February 1, 2024: Russian Digest

Ukraine says it sank Russian warship off coast of Crimea and unleashed ‘massive’ missile barrage on peninsula

Ukraine’s military intelligence says it sank a Russian warship off the coast of Crimea overnight into Thursday, landing the latest in a series of blows to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet after mounting a “massive” missile attack on the occupied peninsula hours earlier.

Russia’s guided missile ship, the “Ivanovets,” suffered multiple hits to its hull before it sank overnight in the harbor of Lake Donuzlav, Crimea’s deepest lake, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence said.

Night-time footage supplied by Ukraine showed naval drones racing toward the Russian ship before exploding on impact, causing significant damage to the vessel. At the end of the video, the ship appears to have sunk, with just its bow above water. CNN could not independently verify Ukraine’s claims and it is unclear from the footage which vessel was struck and when.

Exclusive: China warns Ukraine over naming its firms 'sponsors of war' - sources

China has told Ukraine that their bilateral relations could be damaged by Kyiv's designation of more than a dozen Chinese companies as "international sponsors of war", two senior Ukrainian sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

The warning was communicated to Ukraine last month at a meeting of China's ambassador to Kyiv with senior Ukrainian government officials, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

China's foreign ministry, the Chinese embassy in Kyiv and Ukraine's foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Beijing has close ties with Moscow and has refrained from criticising Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but it has also said the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries must be respected. It has offered to help mediate in the war.

Ukraine has listed 48 companies globally, including 14 from China, as "international sponsors of war" whose business activities it says indirectly assist in or contribute to Russia's war efforts.

The far-right Bundestag aide and his rapping FSB case officer

A pro-Russian aide to a far-right German legislator who attempted to scuttle Berlin’s shipment of main battle tanks to Ukraine is an agent of Russian intelligence, The Insider can now reveal. Also, his handler is a rapper.

This is a joint investigation with Der Spiegel.

Vladimir Sergienko, 52, is the Ukrainian-born adviser to Eugen Schmidt, a Bundestag deputy with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The Insider and Der Spiegel reported in August that Sergienko had fallen under suspicion in Germany after his email and text message correspondence with a suspected FSB operative known only as “Alexei” came to light.

Alexei’s real name can now be disclosed as Ilya Vechtomov, born in 1987, an officer of the Fifth Service of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the successor agencies of the Soviet-era KGB. Although the FSB is largely responsible for domestic security and counterintelligence activities inside Russia, the Fifth Service, created in the 1990s, acts as its foreign intelligence arm. (On Jan. 29 The Insider disclosed that at least one Fifth Service FSB officer served as a handler to Tatjana Ždanoka, a Latvian MEP. Following the publication of that article, it was announced that Ždanoka is under internal investigation by the European Parliament.)

Read The Full Investigation At The Insider: https://theins.ru/en/politics/268805

Germany Indicts Two Ex-MPs for Bribery

German prosecutors brought bribery and corruption charges against four people on Monday, including two former lawmakers suspected of receiving bribes from Azerbaijan in exchange for voting in Baku’s favor at the Council of Europe.

Axel Fischer and Eduard Lintner were members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and were implicated in what became known as the Azerbaijan Laundromat -- a EU-wide lobbying and money-laundering scheme revealed by OCCRP in 2017. Azerbaijan used this so-called “caviar diplomacy” to influence European policy.

Baku used a secret US$2.9 billion slush fund to, among other things, offer free trips and expensive gifts to European MPs who would, for example, vote in Baku’s favor and beautify PACE’s human rights reports at a time when the country threw dozens of political prisoners in jail.

The investigation conducted and published by OCCRP and the Süddeutsche Zeitung exposed Lintner and a third PACE member, Karin Strenz, as those who benefited from the tactic. Strenz died unexpectedly in 2021, but prosecutors announced their intention to confiscate the bribes she allegedly received. Fischer was later identified by German prosecutors in 2021.

"Stroke Putin's ego." Over the past several years 12 scientists involved with hypersonic technologies have been imprisoned for treason

In Russia, at least 12 scientists were arrested who were studying physical processes at hypersonic speeds, the BBC Russian Service calculated. All of them were accused of treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code). Three detainees have already died.

The FSB began to take an active interest in specialists in this field after 2018 - then President Vladimir Putin presented Russian hypersonic missiles “unparalleled in the world” in his address to the Federal Assembly. He said that the new weapon would be able to overcome all modern missile defense systems and would be “virtually invulnerable,” threatened the West and thanked the developers.

Subsequently, several scientists studying hypersound were arrested at the Moscow region Central Scientific Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering (TsNIIMash), the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute named after Professor Zhukovsky (TsAGI), as well as at the Novosibirsk Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITPM) of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

At ITPM, director Alexander Shiplyuk and chief researchers Alexander Maslov and Valery Zvegintsev became defendants in treason cases. The first two were accused of passing secrets to China.

Zvegintsev, who founded the high-speed aerodynamics laboratory at the institute, collaborated with his former colleague, associate professor at Tomsk Polytechnic University Vladislav Galkin, whose arrest became known in December last year. According to a TASS source, cases could be brought against scientists due to a 2021 publication in an Iranian scientific journal.

Maslov, Zvegintsev, and Shiplyuk are also united by participation in projects of the seventh framework program of the European Union FP7, which provides for the allocation of grants for space research.

TsAGI and TsNIIMash took part in the same program, six of whose employees were also accused of treason. The publication does not provide the names of two of them and another, the 12th arrested.

On October 27 last year, the court sentenced physicist Anatoly Gubanov, who worked as the head of a department at TsAGI, to 12 years in a maximum security colony. According to investigators, he transferred to one of the European states secret information about the hypersonic civil aircraft HEXAFLY-INT, in the development of which, in addition to Russia, Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands participated. Gubanova’s prisoner, MIPT professor, and Doctor of Technical Sciences Valery Golubkin, received a similar sentence on the same charge.

At TsNIIMash, cases of treason were brought against the leading specialist, physicist Vladimir Kudryavtsev - he died before he could see the trial. According to his widow, her husband worked with Maslov. The same fate befell the head of the Center for Heat Transfer and Aerogas Dynamics of TsNIIMash, Roman Kovalev - he was released for health reasons on April 13, 2022, and two weeks later he died of cancer.

Another deceased person under investigation is the head of the laboratory of quantum optical technologies at the Institute of Laser Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dmitry Kolker, who was taken to a pre-trial detention center straight from the hospital at stage IV cancer. He died two days later.

In private conversations, FSB officers admitted that arrests on charges of selling classified information about Russian hypersonic weapons occur “at the request of the state,” said lawyer Evgeny Smirnov from the First Department, who defended defendants in treason cases, including scientists, in court. According to him, the investigators directly said that they report to Putin about every such case against scientists.

The purpose of the FSB’s work is to demonstrate that spies are hunting for secrets about Russian missiles, Smirnov clarified: “To stroke the ego, to show that Russian missiles are the best and they are trying to steal them.”

He noted that almost all cases of treason against scientists developed in the same way: FSB officers came to institutes and looked for what was “most suitable” among their international projects for 10–15 years. “The goal was not to find the guilty, but to imprison several people in each institute,” Smirnov emphasized.

Via The Moscow Times and BBC Russian Service: https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2024/02/01/v-glazah-vladimira-putina-rf-viglyadit-legko-upravlyaemoi-a-voina-udobnoi-i-vigodnoi-a120387

Romanian defense chief: Russia 'will not stop' with war in Ukraine, calls for better preparation amid potential conflict with NATO

In an interview with Europa Libera Romania on Feb. 1, Romanian Chief of Defense Gheorghita Vlad urged Romania and Europe to better prepare for a potential war with Russia, warning that Russia will continue its escalation if it is successful in Ukraine.

"The Russian Federation has become a problem for the world order, for democracy. In fact, it is a war of Russia with the democratic world. It is not a war with Ukraine," said Vlad, Romania's highest-ranking military officer.

Vlad, who was recently appointed Chief of Defense in November 2023, said he believes that Russia "will not stop" at Ukraine.

"If (Russian President Vladimir Putin) wins in Ukraine, the main target will be the Republic of Moldova. We will witness tensions in the Western Balkans. I am more than convinced that President Putin's policy will escalate in the immediate future."

EU approves €50B Ukraine aid as Viktor Orbán folds

European Union leaders on Thursday reached a deal to provide €50 billion in aid to Ukraine — and they were in unanimous agreement after some leaders persuaded the sole holdout, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, to drop his veto.

“All 27 leaders agreed on an additional €50 billion support package for Ukraine within the EU budget,” European Council President Charles Michel wrote on X, a few minutes after the formal start of the Council meeting on Thursday.

“This locks in steadfast, long-term, predictable funding for Ukraine,” he added.

Authorities suspected sabotage in the largest Runet failure in history

The investigation into the large-scale crash of Runet, which took place on Tuesday evening and left millions of users in Russia and abroad without access to sites in the .RU zone is considering the scenario of sabotage. The main version of the cause of the incident, which is now being discussed, is the “human factor,” including “malicious,” Forbes reports, citing a source close to the Coordination Center of the national domain.RU/.РФ.

Employees of the Federal Security Service (FSB) were involved in the investigation, which is being conducted by the Ministry of Digital Development and Roskomnadzor. The government held an emergency meeting on January 31, where they also came to the conclusion that the version of “malicious intent” cannot yet be discarded.

Officially, the CC explained the failure, perhaps the largest in the history of the Runet, by the “imperfection” of the software used to create encryption keys. The problem arose with the DNSSEC protocol, which prevents IP address spoofing when accessing the Domain Name System (DNS).

The incorrect keys, as stated by the CC, were revoked, and “the functionality of the .RU zone was fully restored.” But in reality, it is impossible to talk about a complete solution to the problem, notes Philip Kulin, author of the Esher II telegram channel: DNSSEC has been rolled back to its pre-emergency state, but the .RU zone is now “frozen”, that is, domain registrations or re-registrations are not taking place, nor are they being deleted and old domains.

“KC’s vague explanations of the causes of the accident as “software imperfections” do not correspond to reality,” believes Kulin. “Rather, we can say that TCI rolled out an update to the domain name system in the zone and did not check the correct operation of this update.”

During the outage, Roskomnadzor demanded that telecom operators switch to the National Domain Name System (NDNS), a key element of the “sovereign Runet”, which de facto assumes the autonomous existence of the Russian network.

However, the incident showed the unpreparedness of NSDI to support the entire .RU zone, a source close to CC told Forbes. “Yes, NSDI made it possible for applications to work primarily, but if all providers switched to it, it would collapse. It saved us from failures, but DNSSEC had to be turned off, which means that Runet was left without protection against phishing for some time,” explained the publication’s interlocutor.

Via Moscow Times: https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2024/02/01/vlasti-zapodozrili-diversiyu-vkrupneishem-vistorii-sboe-runeta-a120380

Russian spies impersonating Western researchers in ongoing hacking campaign

Hackers working for Russia’s intelligence services are impersonating researchers and academics in an ongoing campaign to gain access to their colleagues’ email accounts, according to messages and files seen by Recorded Future News and independently analyzed by two cybersecurity companies.

Keir Giles, the British author of “Russia's War on Everybody” and a consulting fellow at the Chatham House think tank, shared with Recorded Future News several suspect emails sent by accounts purporting to be fellow researchers. Other correspondence we have seen shows multiple researchers who did not consent to being identified in this report also being targeted over the past three months.

All of the correspondence suggests several of the researchers have been successfully compromised by the hackers, who pretend to solicit feedback on academic articles — including an op-ed about sanctions on Moscow — or a draft version of Ukraine’s maritime security strategy.

The campaign, which also has impacted individuals in the United States and Europe, is the latest example of Russian cyber activity that serves both an intelligence-gathering function as well as providing the Kremlin with material it can use to discredit its critics.

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