Our Association wrote in the summer of 2022 about the proclamation by the Russian special services for the illegal “opening” in Damascus of the so-called “representative office” of the Nikitsky Botanical Garden, which was criminally “nationalized” by the aggressor in 2014.
We investigated the personalities of the fake “head of the representative office” Sergei Khokhlov and his fictitious “deputy” Alexander Grib, declared by the occupiers. In particular, it was pointed out that the criminal “boss” had indeed previously worked in the botanical garden in Nikita, near Yalta, in the direction of diseases of olive trees.
We wrote that in the future we should not exclude the corresponding “breakthrough developments” of the Russian special services in Syria in order to undermine the food security of the Mediterranean countries. At the same time, the Association also covered the previous stormy “commercial activity” of Grib and Khokhlov in the occupied Crimea, associated with fraud in land, real estate, and also with trade in “botanical garden products”.
Now Khokhlov gave an “interview” to the aggressor-controlled Crimean “media”, in which he obviously tried to prove the “importance and usefulness” of the work of his fake “representation” in Syria, but predictably, he did not succeed very well.
From the stream of “botanist’s” words about the allegedly “wide range of issues of mutually beneficial cooperation”, it followed that instead of the promised “research and work” in Latakia, destroyed by the war and crimes of the Assad regime, where the climate and vegetation are somewhat similar to Crimean ones, the fake “representation” is now “renting small office in Damascus” and then plans to “move to the premises of the local university.”
Khokhlov bluntly states the absence in modern Syria of both scientific personnel and a research base, but he is obviously “embarrassed” to name the reasons for such a collapse.
Thus, the “Khokhlov’s farm” does not even plan to undertake any work on the “theme of the botanical garden”; at the same time, the “botanist” himself and his curators from the special services still found an unassuming source of income in Damascus.
According to the said Khokhlov, his “equipment” allegedly “will allow the Syrians to check their export products (fruits, vegetables, berries)”, that is, “to monitor that it complies with Russian state standards”.
In fact, the “representative office” plans to engage in a corruption scheme for “certifying” some export products from Syria, which Russian propaganda has been enthusiastically talking about for many years.
The second task of the “representative office”, was pointed in the “interview”, which had nothing to do with botany, but clearly met the interests of Khokhlov’s curators, exactly – the search for Syrians for their education in the “Crimean and Sevastopol universities”.
Thus, the criminal propaganda action of the aggressor with a fake “representative office of the botanical garden” traditionally ended in a violent imitation of vigorous activity, with elements of corruption and intelligence work of the Russian special services.
