On August 6, “Radio Liberty” published an investigation into the connections between the Berlin law firm “Schmider & Eckstein” and the Ukrainian state enterprise “Document”.
The primary basis for this publication was the responses of this law firm on behalf of “Document” to complaints from Ukrainian citizens in the countries of the European Union, who, since the spring of 2024, have been delayed in issuing passport documents in the branches of “Document”, in the context of changes in the Ukrainian legislation on mobilization.
At the same time, among other things, it was indicated that even the address of the German branch of “Document” coincides with the office of “Schmider & Eckstein”.
One of the co-founders of this law firm is Karl Eckstein, who has been actively promoting the “recognition” of the attempted annexation of Crimea since 2015, as the alleged “president” of the Swiss “Union of Friends of Crimea”.
In 2020, our Association devoted an investigation to Eckstein’s activities, confirming that he had repeatedly visited occupied Crimea, actively playing the role of a delegate of “Swiss business” and voiced corresponding “commercial ideas” there, in particular during meetings in 2016 with then Vice Gauleiter Ruslan Balbek.
In addition to a certain “tourist trail”, in 2017, at the fake “Forum of Friends of Crimea” in Yalta, Karl Eckstein proposed creating in Crimea “an internal blockchain platform for anonymous foreign investments bypassing European and American sanctions”. We have proven that since 1982, Karl Eckstein headed the Moscow representative office of the Swiss industrial consortium. As a lawyer, he represented the interests of such Swiss concerns as Nestle, Sulzer, Bührle Oerlikon, Andre Lausanne, Bühler Uzwil and others in the USSR.
And already in 1986, Eckstein founded his own consulting company in Moscow, “Eckstein and Partners”, dedicated to legal and accounting services, and trust management of cases. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the firm’s practice has expanded to include “protecting business interests in the European Court” and “representing clients’ interests in Interpol.”
As reported on the website of “Eckstein and Partners”, this structure “offers a wide range of services in Germany, France, Switzerland and Liechtenstein” and their activities are clearly not limited to the tasks of the “washing machine” of Eckstein’s obvious “Crimean friends.” Among other things, Eckstein, among other things, “generously” offers clients Swiss citizenship, real estate, and all forms of doing business in this country.
In 2020, ARC indicated that the company’s partners include former Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Yuri Skuratov. And among the staff of “Eckstein and Partners” who actually work with clients, Irina Kladovaya is designated as a project coordinator, who graduated from the Moscow military university in 1987 with a degree in translation and then immediately worked in Germany for five years.
Back in 2020, we wrote that “it is easy to see that not only professor Eckstein himself has the right to a Russian “general’s pension” in this structure.” Karl Eckstein weakly concealed his own “combat experience” in the Russian special services, he has Russian citizenship and was married to a Russian woman, and since 2007 he has become the honorary consul of the Russian Federation in Switzerland, opening his pretentious office in Zurich as a “consulate of the Russian Federation” for this purpose.
However, in October 2018, a few weeks after the announcement of the establishment of the aforementioned “friends of Crimea” in the Swiss Rorschach, Professor Eckstein was “forced to resign his own consular powers in Zurich.”
However, Eckstein continued to call himself the head of the “East-West Forum”, the “Switzerland-Russia Chamber of Commerce”, the “Switzerland-Russia Cooperation Council”, and so on.
A little later in the same Rorschach in 2019, Karl Eckstein, together with Markus Pflitsch, founded the company “Terra Quantum” with an authorized capital of 10 million dollars, allegedly located at St. Gallerstrasse, 16a.
On the website of “Terra Quantum” itself, the founders indicated were confirmed, along with the “technical adviser” Gordey B. Lesovik added to them. Gordey Lesovik, then head of the Laboratory of Physics of Quantum Information Technologies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), was “a leading Russian scientist in the fields of quantum metrology and quantum thermodynamics and a powerful specialist in quantum cryptography and quantum information science, the author of groundbreaking works on high-precision quantum measurements.”
Mr. Pflitsch began his career with the world leader in management consulting, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and then worked at the largest European banks, Deutsche Bank, UniCredit, and then as a quantum physicist at the CERN international center in Switzerland.
At the same time, Pflitsch has a specialized education and, by a “strange coincidence,” is a visiting professor at MIPT. Thus, as we wrote in 2020, the Russian special services do not spare either funds or personnel for the “Terra Quantum” project.
By 2020, the Kremlin had already attracted more than sixty scientists to the project, and on its own website, “Terra Quantum” did not hide its tasks in the fields of quantum cryptography, quantum computers and quantum networks.
We wrote that “it is quite obvious in whose interests this work is now being actively carried out, near the very center of CERN, in the heart of the financial and energy systems of Europe”, despite the fact that at the “official address” of “Terra Quantum” there are “neither physicists nor lyricists”, after all, the office center of an outside Swiss charity is located there.
Thus, it is obvious that Karl Eckstein, and through him the Russian special services, could not only receive from “Document” databases of millions of Ukrainian citizens, not only use their role as “lawyers” in responding to citizens’ requests, with the aim of discrediting Ukraine’s mobilization activities in Europe, but also to gain access to issues of cryptography of Ukrainian passport documents.
After Professor Borys Babin was informed by Radio Liberty journalists in July 2024 about the ongoing journalistic investigation regarding “Schmider & Eckstein” and “Document”, he gave the journalists a detailed comment, and our Association contacted “Document” twice demanding a comment on the situation, to which we received formal replies in which the head of the enterprise Sergiy Prokopchenko directly tried to hide the connections between “Document” and the obvious agent of the Russian special services Karl Eckstein, about the nature and consequences of such connections.
Our Association will continue monitoring this situation, which has all the signs of ongoing undermining of the national interests of Germany, Ukraine and Switzerland by the Russian special services on an especially large scale.
