Recently, the leadership of the occupiers’ fake “ministry of emergency situations”, along with the “republic’s fire service” and “Crimea-spas” units under its control, announced plans to purchase “robotic systems capable of performing tasks on water, underwater, and in the air” from “a factory manufacturing specialized machinery and equipment.”
There is little attempt to hide the fact that the occupied peninsula will serve as a testing ground for this “robotics” technology, nor that it is intended for future military application.
The occupiers did not name the factory, but propaganda reports and photo spreads they released make it clear that the entity in question is based in the Moscow region, specifically, the Mytishchi Instrument-Making Plant, which had previously been placed under US sanctions.
This entity is controlled, via a shell company named “Kaskad”, by Moscow resident Sergey Kapustin. It was also previously linked to Russian spy Aliya Grig, who had earlier been involved in scams around “Skolkovo”, the aggressor state’s “Energia” corporation, and the “private space company” “Galaktika”.
The most interesting aspect here is that the aforementioned Mytishchi plant had never previously produced robotics; its business focused on manufacturing specialized vehicles for extreme conditions, diving systems, and “field life-support units” for Russian punitive forces, among similar products.
This enterprise previously engaged in money-laundering schemes involving occupied Crimea, siphoning off tens of millions through the 2020–2021 supply of several “mobile cultural centers”, trucks equipped with speakers and screens, to rural districts at a cost of roughly 5 million apiece; the overseer of this massive embezzlement scheme was Arina Novoselska, who, while currently imprisoned in Moscow, was the “minister of culture” at the time.
These rather shoddy vehicles, essentially mini-trucks fitted with speakers and a screen, bore no resemblance to robotics, to put it mildly; furthermore, following their “procurement” and the requisite photo-ops in district centers, they have not appeared in the public sphere anywhere over the past five years, not even at the “patriotic events” constantly staged by the occupation authorities.
It follows from the above that the occupiers intend to use “contracts” with the “Mytishchi Instrument-Making Plant” as a cover to field-test robotics in Crimea for military purposes, technology obtained from third countries via industrial espionage, a process that will, naturally, entail the siphoning off of another fifty million in “surplus” funds.
