Look at these photographs. They show members of the Russian National Guard (Rosgvardiya).
Acting on orders from their bosses—Vladimir Putin and his bodyguard Zolotov—they are protecting the country from its enemies. Just look how desperately and selflessly they do it:
But here’s the thing: in reality, it’s exactly the opposite. The country needs to be protected from these men’s bosses—from Putin, from Zolotov, from Medvedev and his cronies, and from the rest of the crooks.
So this investigation is for you, my dear Rosgvardiya troops, police officers, service members, and everyone else in uniform. So that you understand that it is we—me, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, our party, the people who go out to rallies—who are actually standing up for your interests. We are protecting you from the authorities and from your thieving bosses, who are literally taking food out of your mouths so they can profit from it.
Russia has more than 340,000 Rosgvardiya personnel. It is a special structure created to protect those in power: Putin set it up and put his personal bodyguard, Viktor Zolotov, in charge. This whole army has to be fed, right? Not just given uniforms, weapons, transport, and housing, but literally fed. These are hundreds of thousands of young men, and they need to eat.
So the state buys food for them with taxpayers’ money. Cabbage, carrots, potatoes, meat—completely ordinary products used to prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner in canteens. All of this is purchased centrally; there is no freelancing here—everything is governed by GOST state standards, specifications, and clearly defined quality requirements, down to the size and weight of each potato. Feeding everyone decently and uniformly is actually not a simple task: Rosgvardiya units are stationed in every region, the country is enormous, the distances are vast, and someone has to keep track of quality, deadlines, contractors, and so on everywhere.
As recently as a year ago, food was purchased from different suppliers depending on the region. Then the bosses realized: this is a huge pot of money—billions of rubles every year. Why not make some money off it?
Here is a government decree dated December 2, 2017, by which Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev—an old “friend” of our foundation—granted the company *Druzhba Narodov Meat Processing Plant* the exclusive right to supply food to Rosgvardiya without any tenders or competition whatsoever. And Rosgvardiya buys food ONLY from this company.
And the company is located in Crimea. It used to be part of an agricultural holding owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Yuriy Kosiuk. Then Crimea became part of Russia, and the oligarch had to sell off this Crimean segment. “Had to” is the key phrase—but I’ll come back to that a little later.
Now let’s do a super-simple exercise. Let’s compare procurement prices for ABSOLUTELY identical products for the same units before and after Medvedev’s order.
For this, we have last year’s state contract and the current one.
Example one: white cabbage.
Last year it was bought for 14 rubles 96 kopecks per kilogram, and now the exact same cabbage for the exact same Rosgvardiya troops is being purchased for 46 rubles 78 kopecks per kilogram. Three times more expensive.
Example two: onions.
Last year: 16 rubles per kilogram. This year—just like that—onions have suddenly doubled in price, to 37 rubles per kilogram.
Example three: apple juice.
Until quite recently, it was being bought for 40 rubles per liter. After Medvedev’s decree: 87 rubles per liter. More than twice as expensive.
And the situation is exactly the same for potatoes, carrots, and butter. And we are not talking about pocket change here: the total value of these contracts is 2.1 billion rubles according to SPARK (a Russian corporate database), or 2.4 billion rubles if you calculate it manually. In the video, we used the conservative estimate of 2.1 billion rubles.
And here’s something else: the food has not only become two or even three times more expensive, it has also become worse in quality.
In November 2017, that same Moscow logistics support center purchased meat at 311.78 rubles per kilogram, and just one month later, from *Druzhba Narodov*, at 436 rubles per kilogram—an increase of almost 40%. Yet under the previous year’s contract, 50,000 kg of frozen beef blocks made from trimmed beef were supplied, with connective and fatty tissue accounting for no more than 6%, and the remaining shelf life of the product at -18°C had to be at least 10 months from the date it was received by the customer. Under the contract with *Druzhba Narodov*, by contrast, 57,000 kg of frozen meat blocks were supplied, with connective and fatty tissue now allowed to make up as much as 14%, and the remaining shelf life at -18°C only had to be at least 8 months from the date of receipt by the customer.
Why not? Give them whatever—you know they’ll eat it anyway. And on meat alone, you could build yourself a country house.
If I still haven’t convinced you, dear Rosgvardiya troops, that billions are being stolen from your food budget, then I went especially for you to a Pyaterochka supermarket near our office. It’s a completely ordinary store near the metro.
At Pyaterochka, I checked the prices of potatoes, onions, cabbage, and juice.
And here is the result of my experiment: Pyaterochka is cheaper.
And that is the price in an ordinary store by the metro. In Moscow! It includes a whole pile of markups—the store’s margin, logistics, the wages of loaders and cashiers. And anyway, this is retail, not a wholesale order worth billions of rubles. AND IT STILL COMES OUT CHEAPER.
At this point, of course, the question arises: who is pocketing these stolen billions?
But why ask me? Ask the FSB. Ask the Investigative Committee. Ask your Zolotov and his friends Putin and Medvedev. After all, you are protecting them from the people. And they certainly know. I’ll explain why now.
The *Druzhba Narodov* meat processing plant, where food is being purchased at absurd prices, was seized from a Ukrainian oligarch in early 2017. In an interview, he says it outright: “Yes, it was a takeover.” The oligarch’s press secretary says it was done by structures “close to the leadership of the Russian Federation.”
And here is a video comment from the Ukrainian oligarch’s press secretary:
I agree, the information is not very specific, but let’s work with what we have.
Especially since the story is objectively rather strange. They took part of the business away from the oligarch, then immediately handed it contracts worth several billion by Medvedev’s personal decree. Rosselkhozbank opened some unbelievable credit lines, and everyone seemed to rally together to make sure the Crimean plant was doing just fine. So surely, at the very least, it ought to have ended up in state ownership?
Let’s look at the chain of ownership. Two companies down the line, we find a certain gentleman named Boris Zaurbekovich Kantemirov.
It would be nice to write, “Oh, we recognized Boris Zaurbekovich immediately and understood everything.” But that’s not quite true. Boris Zaurbekovich just seemed vaguely familiar to us.
First, a little about him. Kantemirov is a former officer of the Internal Troops. He is listed as the Head of the Central Archive of the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (now Rosgvardiya), which means that in the past Kantemirov was a direct subordinate of Viktor Zolotov, the head of Rosgvardiya.
“So all roads lead to Zolotov,” you might think. Some certainly do—but from Kantemirov, not just a thread but a whole rope leads to other people.
For the past several years, Boris Zaurbekovich Kantemirov worked as CEO in the business structures of St. Petersburg businessman Boris Vaninsky. Below you can see him serving as CEO of various companies that belong to the Rodcroft group. That is Vaninsky’s asset.
And Vaninsky, we already know veeeery well. Because he ALMOST made it into our film “He Is Not Dimon to You”, but at the very last moment he was cut by our heartless editors for supposedly being insignificant. We admit it: we were wrong.
This famous Kushelev-Bezborodko palace in St. Petersburg (it now even has a car elevator and luxury apartments registered to the “charitable” Dar Foundation) was bought by Medvedev’s buddies not from just anyone, but from Vaninsky’s company.
The previous owner of this mansion was LLC Nevskoe, and that LLC is part of the aforementioned Rodcroft group.
And of course. We haven’t written this phrase in a while, so with some pleasure: Boris Vaninsky is also a graduate of the law faculty of St. Petersburg State University.
Let’s return to our mysterious meat plant owner, Kantemirov. What else can we find out about him?
He was the CEO of a company called LLC Resource Service.
The name may sound bland and boring, but the company itself is not. It owns (or owned—that is a separate story, for another time) a huge plot of land directly adjacent to one of Medvedev’s unofficial residences on Rublyovka (an elite residential area outside Moscow), in Maslovo.
We wrote about the Maslovo residence in our longread about Dimon (a mocking nickname for Dmitry Medvedev). You can reread it here—and why not take another look.
We’ve drawn up a diagram for clarity.
The neighboring companies are all connected to each other as well, so it looks as though they simply built a kind of “security belt” around Medvedev’s dacha.
The dates all line up: Kantemirov, the owner of the meat plant, while serving as CEO of both Resource Service and other Rodcroft companies, simply could not have failed to be involved in this deal.
And one more great detail. The Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation joins our investigation: from its report, we learn that Kantemirov’s company bought this plot illegally, most likely through collusion with Rosimushchestvo (the federal state property agency).
For 15% of its cadastral value.
I don’t think there is anyone who would believe that Kantemirov, the head of a police archive, is the real owner of a meat processing plant in Crimea—a plant that feeds all of Rosgvardiya and has been generously supplied with both money and contracts by Medvedev’s personal decree.
It is obvious that Kantemirov is fronting for someone. We tried to figure out for whom, and as you can see, Medvedev keeps popping up everywhere. So let’s set dogma aside and say it plainly: we have come away with the impression that the beneficiary of this scheme—under which all of Rosgvardiya’s food procurement was funneled through the *Druzhba Narodov* meat processing plant—is either Medvedev himself or people from his inner circle.
If you know more, write to us through Black Box.
If you know any Rosgvardiya troops or service members in general, send them this video. Let them learn more about their “commanders-in-chief.”
September 9 is a nationwide day of protest against raising the retirement age. Be sure to come out.
Facebook groups for the protest in different cities.
VK groups for the protest in different cities.