If all you heard about as a Russian was exactly what Putin wanted you to hear, you might Crowdfund a Russian invasion of Ukraine too, especially when no one who is a Russian Soldier is thought to have died there(except by parents whose sons don't come back). But, there is no news about them dying at all in Ukraine anywhere in Russia on pain of death to reporters in Russia.
Pro-Russian rebels carried the flag of their self-proclaimed Republic of Novorossiya in Debaltseve, Ukraine, in February.Credit
Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images
WASHINGTON
— The Novorossiya Humanitarian Battalion boasts on its website that it
provided funds to buy a pair of binoculars used by rebels in eastern
Ukraine to spot and destroy an armored vehicle. Another group, Save the
Donbass, solicits donations using a photograph of a mortar shell
inscribed with its web address and the names of donors. Yet another,
Veche, states that its mission is to “create modern, combat-ready”
military units fighting Ukraine’s central government.
These
organizations are part of an online campaign that is brazenly raising
money for the war in eastern Ukraine, using common tactics that have at
least tacit support from the government of President Vladimir V. Putin
of Russia. Although they often portray their mission as humanitarian,
most of the groups explicitly endorse the armed insurgency and vow to
help equip forces in the two regions at the center of the fighting,
Donetsk and Luhansk.
An
examination by The New York Times of the groups’ websites, social media
postings and other records found more than a dozen groups in Russia
that are raising money for the separatists, aiding a conflict that has
killed more than 6,400 people and plunged Russia’s relations with the West to depths not seen since the Cold War.
Photo
A QIWI terminal in Moscow. Its system can be exploited for illicit uses.Credit
James Hill for The New York Times
The
groups have relied on social media — including YouTube and the Russian
version of Facebook — to direct donations through state-owned banks in
Russia and through a private system of payment terminals owned by a
company called QIWI that is affiliated with Visa and traded on the
Nasdaq. While most of the donations appear to come from Russia, the
organizations have also solicited funds from abroad using large American
and European financial institutions, including banks and companies like
Western Union and PayPal, even though many of the groups are targets of
international sanctions.
The
fund-raising could pose legal risks for those companies, which are
prohibited from doing business with blacklisted people or groups. In
fact, the sanctions have helped give rise to a cat-and-mouse game in
which the fund-raising groups morph with the shifting circumstances,
changing names and redirecting donations to new accounts to keep the
money flowing.
With
the European Union expected to renew its sanctions later this month,
Mr. Putin has continued to insist that the fighters in eastern Ukraine
are part of a homegrown opposition movement, even though a preponderance
of evidence shows that Russia has provided manpower and weapons. In
late May, for instance, two Russian soldiers were captured on the battlefield and charged with terrorism.
Mr.
Putin participated in the negotiations that produced a tenuous
cease-fire in February, and he has called on both sides to reach a
lasting political settlement, most recently during his meetings with
Italian officials and Pope Francis in Rome. Officials in Ukraine and
elsewhere, however, say that he has continued to stoke the conflict in
order to keep his neighbor weak and unstable.
In
recent days, new signs of a buildup of Russian troops and equipment at
the border, as well as fighting that killed at least 19 people on the
outskirts of Donetsk, have raised fears that the simmering conflict will
erupt again.
It
is unclear just how extensive the fund-raising network is, or how much
money flows through it, though the separatist groups identified by The
Times claim in social media posts to have raised millions of dollars.
The
network features a disparate yet overlapping cast of characters that
includes a mustachioed former Russian military intelligence officer
credited with starting the uprising, Igor Girkin, who uses the nom de guerre Igor Strelkov; the dissident writer and Putin critic Eduard Limonov,
whose neo-nationalist followers have championed the territorial
expansion in ethnically Russian regions with far more vigor than Mr.
Putin’s Kremlin; and a former “foreign minister”
of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Yekaterina Gubareva, and her husband,
Pavel, an ethnic Russian from Ukraine and one of the most prominent
separatist leaders there.
Photo
Igor Girkin, a former Russian
military intelligence officer who uses the nom de guerre Igor Strelkov.
He is a leader of the Novorossiya Movement, which has been a target of
Western sanctions.Credit
Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
All
share a common cause: establishment of a region loyal to Russia that is
sometimes called the Donbass or Novorossiya. They make similar appeals
to ethnic and political solidarity with the fighters opposing the
central government in Kiev, and they share methods for raising money for
illicit activities that the Internet has made vastly more efficient,
according to experts and officials monitoring financial flows of
criminal and terrorist groups.
“Violent
groups operating in war zones and their supporters abroad are
exploiting advancements in communications and financial services
technologies to more efficiently increase popular support and raise
funds for their cause,” said Howard Mendelsohn, a former deputy
assistant Treasury secretary and now the managing director of Camstoll
Group, an advisory firm in Washington.
According
to their own online appeals, the organizations have directed that
donations be made via state-owned or state-controlled banks in Russia,
including the country’s largest, Sberbank, or credit cards issued by
those banks, some branded with MasterCard and Visa logos. Mr. Putin’s
government, which strictly regulates nongovernmental organizations to
monitor opposition political activity, has done little to stop the
fund-raising.
The
head of Russia’s Federal Service for Financial Monitoring, Yuri A.
Chikhanchin, for instance, recently told Mr. Putin that his agency had
frozen 3,500 bank accounts suspected of supporting terrorist
organizations. The fighters in eastern Ukraine, however, are not among
the groups Russia has designated as unlawful.
Photo
The separatist leader Pavel
Gubarev, center, in the Parliament chamber in Donetsk, Ukraine, last
year. Mr. Gubarev and his wife, Yekaterina, solicit donations through
the Humanitarian Battalion of Novorossiya.Credit
Uriel Sinai for The New York Times
“Anyone
in Russia who wants to provide assistance to the D.P.R. and the L.P.R.
is encouraged by and gets support from the Russian government,” said
John E. Herbst, a former American ambassador to Ukraine now at the
Atlantic Council in Washington, using the abbreviations for the
self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Following the Money
One
of the fund-raising groups, Save the Donbass, claimed in May to have
raised the equivalent of $1.3 million in donations through Sberbank and
other payment systems, including QIWI.
The
fund run by Ms. Gubareva and her husband, the Humanitarian Battalion of
Novorossiya, claims to have raised $213,000 since its founding in May
2014, shortly after the fighting began.
Photo
A pro-Russian group battling
for control over the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol solicited donations
for equipment on VKontakte, Russia's most popular social network. It
wrote "help is very much needed" and listed ways to transfer money,
which The Times has redacted.
Its
website allows donors to direct their contributions to specific militia
units, including a mortar battery named after the Russian version of
Pinocchio, a puppet called Buratino, and boasts that it has provided not
only the binoculars used in the destruction of the armored vehicle, but
also tactical military gloves, laser range finders, radios and a car
used by the battery’s spotters.
At
least five of the organizations solicit donations through PayPal, the
online payment company based in California that is now owned by eBay.
PayPal has in the past faced legal trouble for processing payments to
entities in Iran, Sudan and Cuba, recently paying nearly $7.7 million in
penalties in a settlement with the Treasury Department.
When
asked about the Ukrainian-related accounts — identified by email
addresses in Russia — a PayPal spokeswoman, Sarah Frueh, said none of
the accounts were valid. She declined to respond to additional questions
seeking clarification. Many of the organizations openly advertise ways
to donate using American and European banks. On the Humanitarian
Battalion website, for instance, Ms. Gubareva explains how to wire
dollars or euros into her account at Sberbank using correspondent
accounts at Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank in New York,
among others. So did the separatist group Veche.
It
remains unclear how much money is flowing into eastern Ukraine from
abroad. Only one of the international banks said it had detected illicit
donations, blocking a contribution to Ms. Gubareva’s organization,
according to a bank official who spoke on the condition that the bank
not be identified. Another donation of $200 did pass to Veche, which is
not on any blacklist but proclaims links to organizations that are —
including Mr. Strelkov’s Novorossiya Movement and the Ghost Battalion,
led by Aleksei Mozgovy until he died in an ambush last month.
Photo
An image taken from a video
posted on Russian social media in November shows a mortar shell
inscribed with the web address of the separatist group Save the Donbass.
But
the widespread use of QIWI has created potential risks for its partner,
Visa. Nearly all the fund-raising groups solicit donations through
QIWI, a virtual payment company founded in 2004 and later incorporated,
like many Russian companies, in Cyprus. QIWI provides consumers in
Russia — and increasingly other countries — with a variety of ways to
make payments online or through a network of tens of thousands of terminals that act like reverse A.T.M.s, allowing users to deposit cash and then pay participating vendors.
Users
can also move money to individuals — or charitable organizations — as
long as they have accounts linked to working telephone numbers. Its
partnership with Visa, begun in 2012, allows customers to use a
QIWI-Visa credit card to pay vendors outside QIWI’s network.
The
system has become wildly popular, used by 17 million Russians, but it
has also skirted legal trouble. The company’s terminals and credit cards
— along with the failure to require identification for transactions, as
demanded by Russian law since last year — can be easily exploited to
transfer proceeds from illicit activities, from drug dealing to tax
evasion.
In
a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, required
because its stock is traded on the Nasdaq, QIWI said its system “remains
susceptible to potentially illegal or improper uses” such as money
laundering by organized crime groups and other illicit actors, including
those named in sanctions by the West for their activities in Ukraine.
Photo
The dissident writer and
Putin critic Eduard Limonov, left, at the funeral of a man identified as
a Russian volunteer who was killed during fighting in Debaltseve, in
eastern Ukraine, in February.Credit
Anatoly Maltsev/European Pressphoto Agency
In
February, the company filed an amendment, saying that law enforcement
officials had carried out an investigation at its Moscow offices
involving “a small number of clients,” though it did not elaborate.
Officials
with Visa said they did not believe their company had processed any
donations to the organizations examined. QIWI’s chief executive, Sergei
Solonin, said in a telephone interview that QIWI blocked some of the
accounts identified by The Times last summer because they were engaged
in fund-raising activity prohibited by company policy. The company, for
instance, blocks the use of its system for political fund-raising.
Mr.
Solonin said other accounts were blocked after The Times brought them
to QIWI’s attention. One group, Tricolor, posted photographs of
donations made on QIWI accounts as late as October 2014, but Mr. Solonin
would not say whether that was one of the accounts closed later, citing
Russia’s financial confidentiality laws. After that interview, a number
of groups noted on their websites that their QIWI accounts had been
blocked, and removed them as payment options.
But
underscoring just how tricky it can be to curtail the groups’
fund-raising activities, a number redirected money to new accounts. On
April 20, a group called Batman noted on its social media page that all
but its Sberbank account had been blocked. But by May 18, it had updated
the page to include a new QIWI account number and a plea: “Donbass
needs your help!”
The
Western sanctions lists, for their part, have not kept up with the
groups’ ever-changing names. Mr. Strelkov’s Novorossiya Movement, for
instance, stopped soliciting funds after the European Union placed
sanctions on it in February. Instead, it asked that the funds be sent to
a related group, not blacklisted, called Global Initiatives, run by the
movement’s chief of staff with Mr. Strelkov as chairman.
In
early May, it morphed yet again, redirecting funds to yet another
related group, ANO KNB. Later in the month, a group identified by the
Novorossiya Movement as its partner, Strelkov Info, wrote that because
of constant blocking of its accounts, “we’ve decided to not post them in
places open to all”; donors could send an email “to find out transfer
details.”
Meanwhile,
new fund-raising appeals keep popping up. A group calling itself
Dobrovolec.org was soliciting funds online as of May 26, with QIWI and
Sberbank accounts among the payment options. The group, which claims to
be conducting at least two campaigns involving volunteer snipers and
“tankmen,” called on fighters familiar with such deadly weaponry as
surface-to-air missiles, flamethrowers and anti-tank guided missiles to
join its effort to “participate in military conflict in the west of
former Ukraine on Novorossiya side.”
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