Previously, our Association covered scams related to the aggressor’s financing of “Putin’s re-elections” in the occupied territories, in the format of the corresponding “dead souls” and “payment for their labor”.
Now it is worth separately describing the extremely typical situation of organizing a “video surveillance system” at this criminal show, from the criminal “Crimean mobile operator” “Miranda-Media”. The situation was analyzed by experts Boris Babin and Olesya Tsybulko, based on our Association’s previous researchs.
As the illegal “general director” of this structure, Igor Zhizhikin, recently stated, “more than 700 election commission sites” will be covered by the “video surveillance system” from “Miranda-Media”, both in Crimea and Sevastopol, and in the occupied areas of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya, Luhansk and Kherson regions.
This is the first time “Miranda-Media” has conducted this show on the occupied continent, and in the Crimea this structure has allegedly carried out so-called “video monitoring of elections” since 2014.
“Miranda-Media” began to play a key role in the criminal support of the occupation of mainland Ukraine in the spring of 2022. Let us recall, that on May 30, in the occupied territories of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions, the invaders cut off Ukrainian mobile communications.
The occupiers were preparing for the shutdown throughout May and accompanied it with statements about allegedly “negative actions of Ukraine”, which was denied in particular by Ukrainian mobile operators. In Kherson, then almost alive collaborator Kirill Stremousov began to spread misinformation that the shutdown on May 30 allegedly occurred “due to shelling by the Armed Forces of Ukraine” and a “large-scale accident”. This was intended only for persons who did not have information about the simultaneous shutdown of communications by the occupiers in Berdyansk and Melitopol, where, apparently, “large-scale accidents suddenly occurred”.
As Kherson residents reported then, on May 30, “at about 18:10 – 18:20, the connection disappeared. Over the previous two days, the connection was unstable, it appeared and then disappeared. And now it has disappeared completely. There are only unidentified operators on the network that appeared a few days ago”. The aggressor’s propaganda, however, in addition to statements about a fake “accident,” did not hesitate to declare that the “Russian mobile operator” “Na Svyazi” with the code +7990 allegedly began to work “in full force” on the occupied mainland territory of Ukraine.
It is noteworthy that the occupiers initially tried to hide the origin and ownership of the said “operator”. However, Kherson residents reported that the discovered technical parameters of the “operator” are very similar to “Win mobile”, a brand of the occupiers controlled “Crimean” telecom operator “K-Telecom”.
However, soon the occupiers began to indicate that communications and mobile Internet in occupied Kherson would be provided by another “Crimean provider”, namely “Miranda-Media”, which, in principle, was the same illegal mechanism.
Then we established that this criminal “provider” is a “daughter” of the Russian concern “Rostelecom” and their activities in the occupied Crimea are directly financed by “Rossiya” bank; in addition, it is “Miranda-Media” that operates underwater fiber-optic communication channels connecting Russia and the occupied Crimea. It was noted that the formal owner of 80% of “Miranda-Media” is not “Rostelecom” itself, but the fictitious “shipping company” “Luxtrans”, the “founders and owners” of which are the top managers of “Miranda-Media” itself – Oleg Sukhov, Pavel Toporischev and Olga Sharapova.
This “complex scheme” had a simple explanation, because it was through the “contracts” of “Luxtrans” in the Crimea that the real beneficiaries of this system, the owners of “Rossiya” bank, including Putin’s oligarch Yuri Kovalchuk, successfully absorbed “budget” billions. After all, it was the “shipping company” that supplied “Internet services” to the Crimea for most occupation structures, including fake “ministries”, military units and those same “election commissions”. In 2022 alone, in open sources we discovered more than 70 such “contracts” from virtual “shipowners” worth approximately 136 million rubles.
Naturally, the occupiers’ attempt on May 2022 to hide the beneficiaries of the new “operator” “na Svyazi” became just such a fraud; it is explained by the residents of Kherson precisely in order to create an additional “lining” for the said “federal scammers” to use the funds of “new subscribers” in the occupied territories. However, then, both the occupiers and the aforementioned Stremousov in Kherson, “something went wrong,” and against this background, in August 2022, it was not surprising that the occupiers’ complaints that “one of the most powerful Internet providers in the Crimea and Sevastopol”, the same “Miranda-Media”, “was subject to a hacker attack”.
Indeed, on the occupied peninsula, for several hours a congratulation on the Independence Day of Ukraine was posted on the “Miranda-Media” website, to which Crimean residents from different parts of the region reacted on social networks. In the same summer of 2022, the occupiers began to announce the opening of fake “administrative service centers” on the occupied mainland, and the corresponding communication support for their activities was carried out precisely from the occupied Crimea, and precisely with the use of “Miranda-Media”.
Then, following the example of the aggressor’s seizure of the building and equipment of a real service center in Nova Kakhovka, Minister Mikhail Fedorov wrote: “the occupiers took away from 60 thousand Ukrainians the opportunity to receive government services quickly, conveniently and humanely”.
During the same period, “Miranda-Media” stopped operating the seized equipment as a kind of “anonymous operator”, “reincarnating” in the occupied parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions as the criminal “Mir-Telecom”. And in November 2022, both “Miranda-Media” and another “communications company” of the aggressor, the illegal “Krymtelecom”, were headed by the same Ivan Zima, a “Rostelecom” functionary.
This “coincided” with the “genetic adventures” of collaborator Ekaterina Gubareva, whose tasks from the aggressor included the criminal “provision of Russian mobile communications” in the occupied Kherson region. At the criminal “post,” Gubareva was “replaced” by the occupiers Nikita Borodin, who from 2015 to 2019 was used by the aggressor in a similar criminal role as “deputy minister” in occupied Donetsk, but was later forced to “urgently leave” for Russia as part of a showdown between terrorist groups. At the same time, attempts began to bring both “Miranda-Media” and “Krymtelecom” not only to the occupied mainland south of Ukraine, but also to occupied Donetsk and Luhansk.
Let us recall that the illegal “Krymtelecom”, controlled by “Rostelecom”, is under the commercial control of the “Management Company of Infrastructure Projects”, which came under the control of the clan of Boris Rotenberg and Evgen Roitman. It is noteworthy that before the “arrest” of Gubareva, her husband, who then positioned himself in the role of a “trench truth-teller” of the Russian invaders, announced a certain “link” between the aggressor’s special services and ethnic crime in the Russia-occupied areas of the Kherson region.
Well, after the “arrest”, the same Gubarev said that Ekaterina “will soon be released,” but at the same time he is “forced to maintain the secrecy of the investigation”, adding that Gubareva, it turns out, “was shell-shocked” as a result of some “arrival” and even “was undergoing treatment”. Let us note that in fact we are talking about money laundering, which the occupiers organized in the occupied part of the Kherson region by establishing illegal systems of “banking services”. using the Internet traffic of illegal “Crimean providers” and cards of illegal “mobile operators”, primarily from “Miranda-Media”.
Thus, the aggressor strengthened control over money laundering through “Crimean” operators, and removed collaborators who “wanted too much” or “told too much” from this criminal game. Further, in February 2023, the aggressor decided to “cleanse” the activities of “Miranda-Media” from “competitors” in occupied Melitopol. Then the occupiers announced to city residents that the Internet would be “temporarily unavailable” due to supposedly some “repair work on the cable leading to Crimea”. In fact, then the main local Internet provider “Mediana”, previously captured by the occupiers, was “expropriated” by “Miranda-Media”.
On February 3-4 last year, at the Melitopol “headquarters” of “Mediana”, the occupiers staged a kind of show reminiscent of raids and searches, and then Melitopol residents had access to the Internet, but through “Miranda-Media”, and allegedly through its “Feodosia office”. At the same time, the illegal “Sevastopol vice-governor” Sergei Tolmachev from the “Krasnoyarsk team” of Mikhail Razvozhaev, about whose adventures and “election campaigns” we wrote a lot, also “checked out” in Melitopol. In occupied Sevastopol itself, “Miranda-Media” was mainly exposed in a number of scandals related to the expansion of its “telecommunications network”, both at the expense of private property and historical and archaeological sites.
Among other things, the criminal “deputy director of the department of digital development” of the occupied city, Tatyana Chernousova, stated that with the population growing, due to the criminal Russian colonizers of Sevastopol by 40%, her “protégé” from “Miranda” and “Krymtelecom” plans to “develop a system of antenna structures”. At the same time, as this illegal “official” admitted, in order to “full-scale coverage” of Sevastopol with this “infrastructure,” they allegedly need the territories of “historical monuments,” of which there are “too many.”
At the same time, in Melitopol, the criminal “layout” for “Miranda-Media” in the form of “Mir-Telecom” was constantly having something “go wrong”. Among other things, in order to make an illegal “connection”, Melitopol residents were required to come to the “technical support” of the criminal “Mir-Telecom”, located by the occupiers in the seized “Ukrtelecom” building, and “provide passport data”.
Next, all “subscriber data” was copied by the criminal “employees” manually, after which the “subscriber” was asked to come again, “in two weeks, for a login and password.” It is reported that in addition to such “Internet on a piece of paper,” swindlers from “Miranda-Media” also offered “prompt connection”, but through the “More-Telecom” laying and at a “double tariff”.
However, Miranda-Media for a long time failed to “become a single telecom operator” on the entire occupied mainland of Ukraine, “absorbing” criminal operators from Donetsk and Lugansk in order to “unite the technical “zoo” of available networks, overcoming an acute personnel shortage”. The main reason for “postponing the date of unification” were sanctions that made it impossible to obtain new equipment; however, the aggressor expected to bring equipment made in India and communist China for the “Donetsk plans” of “Miranda-Media”.
This approach obviously “left behind” a number of collaborators, in addition to the Gubarev family, who naively hoped that the occupiers would allow them to make “local earnings” on fake “mobile operators” and “Internet providers”, and also could not “please” individual “ Donetsk telephony tycoons.” The “voice of the disadvantaged” was then acted by Melitopol collaborator Vladimir Rogov, who publicly attacked the “Crimean operator” with “criticism” regarding the “quality of communication”, “incomprehensible tariffs” and “dividing people into classes”.
However, here it is worth taking into account the criminal role of Rogov as the “official offended” and fake “oppositionist” of the Melitopol collaborator Evgeny Balitsky, associated with Sevastopol. In 2023, on this occasion, we wrote that “it is obvious that the current “public concern” is a belated fight between collaborators at the trough and will not lead to anything in the “Miranda case”, which, in fact, was observed further.
As Crimean collaborators state, “at the moment the “Miranda-Media” group of companies includes: “MirTelecom”, “Krymtelecom” and “Miranda””, and this criminal “operator provides fixed and mobile communication services in six regions”, which includes both Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, and the occupied areas of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions. However, in fact, it was only in January 2024 that the same “K-Telecom”, under the “+7Telecom” and “Miranda-Media” brands, announced the launch of mobile Internet in the occupied Luhansk region. However, in fact, the network was deployed only in Lugansk itself and “on old equipment from Nokia and Ericsson,” since Chinese manufacturers still did not risk “supplying something new directly there.”
But since the spring of 2023, “Miranda-Media” has had problems on the occupied peninsula. Then, namely on May 26, “problems with the Internet connection” occurred in the Crimea. According to reports from local residents, the Internet was absent in Kacha (illegal provider “Neotelecom”), Feodosia, Bakhchisarai, Alushta, Solnechnogorsk (fake provider “Comfort 21st Century”) and Simferopol (illegal provider “Telesystem”). The fake “ministry of information and communications” explained, what happened as an alleged “accident” on the network of the “largest” illegal “telecom operator” of the peninsula, namely “Miranda-Media”. Internet interruptions from the illegal “Miranda-Media” were also observed in occupied Melitopol.
However, subsequently the occupiers began to announce some kind of “large-scale hacker attack”, and three days after which the criminal “minister of internal policy, information and communications” Vladimir Tregub, “resigned”, allegedly of his own “own request”. Tregub came to his current “high post” after the start of large-scale Russian aggression from the criminal “position” of “head of the administration of the Sovetsky district”, and “formally” the reasons for his rather sudden “resignation” were not explained.
As Elena Kushnir, adviser to the Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, stated on last year June 13 , in the occupied territories the invaders will “re-register the Ukrainian Internet resource as a Crimean company”. Kushnir pointed out that the occupiers are taking over operators, disconnecting networks from Ukrainian communication channels and switching traffic to the same, by that time illegal “Miranda-Media”, which we had repeatedly described, which, as the adviser admitted, “was created specifically in order to “Russian Internet traffic was provided in the occupied territories”.
Kushnir said that to combat this phenomenon, representatives of Ukraine are making efforts to establish a constructive dialogue with the RIPE NCC, the regional Internet registry for Europe, and that “a temporary mechanism has already been created to block such re-registration based on statements from Ukrainian companies”, and then the Ukrainian Internet community must achieve the creation of a permanent mechanism in this area.
“We have processed requests from Ukrainian providers. We have established contact with the RIPE NCC and are submitting the first requests to cancel the re-registration of an Internet resource”, added regional director of the Viner Telecom Internet provider Victoria Opanasyuk. Let us recall that our Association systematically reports these violations to authorized international structures, including the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and UN structures.
Among other things, we provided input to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for his report on internet shutdowns and human rights to the UN Human Rights Council in June 2022. In July 2023, we reported these issues to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Irina Khan, for her report to the UN General Assembly.
The corresponding atrocities of the Kremlin were discussed by us at the Supplementary OSCE Human Dimension Meeting in Vienna “The Role of Civil Society in Promoting and Protecting Tolerance and Non-Discrimination” on June 27, 2023 In addition, on March 1 of this year, experts from our Association initiated a corresponding discussion at online consultations held at the UN headquarters in New York as part of the UN Global Digital Compact initiative.
Also, during 2022, our Association sent a number of materials to the ITU on current aspects of Russian aggression against Ukraine, including aspects of the activities of illegal providers. Such activities were provided for by ITU resolution 1408 “Assistance and Support to Ukraine for Rebuilding Their Telecommunication sector” dated April 7, 2022.
In the materials we prepared, the ARC informed the ITU that since the beginning of large-scale Russian aggression, the occupiers have increased the level of violations of the right to freedom of receipt and dissemination of information in the occupied Crimea, and then began to massively deprive residents of the territories criminally seized by the aggressor since February 2022 of this right.
This happened as part of the destruction, damage and seizure by the invaders of equipment, stations and channels of mobile communication and the Internet, television and radio companies, as well as as part of the persecution of journalists, bloggers, employees of Ukrainian providers and media, the creation of fake “information structures” and illegal “communication enterprises”.
The ARC proposed to consider at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in September-October 2022 (PC-22) in Bucharest, the issues of functioning of representatives of the Russian intelligence services as “officials” of the Union. The Association received some feedback on our presentation from some ITU member states at the time, but for a long time no official information regarding aspects of Russian aggression was available on the ITU website.
Only in January 2023, some relevant data, previously unpublished, were posted on ITU web resources. On December 23, 2023, ITU nevertheless published a Report on the Implementation of Resolution 1408, in which it recognized that legitimate telecommunications companies in Ukraine, displaced and destroyed by the aggressor, provided 22% fewer services in 2022, which led to a decrease in revenues, and that to restore the telecommunications sector it is necessary US $ 1.79 billion.
In addition, as our Association also reported to ITU, the Report indicates that the aggressor unilaterally unlawfully changed the international numbering system defined by the ITU in Recommendation ITU-T E.164 (11/2010) 45 and Recommendation ITU-T E.212 (09/2016) 46 for the national numbering system of Ukraine, by illegally introducing new national destination codes for the occupied and war-affected territories of Ukraine and illegally using them under the country code “7” allocated by the ITU for Russia and Kazakhstan.
As the Report adds, the national destination code (NDC) of Ukraine and the mobile network code (MNC) were illegally used by “fixed and mobile networks” operating in the interests of the aggressor in the occupied territories of Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions, by illegal transition to the international numbering system of Russia, which directly states the recognition at the international level of the illegality of “Miranda-Media”.
Among other things, we have established that these processes are associated with the laundering of huge funds through all forms of Internet payments controlled by “Miranda” beneficiaries, and therefore they should be investigated as part of combating the financing of terrorism. In this dimension, it is noteworthy that the accountant of the formal “owner” of “Miranda”, the above-mentioned Moscow “shipping company” “Luxtrans” – most recently was Svetlana Frankovskaya, who, at least, served in the same role “Crimean structures” – solar power plants the company “Active Solar”, around which the large-scale scams we had previously exposed took place in the interests of the oligarch Andrei Klyuev.
In the “Miranda-Media” case, after the aforementioned “resignation” of Vladimir Tregub, it is worth mentioning collaborator Albert Kurshutov, who has become the fake “acting minister of internal policy, information and communications” since July 2023. Before the occupation, Kurshutov was the director of a number of companies, and their beneficiaries were “Deltanafta”, “Boris Company”, the offshore company “White Sphere Ltd.”, registered in Belize, and personally Nadezhda Yanaki, the mother of Leonid Grach’s son-in-law Nikolai Yanaki. Our Association has repeatedly written about the scams of the Grach-Yanaki clan in the field of oil products production and fraud with them.
It is obvious that this “minister for an hour” will formalize all the relevant scams related to the organization of “video surveillance systems” from “Miranda-Media” at the criminal show of “Putin’s re-election.” It is interesting that since December 2022, Crimean Tatar collaborator Kurshutov has played the criminal role of “first deputy chairman of the state committee for interethnic relations”. After 2014, Kurshutov collaborated with the occupiers in a number of fake “positions” in occupied Yalta, including in “urban planning, land and property relations”, and also criminally “led” the illegal “United Russia faction”.
In April 2022, he “marked himself” as one of the “talking heads” of the fake “Congress of the Crimean Tatars deputies”, organized by the occupiers’ special services, and also “headed the football club” “Kyzyltash”, which had previously been involved by the aggressor in a number of criminal political provocations. Another “friend of Miranda” was the criminal “chairman of the committee on information policy, technology and communications of the State Council” of the occupiers, Ivan Manucharov, who was repeatedly described by us, an assistant of Vladimir Konstantinov, whose plans for “quick rise”, apparently immediately after the “Ides of March”, we also previously studied .
Actually, the new “talking head”, in the form of the “General Director” of “Miranda-Media”, was the graduate of the Novosibirsk Higher Military School, Igor Zhizhikin, whom we mentioned. From 2000 to 2008, he worked in various leadership positions at “MTC” and then built a career with the Russian mobile operator “Tele2”, mainly as “director of the macro-region”.
It is noteworthy that Zhizhikin replaced the above-mentioned Zima extremely non-publicly, on September 27, 2023, after the aforementioned scandal with “malfunctions” of “Miranda” and the “loss of subscriber data by the operator”. The “new director” was noticed only in December, and he began to appear publicly already in the midst of preparations for “Putin’s re-election”. However, even under the “new director” the number of “failures” in the work of the criminal “operator” does not decrease.
On October 28 last year, the Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine Mikhail Fedorov stated that “the IT Army stopped the work of the largest telecom operators and Internet providers in the temporarily occupied territories. The companies “Krymtelecom”, “Miranda-Media” and “MirTelecom” came under cyber attack.” Currently, communications of the occupying forces in the Crimea and in the occupied parts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Donetsk and Lugansk regions are partially paralyzed”.
On October 31, punitive forces in occupied Crimea announced an alleged “cyber attack” on the information resources of the criminal Russian “enterprise” Krymenergo, as well as on “equipment of Internet providers.” And on January 23, Miranda-Media announced in its telegram channel “the absence of communication services in the Crimea and Sevastopol on January 24 from 00:00 to 06:00.” This announcement began to be refuted by the fake “Crimean authorities”, including the criminal Ivan Manucharov, who stated that “an internal audit was initiated based on the publication of the post in the company’s official telegram channel”.
Thus, the near future will show exactly how the beneficiaries, “talking heads” and “technical staff” from “Miranda” will implement “video surveillance” at the criminal show of “Putin’s re-election”, and what this will lead to both on earth and in the “digital clouds”.
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