Hackers produce details on plans to stoke unrest in Kharkiv, replace unruly separatist officials, and submit pro-Russian bills to parliament
Leaked Kremlin emails reveal how Russian operatives botched an attempt last year to foment an uprising in Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, writes Maxim Tucker for The Times.
The emails, obtained by The Times, were apparently hacked from the inbox of Maria Vinogradova, an adviser to Vladislav Surkov, President Putin's point man on Ukraine. The civilian intelligence analysis group Inform Napalm said that it had traced the adviser to an office in central Moscow used by the FSB spy agency.
Three of the Ukrainian hackers involved in the leak met The Times on condition of anonymity. They rejected suggestions that the hack had been carried out with the help of Ukrainian or US intelligence services.
The inbox that they shared contains 423 emails between government officials and separatist leaders between 2014 and 2016. Highlights include a proposal from a militant leader to split Ukraine into three parts under a federalized system, plans to replace unruly separatist officials who were then killed or arrested, and draft Ukrainian laws to be submitted by a pro-Russian party.
The presidential office was also sent emails asking for approval of a screenplay and a poem about the war in eastern Ukraine.
The email trove includes two maps sent in January this year by Denis Pushilin, a rebel leader who reports regularly to Surkov, and suggests that Ukraine could be carved into three parts: an eastern third known as "New Russia", a central region, including Kyiv, to be known as "Lesser Russia" and a smaller western area to take the historic name "Galicia".
An email sent in April last year to Surkov from Mikhail Markelov, chairman of Russia's parliamentary committee for public associations, sets out a plan for stoking unrest in Kharkiv by creating a pro-Russian "resistance group" called the Civil Initiative.
By June, however, the committee chairman was reporting that the plan had run into problems. In the email Markelov explains that Kharkiv had ignored the group's false warnings of "bloody attacks" on Russian speakers by Ukrainian nationalists. He also relays concerns from field agents that Ukrainian intelligence services have infiltrated the pro-Russian organisation.
In a third email two weeks later Markelov appears to have abandoned hopes of an uprising, writing that many of the "resistance fighters" have been arrested or fled to Moscow or the breakaway Donetsk People's Republic.