firm. Ukraine, he said, is "governed by the laws of the road".

To the American ambassador Firthas described that it was impossible to approach any Ukrainian government official without also meeting a member of organized crime at the same time. All these confessions, Firtash made them with a view to showing the American administration, which he had known for a long time to investigate him, that he acted only on "compulsion", that it was the Balkan practice to always act in accordance with the mafia and that without the boss Mogilevich nothing could move in the gas, even though he specified several times that he had never had direct relations with him. Obviously, once the cable was released, Firtash scared that he was unwittingly proof that the world was looking for information on RosUkrEnergo denied the whole world that he had said anything of the sort.

The "unexpected" Maidan

What interrupted this mafia gas scheme that caged Ukraine? The unforeseen that even Solntsevskaya bratva could not foresee was the revolution in Maidan Square in 2014, when an uprising Ukraine denounced Yanukovyč's electoral fraud, forcing him to flee to Moscow.

The unexpected insurrection of the Ukrainian people linked to the pro-European desire broke the bank of the mafia agreement: "It must be said - says the British political scientist Taras Kuzio, one of the world's leading experts on the dynamics we are describing - that Ukraine, before the revolt of Maidan in 2014, had become a neo-Soviet mafia state ». Europe, under the blackmail of Russian gas, left Ukraine alone in this new season of independence but above all of liberation from mafia power. Indeed, the European and Swiss banks welcomed the Organizacija's money (a term used to define all the various Russian organizations).

Austria welcomes Firtash. European support for Ukraine has been more in form than real, in this dynamic (only this is) the space that NATO and the US see in order to carry out their international politics.

Smuggling on the Black Sea

The vories (godfathers) are taking advantage of the tension on the border between Ukraine and Russia to increase their power. Crimea is the center of smuggling between Europe and Russia: (due to) drug and merchandise trafficking, (it has been) called for years "Ukrainian Sicily" (referring to the power of the Cosa Nostra). Mark Galeotti, one of the leading scholars of the Russian mafia, wrote: "Crimea is the first conquest in history led by gangsters who work for a state."

The famous unsigned soldiers who make raids are none other than members of the Solntsevskaya bratva of Mogilevich and Michas. Viktor Shemchuk, ex Chief prosecutor of the region, recalls: «Every level of the Crimean government is mafia. It was not unusual for a parliamentary session to begin with a minute of silence in honor of one of the murdered 'brothers' (affiliates). " The Black Sea and Odessa are the great spaces in which various trades are articulated: gasoline sold by smuggling circulates, tons of illegally excavated coal loaded on ships ready to go halfway across the world, heroin, gold. Anything that can evade the burden of the taxman in exchange for a tax to the vory mafia. Everything that has to enter Europe illegally passes through these places. Black hole of goods, heroin, raw materials.

Russian journalist Yuliya Polukhina makes a clear summary: “The beneficiaries of this war are politicians, oligarchs and gangsters. Coal, gold, gasoline and tobacco. This is what they are fighting for in eastern Ukraine. " The conquest of Donbass and Crimea served above all to protect business.

The affiliates have sparked an insurrection in order to create autonomous republics in Donetsk and Lugansk, but they are nothing more than republics of mafia members, governed by proxy from Moscow. The leaders of the revolt, as Galeotti reports, all have nicknames they had when they were inside the bratva: Motorola, Batman, Shooter

Putin and "the junkies"

On April 17, 2015, Radio Svoboda interviewed a Russian volunteer who believed Putin's propaganda, the illusion of going to fight against the Ukrainian fascists: "When you get there, you immediately realize that it is not military units, but of real gangs "

Former Ukrainian police general Vladimir Ovchinsky comments: "Now a sort of nationalization of the mafia is taking place." Yet Putin in the accusation against the Ukrainian authorities defines them as a "gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis". That passage on "drug addicts" clearly refers to the role that Ukraine plays as a transit for drug trafficking but ignores that it is the Russian mafia to organize it.

But could there be more, perhaps the Ukrainian cartels are pulling out of their historic alliance with the Moscow bratvas? Is the Ukrainian mafia in split like the country? Have they decided not to submit to the Crimean groups? To escape the dominion of the Donetsk families? This is the real issue to be understood in the next few hours.

Mark Galeotti in the book The Vory: Russia's Super Mafia writes: "Ukraine is ... a country where all the main Russian criminal organizations have interests, operations, partners and people, and where the culture of vory is also still present. The Solntsevskaya gang has a long-standing relationship with the criminal-political "Donetsk clan", which was the power base of former president Viktor Yanukovyč. "

The pact between the state and criminals

Ukrainian criminal structures are similar to Russian ones, albeit on a small scale and in a territory where the majority of organizations operate locally: in the same way, however, they are in symbiosis with a deeply corrupt political class and aim at oligarchic control of the 'economy. "The flow of drugs through Donbass, to Ukraine, and then to Europe, has not shrunk by a single percentage point, even as bullets fly back and forth across the front line," says an officer of the SBU to Mark Galeotti, talking about the 2014 clashes in the region.

Russian organized crime is made up of several levels. Putin, as early as the end of 1999, stopped pursuing the policy of the fight against crime, which had also animated him in the first years in power. A street level is generically prosecuted, there are trials, arrests, if there is rape, if there are murders that alarm the population and street peddling is prosecuted if it compromises social peace, but in prison, organizations basically govern everything, they continue to affiliate and protect their inmates by killing their rivals.

Those who move to the highest level of organization, on the other hand, become a privileged interlocutor with a single constraint: they must never create problems for the state and its boss. If they create problems for the government or ally themselves with opponents wanting to replace it, they would be considered as enemies of the state and would simply be annihilated with the help of courts, police, sentences. In reality, the Russian mafia does not completely coincide with the state, the Russian mafia is one of the infinite articulations of Russian institutional power, with which it is in dialectic.

Solntsevskaya bratva of Moscow, the Bratski Krug (circle of brothers) of St. Petersburg and the Tambov Gang, the great enemies of Solntsevskaya, are the souls that dominate the business and life of Russia together with their satellites in Georgia, Kazakhstan, Chechnya, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Cekia.

Cut off heads and punish

Putin uses and is used by criminal organizations, the vories are fundamental for his international criminal approach with which he sabotages enemies or influences friends. Not only in operations in Donbass, but also in Montenegro, when an attempted coup d'etat in 2016 occurred through local criminal cartels allied with the bratva, to prevent the area from joining NATO.

Putin himself cyclically fears the excessive power of the members of the Organization, against which he acts only when they cause him problems, when he is unable to shield them from the Western judiciary who find evidence of their affairs putting the government's reputation at risk or worse when they act in support of his political rivals. To keep (the mafia) under control, Putin must cyclically cut off heads and punish. In 2016, for example, Russian police raided the apartment of one of his senior officers, Colonel Dmitry Zakharchenko, who headed a department within his anti-corruption division. There they found $ 123 million - so much that investigators had to suspend their searches while looking for a container big enough to carry all that money. In reality it was not his money, he was just the keeper of the mutual fund, the obshchak, of a gang of "werewolves": this is how the men of the mafia within the police are called.

Mafia and politics

Putin must remind the Vories that it is he who gives the authorization to their life; obviously he knows full well that it will be over when his power depends on the vories. For now this balance is maintained because the Russian bratvas and the vories continue to do business on natural resources and concessions given by the state: this is the "dependence" of the Russian mafia on the political power in which it mixes and confuses. They manage things whose profit they have to split with the institutions and among other things delegating to organizations often means allowing a vertical efficiency that no one else could guarantee you.

As Taras Kuzio well describes in the book “Ukraine: Democratisation, Corruption and the New Russian Imperialism (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015)” the role of the vory is always only to solve problems, ask and it will be given to you. The reality of the Solntsevskaya gang over the years has made alliances and smoothed out friction with the already flourishing local Ukrainian mafias: "Ukraine - writes Galeotti - is a good example, a country in which all the main Russian associations have interests, operations, partners and people , and where even the vory culture is still present.

The Solntsevskaya gang has a long-standing relationship with the criminal-political "Donetsk clan", which was the power base of former president Viktor Yanukovyč, for example." The relationship between the mafia and politics is so close that even traumatic events, such as the annexation of Crimea to Russia in 2014 and the subsequent clashes in the Donbass, take place with the active support of local vories. If I could ask Semyon Mogilevich how this war will end, I would certainly have the most up-to-date, most useful, most profound opinion we could get, which no analyst, not even the information that the American intelligence leaked to the newspapers, would be able to give. Observing the criminal dynamics, in this case, means looking at the beating heart of matters. Look at the mafia, see the crime; look through the mafia, see the fate of the economy of your time.

February 28, 2022 (change February 28, 2022 | 10:10)

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