Shorouk Express
The war in Ukraine has become a lucrative business for select power players on both sides of the conflict. One such figure is Russian oligarch Dmitriy Nikolayev, whose net worth has reportedly surged to an estimated $1.8 billion, according to Forbes.
Andriy Braginets of the Ukrainian News Agency writes that Nikolayev’s companies profit by selling stolen Ukrainian grain and supplying coal to metallurgical plants in Russian-occupied regions, allegedly with the help of Ukrainian businessmen.
The kp.ua weekly looked into the situation with the sale of coal from the Russian-occupied territories. We publish the material of the newspaper’s journalistic investigation with the author’s style and content preserved.
In August 2024, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions against the Russian company Stroyservice JSC, owned by billionaire Dmitry Nikolaev, who supports the war. The validity of the sanctions does not raise questions, only one question arises: why is it so late? We managed to obtain documents proving that even before the start of a full-scale enemy invasion of Ukraine, Stroyservice carried out continuous coal supplies to the so-called “L/DPR”. And numerous gasket companies, including those controlled by the citizens of Ukraine, helped (and continue to help) him to do so.
“Barzasskaya” scheme
During the war, the fortune of the Russian oligarch Dmitriy Nikolaev almost doubled. If in 2023 the American Forbes magazine estimated the value of his assets at $1.1 billion, in 2024 – already at $1.8 billion. That is, as the popular saying in the “Russian world” goes “For some (people) war is war, for others it’s a dear mother-in-law”.
A press release from the US Treasury, representing the latest package of anti-Russian sanctions, says that this package “is targeting entities involved in Russia’s metals and mining sector”, which have turned into “a tool in service of the Kremlin’s military industrial complex”.
To put it simply, Stroyservice JSC, which has come under sanctions, is one of the key sponsors of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. And so that the sole owner of this JSC Dmitriy Nikolaev (88.89% of the shares belong to him directly, and another 11.11% – through the company Stroyservice JSC LLC) could earn more, the Kremlin farmed him out the occupied Ukrainian Donbass.
Both before and after February 24, 2022, Nikolaev’s company supplied coking coal to enterprises captured by “L/DPR” separatists. Why were sanctions against his company introduced only now? The fact is that it was not easy to “calculate” the involvement of Stroyservice in these supplies: Nikolaev used two or even three intermediaries in his chains to help mask the origin of the cargo.
We managed to unmask one of these schemes completely. Only through the company Barzasskoye Partnership JV LLC for the last two years Stroyservice supplied the coal products for more than 1 billion rubles ($10 million at the current exchange rate) to the territories temporarily not controlled by Ukraine.
Let’s go through this scheme in detail. At first glance, everything is decent: Barzasskoye Partnership JV LLC sells coal to different, as if unrelated companies, and those companies resell it to the end consumer at a margin – business and nothing personal, as they say. But it is not by chance that we emphasized the insidious particle “as if” in this sentence. The fact is that this is nothing but a deliberate splitting of the supply between three affiliated companies – to confuse the tracks. Moreover, affiliated not only with each other, but also with the supplier company. This supplier company just a month before Stroyservice was added to the sanctions lists appeared on the holding’s website as one of its subsidiaries, and then mysteriously disappeared.
In particular, from the supply contract of 22.02.2024, a copy of which appeared at our disposal, it can be seen that when selling coal from ALS-Trade LLC to Algorithm Fuel Integrator LLC (ATI LLC), the actual shipper is another company from among the “first” buyers of the same coal – AlEnSi LLC! How come? The company “Florance” LLC is indicated the consignee, we will speak about it later. Here is this copy of the contract:
And here is the agreement for the sale of coal between Barzasskoye Partnership JV LLC and AlEnSi LLC:
Another remarkable fact is striking if you study the card of ALS-Trade LLC (TIN 4205412620) on the website of the register of Russian legal entities. ALS-Trade contacts indicate e-mail: oooalensi@gmail.com – obviously copied from AlEnSi LLC name.
And in the coal supply agreement between the companies AlEnSi LLC and Investneftetrade LLC, we see the same e-mail indicated as contact!
It turns out that a kind of two different companies use the same email address for business correspondence. It looks about the same as if the Mercedes website indicated such email as: bmw@gmail.com. In the case of ALS-Trade, such a comparison is quite appropriate: in addition to participating in the chain of illegal coal supplies to the occupied territories, this company, as written on its official website, carries “premium cars of the German Great 3” – from China, moreover, in coal containers. Yes, yes, it is written: “The containers with coal were shipped from Kuzbass from the customs and logistics center of AlEnSi LLC, and returned with cars.” That is, this company practices bypassing sanctions in different directions and in different ways.
As we managed to find out, in fact, the ALS-Trade company is managed by Roman Kramar, head of the domestic sales department of Stroyservice JSC. And although Nikolaev’s holding is reluctant to disclose the names of its key employees, information about Kramar can be found on social networks: it turns out that he runs not only from sanctions. So, in the Russian social network “vKontakte” we managed to find the following posts:
The third company from the first “chain link” of coal supplies from Stroyservice JSC to the occupied Donbass is Coal Trading LLC (TIN 7714475147). Everything is simple here: according to an extract from the Russian register of legal entities, it is clear that its previous director, before the sanctions, was Alexander Bobyr. And the same citizen was the general director of the Russian Brevi Manu LLC (TIN 7713298978), also a subsidiary of Stroyservice JSC, whose list of founders include Dmitriy Nikolaev personally. By the way, another founder of Brevi Manu is the Cypriot holding GRAINFUL HOLDING LTD, which journalists associate with the odious businessman, Ukrainian citizen Pavel Fuks. It turns out that Dmitriy Nikolaev, who sponsors Putin’s war against Ukraine, has close business ties in Ukraine? What fun!
But let’s go further along the supply chain. The chain is closed by Investneftetrade LLC (TIN 7729481489), Trade JSC (TIN 7727472979) and ATI LLC (TIN 7706806518). Also they are a kind of three different companies, but, in fact, interconnected for a long time and very tightly. First, they were all mentioned in mass media as the assets of the notorious Russian businessman Sergei Nevsky, who was involved in many corruption scandals, and eventually ended up in prison. And secondly, through all these firms, coal came to the same consignee – the aforementioned Florance LLC.
The Florance company has already been in the spotlight of journalists. At the end of last year, the System (“Sistema”) investigative project connected it with Putin’s compadre Viktor Medvedchuk (Putin is the godfather of Medvedchuk’s daughter), calling the latter “the new beneficiary of the Donbass economy”.
Here are copies of contracts and invoices confirming the fact that it was Florance LLC that accepted coal from Stroyservice JSC:
And an extremely important detail: all contracts stipulate that Florance LLC accepts goods at the Uspenskaya of North-Caucasian Railway 510907 railway stations or, in accordance with the additional instructions of the Buyer, Gukovo of North-Caucasian Railway 580404, or Vystrel of South-Eastern Railway 439818. Here are these stations on Google maps:
If anyone had doubts where the coal from Stroyservice JSC was going all this time, this map should finally dispel them. These companies supplied the coal steadily to the territories of Ukraine occupied by Russia.
“Rabbits” in the service of the occupant
Further study of the coal supply schemes from Stroyservice brought us many more discoveries, the most interesting of which: at least two Ukrainian citizens who also have Russian passports help the oligarch Nikolaev to circumvent the sanctions. Their names are Sergey Sinelnikov and Andrey Rashchupkin. The first owns Russian company TD Syndicate Promo LLC (TIN 7707339111). The second belongs to Green Rabbit Limited (Hong Kong), which translates literally as “Green Rabbit,” and Black Rabbit DMCC (UAE) – “Black Rabbit,” respectively.
These “rabbits” attracted attention due to one document: Appendix No. 1 to Contract No. TS-0112/1 of 01.12.2022, by which one of the participants in the above coal supply scheme Trade JSC sold products to the company TD Syndicate Promo.
The name “Syndicate Promo” has already flashed in the media: a year ago, the site “Important Stories” “disclosed” that this company took part in the export of wheat, coal and other strategic resources from the occupied regions of Ukraine to Russia, and further for export. The owner of the company, Sergei Sinelnikov, then clumsily lied that he was “not selling coal” (as you can see from the document above, it was pure nonsense) and did not know any “rabbits”.
Meanwhile, we found documentary evidence of the facts previously stated in the media. First of all, here is evidence that Russia is driving wheat grown on Donetsk land for export through the Hong Kong company Green Rabbit Limited.
This is the wheat bill issued by Agora LLC:
And this is a certificate of origin of wheat, a certificate issued to Agora on behalf of a certain “state corporation” Agrarian Donbass”, which the invaders created specifically in order to officially steal Ukrainian agricultural products.
Another Russian company, ASTA GROUP LLC, is involved in the chain of this marauding, here are the documents confirming its sale of grain to the same Green Rabbit Limited, and the already familiar Agora LLC is indicated as the consignee. As can be seen from the invoice, 2,781 tons of stolen wheat went on the “Captain Voronkov” dry cargo ship to Turkey.
Here is another contract, ASTA GROUP LLC buys grain for further resale abroad from one of the peasant farms in Donetsk region.
After information about such deliveries was leaked to the press, the “rabbits” decided to disguise themselves and staged the fake sale of Green Rabbit Limited. Instead of Muslim Temerkaev, who is known as an adviser to Marat Kabaev, the father of Putin’s mistress, former gymnast Alina Kabaeva, Andrei Rashchupkin became the owner of the company. This fact is recorded in the extract from the Hong Kong register of companies, a copy of which we also managed to find.
However, this did not change the essence of the rabbits’ business, and they continued to both export agricultural products from the occupied regions of Ukraine to Russia and import coking coal from Stroyservice, which is necessary for metallurgy. Here is the confirmation of Dmitriy Nikolaev’s close cooperation with “rabbits” – for example, a payment order dated 12.07.2024, through which Green Rabbit Limited transferred 30 million rubles for coal to the account of Stroyservice JSC on behalf of Vittolia Company Limited.
Vittolia Company Limited is registered at the same place, in Hong Kong, under the number 3144395, and it is managed by Igor Nikolaev, the son of Dmitriy Nikolaev. He is assisted by several full-time employees of Stroyservice, for example, the nominal director is Andrey Belkov, head of the sales department of Stroyservice CJSC. His name and position can be seen in the list of authors of the article on the state and prospects of the coal market of the Russian Federation. This article is presented on the website of the Russian State Library.
And these transactions are far from isolated episodes of the work of “rabbits” with coal, although the main role in this segment of their business is played not by green, but by the black “rabbit” – the Dubai company Black Rabbit DMCC, which has its own fleet.
But we, in the light of the recently adopted sanctions, are more interested in the role of Dmitry Nikolaev in this group. As we have already said, both Sinelnikov and Rashchupkin are citizens of Ukraine, while in the midst of the war they work with impunity with the occupied territories. Maybe someone else in Ukraine is behind these, and the group is actually controlled from here? Or, on the contrary, are the “rabbits” a pocket group of Nikolaev, which in fact he personally controls? And given the ties with Fuks, maybe Nikolaev is doing business on the principle of “double game,” in case Putin loses?
But whatever the answers to these questions turn out to be, the result is still the same. Nikolaev’s business gathers pace and supports Russian aggression against Ukraine. Both by the means of the huge taxes which Putin spends on the war and by the means of the metal for the Russian military industry. And so far, the “targeted” American sanctions to Nikolaev – like an elephant trunk.
Andrey BRAGINETS
