In May, the “Center for Journalistic Investigations” drew readers’ attention to the aggressor’s latest provocations in the fields of marine fishing and the canned fish industry, linked to the occupied Crimea. The corresponding investigation describes the activities on the peninsula of commercial entities run by Russian figures from Kaliningrad, Sergei and Natalia Liutarevich, including their control over the “Prolyv” fish processing plant in Kerch and the “Arktika” Canning Plant, located in the neighboring village of Osoviny.
The investigation mentions the previous beneficiaries of the “Prolyv” plant, a company owned by businessmen from Dnipro known for glassware production, Yuriy Kryshin and his son Oleg Kryshin. The report states that the Liutarevichs ‘registered’ the entity “Prolyv 1873” in occupied Kerch, with projected revenue of 1.6 billion rubles in 2025, and indicates that these businessmen support Russian troops not only by supplying their own products but also by purchasing drones and other equipment used to kill Ukrainians.
We have previously investigated the schemes of structures controlled by the aggressor involving the “Prolyv” plant, as well as the Sevastopol fish processing and canning plants “Novyi,” “Interrybflot,” and “Aquamarine” mentioned in the aforementioned investigation. Among other things, we have repeatedly described the activities of local collaborators Vladimir Nigar, Vladimir Gelvanovsky, and Grigory Lutsay.
In April 2025, we noted that “dark clouds were gathering” over “Aquamarine”, after Russian colonizers from the clan of Gauleiter Mikhail Razvozhayev had “set their sights” on the company’s assets, but that the “nationalization” of this lucrative resource was “somewhat complicated” by the relevant mafia’s ties to a number of “pockets” belonging to Belarusian dictator Lukashenko.
We reported that prior to the occupation, Gelvanovsky was a member of the Sevastopol City Council representing the “Party of Regions,” and he “oversaw” fish catching and processing enterprises under the patronage of the head of the Sevastopol police, Major General Vitaly Malikov, the son-in-law of former Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Mykola Bilokon. This same enterprise, as well as “Interrybflot-Crimea,” where the same Nigar was listed as a “co-owner,” were used as front companies for chartering fishing vessels.
Nigar was also listed by the occupiers as the “head of the non-profit organization” “Association of Participants in the Sevastopol Free Economic Zone.” In 2025, the occupiers announced the “exclusion” of “Aquamarine” from the “residents” of that same “free economic zone,” and the fake “Sevastopol arbitration court” announced the “start of bankruptcy proceedings” for the plant.
We reported that the “bankruptcy” was the result of a struggle for control over the plant, and that two scenarios are now possible. Either the actual beneficiaries of this entity will “change their skin,” allowing them to save their Sevastopol plant from the close scrutiny of “nationalizer” Razvozhayev, and their mainland assets from other issues. However, over the past year, “Aquamarine’s” “bankruptcy” never materialized, and now it has become known that the same procedure is underway for another entity controlled by Gelvanovsky and Nigara—the aforementioned “Novyi” fishing plant, which is now also being mentioned by the “Center for Investigative Journalism.”
Also this past February, the same “Sevastopol arbitration court” began the “exclusion” of this plant from the “residents” of that same “free economic zone.” Thus, we noted that the struggle for control over the canned fish business in Sevastopol continues, but most notably, it has influenced the reasoning of local experts regarding the “technical reasons” for “Aquamarine’s” current problems.
Among other things, we pointed out that allegedly all Atlantic ocean fish for canning at all factories controlled by the aggressor are delivered “exclusively via Kaliningrad” and that “logistical difficulties” have arisen in this regard. It should be noted that “Kaliningrad transit” is inevitably linked to “Belarusian sorting,” where, on territory controlled by the Lukashenko regime, seafood from the Baltic states and Poland is “magically” mixed with the same so-called “Russian catch” and are then sent to the aforementioned fish canneries.
Last year, we also reported on the typical red tape involving the occupiers’ “Department of land and property relations” in Sevastopol regarding the “Cape Sarych” resort. At the time, we noted that the occupiers’ “registers” listed “Kupecheskiy Trading House,” the firm “Intertech,” and Vladimir Gelvanovsky himself among the “founders” of “Cape Sarych.”
We pointed out that, as part of “internal infighting,” the occupiers’ propaganda accused Gelvanovsky of involvement in organized crime under the patronage of Lev Mirymsky and in deals with the “Tavrika” bank, which was finally liquidated in 2016; yet no consequences for this wheeler-dealer from the occupiers’ punitive forces have been noted over the past decade. We have reported that Gelvanovsky’s “business talents” are, at the very least, characterized by versatility, as dry cleaners, hotels, ship repair and electrical engineering enterprises, and, in particular, “Interrybflot”, were “registered” under his name in Russian “registers.”
We have reported that a number of companies are also registered under Nigara as the alleged “owner.” These include the aforementioned “fishing” enterprises and the Krasnodar-registered “Interprom,” which has a similar purpose, as well as the Sevastopol-based real estate “companies” “Most-S,” “Service-Technology,” and “SKK.” Moreover, Nigara was considered the “founder” of “Crimea-Moscow-Stroy,” which spent a very long time constructing the “Morskoy Breeze” residential complex on Stepanian Street in Sevastopol.
The most interesting “tenants” at “Cape Sarych” in Odesa, especially given the activities of “Aquamarine” in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi that we described earlier, were those from Odesa, since one of them, Iryna Shandryk, is the wife of the former deputy mayor of Odesa, Vyacheslav Shandryk, who once headed the Southern Directorate of Capital Construction of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
Another figure in these “Sevastopol court cases,” Yuriy Yuritsyn, who allegedly lives in Odesa on Babushkina Street next to Shandryk, has long been mentioned in the Ukrainian press as an “accomplice in Shandryk’s schemes,” , including those involving the “Istok” credit union and the “Istok-2001” firm. Notably, in 2017, Yuritsyn was allegedly kidnapped in Odesa by gangsters seeking a large ransom.
And in the occupiers’ “registers” since 2015, Yuriy Yuritsyn has been listed as the “founder” of the “hunting firm” “Krodessos” and the soft drink production “firm” “Perlyna-2015” in Simferopol, while in the “hunting” structure he is linked to a certain Oleksandr Ukrainskyi, a “namesake” of other mainland participants in the aforementioned court proceedings, and Yuritsyn was not declared a “foreigner” by the occupiers.
And a figure involved in the aforementioned “trials,” such as Taisiya Ukrainska, was mentioned by the occupiers a year ago in the case concerning the “nationalization” of companies such as the “Mayak” Ship Lighting Equipment Plant, “Plosk,” and “Tinos,” “Technotron” and the “Korpus” production cooperative, allegedly linked to Petro Kozlovsky and Lyudmyla Kozlovska, the spokesperson for the “Open Dialogue” foundation, who was accused of covertly working for Russian intelligence services.
Among other things, Lyudmyla Kozlovska had a long-standing public conflict with the former Polish government, which deported her to Ukraine in 2018, and the main public work of the “Open Dialogue” Foundation was lobbying within the structures of the EU, the Council of Europe, and the OSCE on behalf of a number of individuals from post-Soviet countries, including big business, as victims of authoritarian regimes.
In addition, while investigating the 2024 death of 19-year-old Ivan Litvinov, a “graduate of the maritime college” of the fake “Sevastopol State University,” aboard the large Panamanian-flagged fishing vessel “Avunda Reefer,” we wrote about the vessel’s ties to the St. Petersburg-based entity “Yugreftransflot,” the “Maltese shipowner” “Yustat Group Ltd,” and the Panamanian firm “Lilium Shipping CO. S.A., affiliated with the large Greek company “Laskaridis Maritime S.A.,” which in turn is the shipping “division” of the Greek corporation “Alimia Group.”
It should be noted that the “Center for Journalistic Investigations” states that the most valuable asset of the “Interrybflot” group was the “powerful fishing trawler ‘More Sodruzhestva’,” which “was engaged in krill fishing in Antarctica at the time of the occupation and never returned to Sevastopol”, and they add that canned goods bearing the “Aquamarine” brand name and logo “were sold throughout the years of Crimea’s occupation in Ukraine, Russia, and the territories it occupied,” noting that “the canned goods were produced in Sevastopol, as well as in Mykolaiv or the Odesa region, although there could have been only one source of krill supply.”
We should add that we also investigated the activities of the vessel “More Sodruzhestva,” IMO number 8724315, back in 2021, as part of an analysis of the business activities in the occupied territories of Estonian tycoon Hillar Teder, who lobbied in 2015 for the appointment of Yarema Kovaliv as head of the Ukrainian State Fisheries Agency. At that time, we highlighted the characteristic “career path” of the next head of the State Fisheries Agency, Anna Shishman, including her ties to the notorious Andrii Chuklin.
We demonstrated the connections between Shishman and Chuklin through Oleksiy Tregubov and his company “Bastion,” as well as the Kyiv-based trust fund “Trust Development,” which was under investigation for the legalization of criminally acquired assets.
We wrote that the Chuklin family moved to Ukraine, namely to Novoazovsk, Donetsk region, from Tajikistan, where Andrii Chuklin’s father, Valery Chuklin, allegedly served. There is no information in open sources about the activities of Chuklin Sr., but at the same time, his “full namesake” was granted Russian citizenship by decree No. 2058 of December 23, 2000.
At the same time, according to the imprudently published university memoirs of our defendant’s brother, Chuklin Jr. allegedly continued the “officer dynasty.” Indeed, on his Facebook page, Andrii Chuklin pointed to his studies at a school in the Tajik Pyanj and his studies at the Moscow Border Guard School, which is already a “full-fledged diagnosis” for anyone who understands the personnel policy and subversive tactics of the Russian special services in Ukraine. And Valery Chuklin lived in Novoazovsk at least until 2021 and a vessel was registered for him there at one time.
In addition, Andriy Chuklin, by a “strange coincidence”, not only managed to work in the Ukraine’s State Fisheries Agency in responsible positions, but in 2016 he even headed the Ukrainian delegation at the 27th session of the Ukrainian-Russian commission on fisheries in the Sea of Azov. Then, during the time of the aforementioned Yarema Kovalev, Teder’s protégé, Chuklin worked as the head of the Department of Fisheries, Aquaculture and Scientific Support of the Ukraine’s State Fisheries Agency.
At the same time, Chuklin headed or was a beneficiary in such commercial structures as “Timefish”, “RKZ Pivdenny”, “Interkryl”, “IG Service”, “Fiji 22”, etc. The above-mentioned companies had one thing in common – the practical support of the activities of the above-mentioned fishing vessel “More Sodruzhestva”. Then another company was mentioned as the formal “owner” of this vessel, namely “Interpromflot”, which also received Kyiv registration and was registered to Serhiy Kharenko from Donetsk, and the above-mentioned “Trust Development” had the same registration address in Kyiv as “Interpromflot”. As of 2021, “More Sodruzhestva” was transferred to the ‘Shipping Register of Ukraine’ and its shipowner was the declared “IKF” company. At the same time, the head of “IKF” was Dmitry Tsulukia, who, together with the same Andrii Chuklin, was a co-owner of the aforementioned “IG Service” company. But the real beneficiary of “IKF”, according to the registers, was listed as Alexander Moshensky. Moshensky was born and spent a significant part of his life in the border town of Brest. He became the founder of the “Santa Bremor” company, which covers a significant part of the Russian preserves market, and is also the general director of the Belarusian-German enterprise “Santa Impex Brest”, with a dealer network in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Moldova. Moshensky was appointed by dictator Lukashenko to the Entrepreneurship Development Council, which is a “permanent advisory body to the President of the Republic of Belarus”, for obvious “personal merits”. Andrii Chuklin married the aforementioned Shishman in February 2021.
However, the above publications of the “Center for Journalistic Investigations” forced us to return to a simple question: where is the same vessel “More Sodruzhestva” now and how has the situation developed around the relevant activity with a sharp taste of the work of Russian special services during the years of large-scale aggression against Ukraine, which our Association’s expert Andrii Chvalyuk tried to figure out.
We would like to note right away that on the available websites, it is “IKF” that positions itself as “the only enterprise in Ukraine that conducts a full cycle of seafood production on the capacities of a RKTS-class vessel and conducts marine fishing for Antarctic krill in the Antarctic part of the Atlantic Ocean” and declares its address in Mykolaiv on Faleyevska Street. But after 2021, this company with tax code 42155625 “for some reason” unpublicly changed its name to “PRIMT”, its registration address to Kyiv, and declares Karimi Asolat Ismatzodu from Dushanbe as its representative.
The formal founder of this structure is now declared to be the British company “7BOND LTD” with the code 16761683, founded at the end of 2025, where the owner is the same Karimi Asolat, born in 1985. We should add that this structure, with a rather opaque hint of “agent 007”, is now listed as the founder of the Kyiv companies “Naftotrade Podillya”, “Karelin”, the Zaporizhzhia structure “Promileks”, etc. Moreover, Ukrainian journalists have proven that hundreds of Ukrainian companies of various beneficiaries have been established on Karimi Asolat, as a rule, with significant problems with the law.
Oddly enough, at the same time, the role of “the only Ukrainian company that catches and processes krill (Antarctic shrimp) directly in Antarctica” with “the second largest trawler that catches krill in Antarctica” is also claimed by Kyiv’s “Interrybflot”, where the director is the same Grigory Lutsai, and the formal founder is Petro Sviridov. However, to figure out who is now, at least on paper, connected to the same vessel “More Sodruzhestva” can be done using marine information systems.
But these aggregators indicate that “More Sodruzhestva” now uses the Namibian flag and is, as of May 2026, in Antarctic waters and plans to visit Cape Town in June. The owner of the vessel is the Cypriot company “Marissco Fishing Ltd” with registration number ΗΕ386746 since 2018, with “extensive commercial operations managed from Estonia and the UK”, no other vessels are registered in this structure, and its beneficiaries and even the signatories of this offshore structure are carefully hidden. At the same time, the operator for the “More Sodruzhestva” is indicated by the same maritime information systems as the Estonian company “Winot OÜ” with Tallinn registration.
The website of this company states that “Winot OÜ” “has extensive experience in the management of fishing and special purpose vessels, providing a variety of services, including technical management, financial management, crewing, state flag and class certification, as well as related services”. Moreover, the website of this company contains advertisements for maritime vacancies for work in Antarctica.
However, the range of business interests of “Winot OÜ” is much wider, since it is, among other things, a co-founder of the Ukrainian company “Primorskaya Energogeneryucha Kompaniya”, which operates a solar power plant in the Saratsky District of the Odesa Region. The founders of this company are also “Solar Green Technologies”, Serhiy Spodin, the Estonian company “Aldera Invest”, and the ultimate beneficiary is the same Oleksiy Tregubov, who is associated with Andrii Chuklin through the companies “Bastion” and “Trust Development”. Therefore, it is not surprising that earlier in this structure, with an income in 2025 of 136 million hryvnias, Andrii Chuklin himself was a co-founder.
In this respect, the recent information from journalists from “Schemes” that the head of the Ukrainian Energy Customs, Anatoliy Komar, came to work in a Mercedes, which his wife rented from the “Primorskaya Energogeneryucha Kompaniya”, for 16 times less than the market price, is not surprising. It is not surprising that in “Winot OÜ” itself, Estonian registers indicate a local resident Natalja Kovtun and Andrii Chuklin as founders, indicating him as a citizen of Tajikistan. Moreover, as can be seen from social networks, “Winot OU” also employs Hanna Shishman-Chuklina’s brother – Pavlo, who is “responsible for recruiting crews”.
However, in this rather obvious story with the participation in the management of the vessel “More Sodruzhestva” and the corresponding flow of marine products through Belarus of such puppets of Russian special services as the aforementioned Hillar Teder and Aleksander Moshensky, there is another rather specific page. The fact is that “Winot OÜ” operates not only the vessel “More Sodruzhestva”, but also the scientific research vessel “Noosfera” (former “James Clark Ross”) IMO number 8904496 under the Ukrainian flag, which belongs to the National Antarctic Center of Ukraine.
As Ukrainian journalists write, from 2017 to 2024, the aforementioned Center purchased goods and services for $45.2 million from structures controlled by Chuklin on a non-tender basis for the provision of logistics services that only the “More Sodruzhestva” could allegedly provide, while also indicating fraud with the relevant requirements in the field of currency legislation, and, “as a result, for five years, a private vessel that was engaged in commercial krill fishing in the Atlantic Ocean was maintained at the state expense of Ukraine.”
Since 2021, a similar situation has developed with the vessel “Noosfera”, where in 2022-2024 the Center, as the formal owner of the vessel, paid “Winot OU” $25.55 million for its maintenance, of which only 10% went to meet the needs of Ukrainian polar explorers in Antarctica, and the costs of managing “Noosfera” increased almost 5 times. As written on social networks, Chuklin is also a key figure in the schemes for the construction of a “commercial hub” on the Polish-Ukrainian border near Mostyska.
Thus, it is obvious that the international fish mafia controlled by Russian special services with such key actors as Moshensky and Teder and the “Tajik” puppets described above is releasing new metastases, and the response to them in the context of large-scale Russian aggression clearly needs to be strengthened.
