If you still haven’t read Kashin’s "From Crimea to Donbas: the Adventures of Igor Strelkov and Alexander Borodai," you definitely should.
Apparently, this article will have major implications for understanding how the civil war in Ukraine is organized and financed. According to Kashin, both Girkin and Borodai worked in Russia for Konstantin Malofeev, a well-known "entrepreneur" in the business of siphoning money from state-adjacent budgets.
http://www.ligainternet.ru/liga/the-board-of-trustees.php
To a broad internet audience, he is known as one of the founders of the Safe Internet League—an organization of hellish bootlickers and propaganda hacks lobbying for internet censorship—and as the possible sponsor of the campaign against VKontakte founder Pavel Durov.
Unfortunately, Kashin did not touch at all on the most important issue—one that says a great deal about Malofeev himself, his money, and the peculiar nature of his dealings with the Kremlin riffraff. Here is my post from November 20, 2012—I found it right away because I remembered it well: that was when Malofeev’s home was searched, and it was presented as "Putin has begun fighting corruption." And since the case involved the theft of funds from VTB, I—as a VTB shareholder who is constantly investigating their fraud—was asked for endless comments on the subject.
At the time, the case escalated pretty dramatically:
Searches are being conducted at the homes of Rostelecom president Alexander Provotorov and company shareholder Konstantin Malofeev as part of a criminal investigation into the theft of more than $200 million from VTB Bank. According to Kommersant, Mr. Malofeev has been taken into custody, and Mr. Provotorov may be detained this evening. http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2071289
and many people thought this really would end in an anti-corruption exposé. All the more so because no reasonable observer doubted that Malofeev had in fact carved roughly $200 million out of the state bank—apparently in collusion with people inside VTB itself. This episode is described in our report on corruption at VTB:
You can read it in full here in English and here in Russian (starting from page 20).
So, as you have probably already guessed, it did not end with an anti-corruption investigation. It ended with a settlement agreement between Malofeev and the state-owned bank VTB. And this became known (SURPRISE) at exactly the moment when all these Girkins and Borodais suddenly turned into "fighters against fascist Banderites" (a derogatory reference to Ukrainian nationalists associated with Stepan Bandera)—at the end of February this year. And while Malofeev may have been able to put up some resistance in the British courts where VTB was suing him, he certainly could not do the same against the actions of the "law enforcement authorities." That is why, according to Vedomosti, the terms of the "settlement agreement" included the clause "VTB withdraws its complaint from the Interior Ministry." Which is, of course, absurd: this is not some private prosecution over a fistfight between neighbors at their summer cottages. A state bank had $200 million stolen from it, and it is entering into a "settlement agreement."
There is also a good profile of Malofeev in Forbes.
But the most interesting part began only after Kashin wrote the column and posted a link to it on Twitter. That’s the power of social media: someone immediately turned up who recognized Malofeev’s voice and pointed out the obvious—though until then it had seemed unbelievable: in the well-known recording of the intercepted conversation involving Girkin-Strelkov, he even addresses "Konstantin Valeryevich."
So, from 4:06 onward, you are listening to a conversation between Malofeev’s former employee (according to Kashin) and Malofeev himself—the organizer of Russia’s Safe Internet League and the man who, according to VTB, stole $200 million from a state bank. I should note that the siphoned-off money, despite all the talk of spirituality, traditionalism, and patriotism, was transferred not to Crimea or Optina Pustyn (a famous Russian Orthodox monastery), but to London, plain and simple:
The moral of the story is this: we already knew that the civil war in Ukraine was being sustained by cash payments to several hundred people, but we had assumed that the money being used for this had been stolen by Akhmetov and Yanukovych from the citizens of Ukraine.
But the reality is even more infuriating: the civil war is being paid for with money stolen from a Russian state bank through crooked devils trying to impose censorship on our internet.