Grid Dynamics connects wars in Ukraine and Syria with Soros’ Open Russia, Sobchak and snipers in Saratov

Grid Dynamics connects wars in Ukraine and Syria with Soros’ Open Russia, Sobchak and snipers in Saratov

by Scott Humor

The “Russian hackers” story never seems to go away. I have described before a scheme behind the empty shell company called the “Internet Research Agency,” and the “Kremlin trolls” who were allegedly working for it.

On December 30th 2017, the Kiev regime’s punitive forces called the SBU, which shares a building with the CIA in the center of Kiev, posted information on cracking a case of phishing emails that had allegedly affected some internet users in Ukraine by taking control of their machines and demanding payments to unlock them.  The RT has more details.

“The SBU specialists found that the client part of the DarkTrack hacking software, after installation, was connecting to server hardware (command&control servers) with Russian IP-addresses. In fact, the Russian hackers, controlled by the Kremlin, were able to covertly and remotely administer Ukrainian web resources and conduct informational retrieval.” “Once installed, the software carried out disks encryption and posted on the desktop information about the need to pay for decryption through anonymous electronic accounts. In most cases, mentioned phishing emails came through Russian mail servers.”

 

The DarkTrack Trojan malware has been around since 2015. It’s a remote administrator tool for any windows platform. It is offered for free with a detailed user manual and can be used by anyone at their leisure. Multiple articles and even books have been published about this remote access trojan (RAT). It is also easy to mask an IP address, but a user of  the RAT would need a contacted server to reply directly to him or her, since you can’t spoof an IP *and* expect it to be used as a control channel. Depending on the internet provider, an IP address provides information on the internet provider,  and geographic location of the user. It takes a minute to decipher general information about an IP address. For the government security services, which is what the SBU pretends to be, it is still fairly easy to figure out an end user simply by submitting a judge-ordered request to the internet provider. For foreign security services, there are still different channels including the Interpol which they can use.

In the “Kremlin trolls” story, the Director of National Intelligence DNI has released the names of the company in question “the Internet Research Agency,” using which I was able to put the puzzle together.

In case of the SBU, they don’t release any info on IPs, internet providers, persons or companies responsible, or even on regions or cities of Russia. Without dismissing the whole thing as being influenced by too much horilka before the New Year’s Eve, let’s treat it as something real. In this case, by not releasing information on alleged perpetrators, the SBU is protecting them, because the organizers of the DarkTrack hacking attacks are valuable assets that the SBU needs to protect.

Analyzing the DNI and Facebook’s claims about the “Internet Research Agency” and Russian citizens involved in creating this false flag operation, brought me to a conclusion that the Western organizers of the false flag attacks to blame Russia, always use a seed of truth for a batch of lies. In the case of the “Kremlin trolls,” we have the CIA assets at some time employed by the FSB, so now the DNI and other US spooks can claim that it was the Kremlin who is behind the “Internet Research Agency.”

The same with the resent SBU “revelation.” They gave us two pieces of information: first, the malware attacks have been coming from the territory of Russia, and second, that  the hackers were “controlled by the Kremlin.” We also can estimate the time of the attacks, approximately around October to December 2017. Another important detail, the malware is being spread by emails. An individual internet user would have difficulty sending out large quantities of emails. His or her account would be suspended by the Internet provider for suspicious activities. You can check with your internet provider and they will confirm this. It happens even if you are a small bossiness owner who tries to mass email “Happy New Year” e-cards to your customers.  A large internet company is the only entity that can get away with mass emails. A public network is also needed to administer a botnet. More on the this in Review of Botnet Attacks and its Detection Mechanism.

During my research for the book, “Pokémons in Ukraine: War Game In Ukraine Manual” I came across an interesting development that took me from Maidan, the earlier days of the Kiev regime’s war against the civilian population of Donetsk in 2014, all the way to a software company with offices in the US, Poland, Ukraine and Russia in December of 2017. I discovered a set up that fits perpetrator profile, as outlined above.

Again, I am not claiming that the company in question is our Trojan horse and a source of the SBU’s woes.

Here are the facts as I was uncovering them.

The NGO Help Army was founded in March 2014, after the military putsch toppled the democratically elected president, but before the Ukrainian army and the foreign special forces started a war against the Russian population of Donbass. The Help-Army’s publicly stated goal was to collect donations for the regular Ukrainian Army during its unconstitutional war. The Help-Army was organized and owned by Yaroslav Volodymyrovych Markevych, currently a Ukrainian politician, businessman, activist, former fighter of the punitive Donbas Battalion, and Member of Parliament of Ukraine of the 8th convocation from the ultra-nationalist Samopomich Union. The Samopomich Union party, or the “self help” party, was one of the most active crisis actors during the Maidan. It’s apparatchiks received the most benefits after coming into power.

The Help-Army was officially organized in March 2014, after the military putsch organizers took power in Kiev, but before armed clashes commenced. Whoever organized this NGO somehow knew that the war against the Russian population of Donbass was about to take place and that the 95th Motorized brigade special operations unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces was deployed on March 1, first to Kharkov to threaten the civilian population of this large, industrial, mostly Russian-populated city, then to Crimea to prevent its referendum, and then to Donbass.

Yaroslav Markevych has been a professional community organizer his entire working life. In 2008, he was awarded by Presidential distinction  Ivan Mazepa’s cross for his achievements being the President of Kharkov city youth union “Eastern-Ukrainian Democracy Development Foundation.” His award decree #189/2009 states that Markevich was “awarded for a major personal contribution to the upholding of national idea, establishing and development of Ukrainian independent state and active political and social activity.” The president who awarded him came to power as a result of the Orange Revolution in 2004.

If you are not familiar with the modern history of the western part of Russia called “Ukraine” translated as the border land, you should know that every president there came as a result of a putsch or a color revolution, to overrun the majority vote, with the exemption of Yunukovich, who was democratically elected, but overthrown by the military putsch of Poroshenko, Yatcenuk and company.

One of the ways to survive in this dysfunctional society was to work for some Western funded NGO. Over one million people, by some accounts, worked for the NGOs before the Maidan, and ironically,  greatly contributed to the collapse of their own country.

One of crisis actors working for Help-Army was Yulia Rudanovska. Native from Isum, she grew up in Kharkov and graduated from the National Polytechnic University in Kharkov. Sometime in 2014, Yulia Rudanovska took part in the production of one of the fundraising documentaries for the Help-Army NGO titled “Half a year of freedom.”

The documentary has subtitles, so you can watch her performance starting with 0:52 of the video.

Two important points. First, Rudanovska was an activist of the Help-Army while she was working for the Grid Dynamics company. Second point, Rudanovska says that she got involved with the war on Donbass because she was not happy with Russians living in Ukraine. She says: “the most difficult in this situation is that there are people in our country who for some reasons do not think of themselves as Ukrainians.” She means that they think of themselves as Russians.

Now, this 34 year old woman lives in Poland with her daughter Kvitka and their cat Bestia. They live there with Yulia’s brother, who also emigrated from Ukraine to Poland. His picture and her comment that he sits where “good guys fought for independence of Poland.”

Another bizarre detail about Yulia, is that while being a Ukrainian nationalist she speaks and writes mostly in the Russian language, as also do her online Ukrainian friends.

In essence her explanation of why she participates in war against Russians living in Ukraine, is because they see themselves as Russians. That’s why she says actively participated in providing funds and material assistance to the mercenaries coming from around the world, including Canada, United State, Israel, and Europe.

While moving to Poland, Krakow,  Rudanovska continued working for the US based software company the Grid Dynamics. The company simply transferred her to their Krakow’s office.

What exactly is the Grid Dynamics company that employs a Ukrainian extremist like Yulia Rudanovska?

The Grid Dynamics was itself founded by emigrants from the Soviet Union, a married couple Victoria and Leonard Livschitz.

According to their website, Grid Dynamics is the engineering IT services company known for transformative, mission-critical cloud solutions for retail, finance and technology sectors. The company focuses on big data analytics, scalable omnichannel services, DevOps, and cloud enablement.

The year of 2017 has become a new start for Grid Dynamics. This year, the company laid the foundation and conducted a series of public Meet-Ups in various fields: DevOps IN UA and JS Dynamic Talks, and also YouCon In Saratov, Russia. In April the company was acquired by Automated Systems Holdings Limited, a publicly traded Bermuda company (Hong Kong Stock Exchange 00771) and subsidiary of Beijing Teamsun Technology Co., Ltd, a publicly traded Chinese company (Shanghai Stock Exchange 600410-SH). However, the founder of the company Victoria Livschitz, is still actively involved in its operations. The company has offices in the US on 4600 Bohannon Drive Menlo Park, California, Ukraine, and Poland with Krzysztof Raś as a Managing Director. In Russia the company has two offices in Saint Petersburg and Saratov.

In Saint Petersburg Grid Dynamics employs 250 IT specialists, and in Saratov, 170.

According to Bloomberg, Ms. Victoria Livschitz founded Grid Dynamics International, Inc. in 2006 and serves as its Chief Technology Officer. Ms. Livschitz is the Founder, Chief Executive Officer and President of Qubell Inc. She served as the Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman of the Board at Grid Dynamics International, Inc. Prior to Grid Dynamics, Ms. Livschitz served for 10 years as a Principal Technologist at Sun Microsystems, where she held a number of senior positions.”

Every year Grid Dynamics in Russia recruits students for its one month long internship.

But this is just a tip of the iceberg of intense work that Grid Dynamics conducts with young people in Russia, and I am talking as young as kindergarten pupils with their app Kids math games for toddlers, kindergarten and preschool kids, and all the way up through school and college.

As a Russian, I wouldn’t want my children to learn anything from a company that employs Ukrainian nationalists who worked providing money and services for the death battalions in Ukraine. I think that if parents in Russia knew about this detail of the company policy, they would feel the same about their children who as students got involved with the company.

Take, for example an Online game and conference of software developers called YouCon. The conference takes place for the past three years and it started in 2015, following the Maidan in Ukraine.

As reported by saratovit.ru, 1200 young people participated in YouCon in October 14, 2017 from different regions of Russia. They listened to 25 speakers on several parallel tracks on technology, design, marketing, and business.

There were even prizes for fast problem solving.

Those who read my research in the “Pokémons in Ukraine:  War Game in Ukraine Manual” are familiar with the role augmented reality technology plays in hybrid warfare. That’s why the latest post on the Grid Dynamics blog titled “Introducing augmented reality for e-commerce” by Dmitry Sumtsov has raised all kinds of red flags for me. The power grab by the Western allies in Ukraine took place, while we, the viewers, watched a staged event called Maidan. Augmented reality technologies were used to stage Maidan first and then to stage the “Russian spring” in Donbass.

The fact that the GD company with its Maidan related expertise brings its expertise in Augmented Reality to Russia is very alarming.

“Augmented Reality (AR) is a type of computer vision technology that allows real-time views to be overlaid with virtual, computer generated objects. As opposed to virtual reality, which replaces the real world with a completely simulated one, augmented reality is designed to enhance people’s perception of reality. Powerful modern computer processing has also opened the doors of the mobile world to this technology and hundreds of companies are now actively producing thousands of different AR applications.” writes Dmitry Sumtsov.

It works very well in term of social engineering. Viewers think that are watching new reports about 100,000s protesting in Iran, while a video taken by a phone on the ground shows a few dozen crisis actors in surgical masks jumping up and down on a street corner.

If you still think that I am being overdramatic, consider this: one of the organizers of the YouCon conference in Saratov is viva64.com, also known as the Program Verification Systems or PVS-Studio (PVS is an abbreviation of company’s name).

According to the company’s vKontakte account in December 2017 for a company’s retreat they stayed in Tzargrad hotel outside of Saratov, where they took a sniper training course.

“Sergey not only can shoot well, but he also poses well,” says in the comments for this image.

This is an owner of the company, Andrey Karpov.

 

And the picture of the Grid Dynamics YouCon conference organizers in front of the PVS-Studio company’s poster.

Notice the company’s logo: a unicorn vomiting rainbow. An Urban Dictionary defines a rainbow puking unicorn  as “1. to vomit rainbows at the sight of something amazing on teh internet. 2. To be overwhelmed with cuteness that you puke rainbows. Antonym: vomiting. Please don’t use this (or any) meme outside of the internet.”

No matter how much Grid Dynamics Saratov wants to look tech and cute and represent an event of YouCon as pure software developers conference, it doesn’t come across as such, because the event was attended by activists working for Soros and, most likely, for the US department of State and the CIA. One of them was Anastasia Moskaleva. Moskaleva bragged about participating at YouCon conference in Saratov on her social media accounts.

In fall of 2017, Anastasia Moskaleva was appointed a regional coordinator for the Khodorkovsky – Soros funded Open Russia movement. Previously, a Russian court recognized the Open Russia MGO as an undesirable foreign agent organization. She was, for unknown reasons, a member of the United Russia party till last October, when she was very publicly sacked from the party for her activities.

In December of 2017, Anastasia Moskaleva became the director of Kseniya Sobchak election campaign center in Saratov. Sobchak expressed her political views as liberal, which traditionally means anti-Russian. Even her campaign slogan sounds “against everyone” in Russia, but pro-Kiev regime, pro-NATO, pro-Pentagon and pro-Washington. Maybe I missed something, but this is her platform in a nutshell. It’s the same political platform supported by Yulia Rudanovska, other members and apparatchiks of the Samopomoch party, the Help-Army NGO, and other witting and unwitting participants of the Deep State.

Sobchak personally actively supported the Maidan in Kiev. here are a few pictures of  Kseniya Sobchak in Kiev 2014 with Stepan Bandera portraits and the extremist Svoboda party logos on the background.

Moskaleva’s presence at the YouCon conference short-circuited this entire contraption.

 

Saratov (an aerial video of Saratov and images of the city) has been on the US government radar for a long time. In 2009, John Ross Beyrle, the US Ambassador to Russia wrote in one of his diplomatic dispatches published by the Wikileaks:

“1. (C) Summary: A two-day visit to the upper Volga city of Saratov… decision-making has created immense frustration among city officials, party and NGO leaders with regional officials. They universally denounced the haughty manner in which regional officials ignore opposition voices. City of Saratov authorities have managed to build broad networks of consultation with opposition parties and NGO’s, earning them respect from those groups.”

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09MOSCOW2619_a.html

“2. (C) Meetings with government, opposition and NGO leaders during a September 30-October 1 visit to the upper Volga River region city of Saratov revealed little concern for the economic crisis. They painted a picture of frustration with the control national government and political authorities from Moscow exercise over regional decision making. The legacy of Saratov’s past status as a closed Soviet city with a concentration of defense industries whose interactions with other Soviet regions was minimized means that, even 18 years after the USSR ceased to exist, the city has few business connections with other Russian cities, and has been passed over for investment by a number of foreign firms.”

Today, Saratov along with the Saratov region is the thriving region manufacturing everything from boats and river passenger ships and dry bulk cargo carriers, to railroad construction parts and speed railroad platforms, industrial power generators and a new generation oil rig complexes.   Saratov district just started operation of the first in the region solar power station.  Saratov railroads use super heavy freight trains. Saratov hydroelectric power plant has been recently modernized.  Balakovsk SRZ OJSC shipbuilder Saratov region, just delivered to a customer its first floating pump station. It’s a single-deck vessel for supplying water to irrigation systems.

The list of industries and manufacturers including those working for the defense, and the list of the institutions of higher education operation in the Saratov and the region is too long to post here. The fact that the famous Russian Air Force Military Educational and Scientific Center “Air Force Academy named after Professor N.E. Zhukovsky and Y.A. Gagarin”  the world’s largest and oldest scientific school of aeronautics is located here speaks for itself. We all have witnessed mastership of the Academy graduates in Syria.

For those interested in economic news, a feed of the industrial news from the region.

The IT companies also increasingly find Saratov to be a desirable location with young profession workforce residing in the region.

The results of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest show that the last time the United States students won this prestigious competition twenty years ago in 1997. Russia’s programmers won most of the years since then. Saratov state University team won in 2006, and the Saint Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics and  the St. Petersburg State University teams won eleven times.

Those college students and IT specialists that got caught into neo-liberal trap thinking that they are capable to deliver something amazing for the economy, consider this: Russia’s team won the ACM contest first time in 2000, the year Putin became a president. In the past ten years, Russian team lost to China twice, in 2010 and 2011, when the neo-liberals with Dmitry Medvedev as a president were staging the comeback of the 90s. If you think that this is not representative enough, consider an economic crisis and a demographic dip Russia had during the years of liberals’ rule.

It’s not accidental that the Grid Dynamic has located one of its offices in Saratov. However, proximity to defense industry manufacturers and military colleges should give us a pause, especially when Victoria Livschitz says about the acquisition of “her” company by the Chinese that “she hopes to pursue emerging opportunities, such as connected cars and IoT in the manufacturing and automotive sectors.”

Let that sink in.

The Western sources like Bloomberg list only one  investor in the company  Eric Benhamou, the former CEO of Palm and 3com. He is also known as a scout for Israel’s science and technology. In 2006, for example, he was a keynote speaker at the symposium at Kibbutz Ma’aleh Hahamisha “The State of US-Israel Scientific and Technological Cooperation.”

Where things get really hairy is when we find out that one of Eric Benhamou’s sons Emanuel  “Manny”  Benhamou, a Tel Aviv University graduate, and, judging by his resume submitted for an internships at Stratfor in 2013, a loyal foot soldier of Israel. Everywhere he went from working for the America Israel Public Affairs Committee in DC to founding the Boston University Students for Israel organization, to being a Strategic Communications Fellow for the Dershowitz group where he “Monitored and tracked international satellite carriers for transmission of SDGT programming and terrorist media.” and even “Conducted daily media reviews to monitor emerging developments and national security concerns in the Levant” for the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs.

According to the Israel based IDC Beyond company  beyond.idc.ac.il\participants-of-2017\ “Manny comes to IDC from Silicon Valley where he headed Operations and Business Development for Y-Combinator backed start-up, Gigwell. Before working in tech, Benhamou spent 10 years in the international affairs arena, where he launched a non-profit initiative aimed at supporting liberal activists in the Middle East and North Africa. He spent a week with the Free Syrian Army while producing his own independent documentary titled, “Syria: A Fire Within.

However, there was another investor that provided $4 million dollars in initial investments. This second investor is not mentioned on the company’s website and as far as I can tell, it never been mentioned by Livschitz, who attributes the success of the company to herself.

The company was founded by the RVC, Russia’s Government fund of funds and the Development institute of the Russian Federation. According to the fund’s press release VTB Capital Asset Management successfully completes the transaction for the implementation of the Grid Dynamics project on 25.05.2017: “VTB Capital Asset Management JSC successfully completed a transaction for the sale of the Grid Dynamics project, which is in the venture Fund of the ZPIF (Closed unit investment fund) of long-term direct investments of VTB — Portfolio Investments. The fund with the size of more than three billion rubles was launched in 2008 with the involvement of the capital of VTB Group and JSC Russian Venture Company.”

The buyer of shares of the Fund and shares of the other shareholders is Chinese diversified IT company the Automated Systems Holdings Limited (ASL).

Grid Dynamics is a leading developer of cloud-based applications for high-load distributed systems in e-Commerce, Finance and other B2C segments. Customers are companies of the Fortune 500. It is expected that the transaction will generate mutual synergies. ASL will have access to the US market and Grid Dynamics will be able to enter the markets of countries in South-East Asia, including China and Hong Kong, according to the RVC press release.

100% of the RVC’s capital is owned by the Russian Federation represented by the Federal Agency for State Property Management of the Russian Federation (Rosimushchestvo). In its press release on successful sale of the Grid Dynamics, it doesn’t mention that the company has offices in Poland, a country that is in open economic war on Russia, and Ukraine, that claims to be in real hot war against Russia, neither it mentions names of other investors.  Let’s assume that these were the reasons why Rosimushchestvo decided to unload the Grid Dynamics to the Chinese. A good move on the RVC’s part.

I spent countless hours researching the products this company developed and trying to understand what exactly makes Google, Amazon and other giants to use the Grid Dynamics. Finally, I came to the conclusion that the company innovation is not technology as such, as its business model. The Grid Dynamics is a front, its goal to get job contracts, most likely initially with help of  Eric Benhamou’s connections. His Benhamou Global Ventures BGV an early-stage venture capital firm boasts deep Silicon Valley roots.

On the back, there is a large IT specialists recruiting agency that doesn’t identify itself as such. Back in 2009, Grid Dynamics announced its merge with Mirantis to form two business units:  Emerging Technology Practice (ETP), offering consulting and development services, and Technology Lifecycle Practice (TLP) offering customized staffing services for large-scale development, implementation and support stages of technology-driven systems.

Alex Freedland is Mirantis’ co-founder and CEO of the company, however from the Wikipedia on Mirantis you can only find out that Mirantis partners with Red Hat OpenStack, VMware,  Ericsson,  Canonical, the UK-based company which provides commercial support for Ubuntu, Oracle and others. One  has to drill down to find any connection between Mirantis and the Grid Dynamic with all of its clients like Microsoft, eBay, and Amazon.

Again, no magic here. Freedland, Benhamou, Stan Klimoff, Victoria Livschitz are managing the companies and have access to free private and public investment funds. They get the money and they get the customers’ orders and they run recruitment networks, meetups, and student conferences to recruit Russian software engineers and IT professionals, who for very small pay develop the giant American and European companies.

When someone tells you that Russia doesn’t have companies like Amazon and eBay, you know now that those companies have been developed and operate by the Russian engineering genius, by Russian programmers and developers, who don’t have access to free money to start and develop their own companies and work for hire, anonymously. And still, we have never witnessed Jeff Bezos coming out and thanking the Russian software engineers for excellent job they have done by developing Amazon into a giant company.

There is another leg to the Grid Dynamics – Mirantis business model, and it’s based in Latvia, another EU member engaged in the economic and political sanctions against Russia. Two more companies co-founded and co-owned by Victoria Livschitz in the same 2008. One company, Questora Inc., located in Riga and Moscow, provides grid and cloud computing, massive parallel processing solution that enables mass data processing; and real-time fraud detection.  And Qubell Tonomi, enterprise-grade automated application deployment and configuration management for web-scale applications. Victoria Livschitz also co-founded with Stan Klimoff, Qubell Tonomi in 2008. The company’s headquarters are located in California.

Among the key executives for Questora listed by the Bloomber  Igor Solodov and Victoria Livschitz.

Igor Solodov serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Questora Inc. he also serves as the Chief Financial Officer of SIA “AGroup.” According to the company profile, SIA “AGroup” develops human resource management and payroll solutions in Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe. It offers HRB, a software product used to manage organizations ranging between 20 and 10,000 employees, which includes human resources, payroll calculation, time recording, and employee self service modules. The company also provides implementation, training, and support services. It serves automotive, communications, consumer goods, education and research, engineering and construction, corporate services, financial services, health sciences, high technology, hospitality, industrial manufacturing, distribution, media and entertainment, natural resources, oil and gas, professional services, public sector, retail, and transportation and logistics industries worldwide, as well as utilities and federal government. SIA “AGroup” was founded in 2008 and is based in Riga, Latvia. www.agroup.lv

What’s most intriguing about the case of the Grid Dynamics and its employees, is that we find here actual specialists in augmented reality and make-believe events similar to the staged “chemical attacks,” or anti-government protests that never took place, but were acted by crisis actors on camera, and fake battles against sandal-wearing camel herders that took place on production sets, while real special operation forces of the US, Israel, and European monarchies, dripping sweat and blood, were taking over villages and towns in Libya, Ukraine and Syria.

While Yulia was making fake documentaries about “simple Ukrainians fighting for democracy,”  the American special forces like the Marines from the 82nd Airborne division out of Fort Bragg William Wright-Martinovich and Pfc. Alex Zwiefelhofer,  Private First Class of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team and the 82nd Airborne Division were shelling Donetsk, a city of a million people. We only know about them because they were exposed after being arrested  by the South Sudan Defense Forces on June 21 2017 while attempting to cross the border into “war-torn” South Sudan from neighboring Kenya  along with another mercenary the US Army “veteran” Craig Austin Lang.

“It is unclear what the veterans were doing in the region, but posts on Zwiefelhofer’s Facebook and Instagram accounts suggest that he had been serving as a volunteer soldier or mercenary in Ukraine as recently as last month.[May 2017] U.S. Army W.T.F.! Moments reports that both he and Lang had served with the same militia in eastern Ukraine.”

“The duo are not the only Americans volunteers known to have fought with militias in Ukraine. In 2014, Mark Gregory Paslawsky, a 55-year-old investment banker from New York, was killed in combat there.”

African News Agency reported that all three of them, Zwiefelhofer,  Lang and Martinovich fought in Ukraine.

In the promo video above, Yulia Rudanovska and her co-conspirators from the extremist Samopomish party delivers sets of generic tank driver uniforms to unidentified mercenaries so they would look convincingly while playing on the cameras the roles of “Ukrainian army,” or “pro-Russian rebels,” or even “the Russian invasion.”  [See my book, “Pokémons in Ukraine:  The War Game in Ukraine Manual” for more details and images.]

Take, for example, “Manny” Benhamou, the son of the Grid Dynamics co-founder Eric Benhamou,  experience in making fake documentaries about “democratic uprisings” in Syria titled Syria: A Fire Within he completed in 2014, “which chronicles the Syrian revolution from the viewpoint of Ammar Abdulhamid, a secular liberal activist and dissident.”  Judging by Abdulhamid’s entire body of work, he has never met a government he wouldn’t want to topple outside of Washington. Right this moment he is advocating to topple Iran’s government with the same fervency with which he advocated toppling Syria’s government.  Replying to Tucker Carlson‏’s tweet “Max Boot will say anything if they just let him invade Iran.”  Abdulhamid writes: “What a fucked-up way to reply to one of the most honest self-assessements to be published in a long long time. Still, since it was brought up, let’s clarify that calls for standing up to #Iran’s regional aggression is not synonymous with clamoring for an invasion.”

Translated from the liberal doublespeak, an invasion of Iran would be called “stand up to the regime.”

Now imagine that a tech company that has apparently provided “solutions” for a bloody color revolution in Ukraine, or at least employs Maidan crisis actors at its different locations and even relocate them across the state borders, and also invites Soros/ Khodarkovsky’s foot soldiers and the CIA assets for “conferences,” with Russian students, would start to provide technology for highway or railroad traffic? How can we be certain that they won’t, at some opportune moment, create problems with traffic flow?  It’s reckless to have this kind of Trojan Horses “creating” an internet of things for Russia’s manufacturers .

Returning back to the SBU statement made this week,  the Grid Dynamics could serve a perfect example of some pure hypothetical entity founded with the Russian public money (here is your Kremlin connection) by citizens of countries currently in economic war against Russia (Victoria was from Lithuania, her husband Leonard was from Ukraine, but both of them are the US citizens) with workforce and servers located physically on the territory of Russia, with the technical capacities to execute virtually any network based false flag operation, an entity connected to the non-systemic opposition forces in Russia, and with affiliates who take the professional sniper training.

If the SBU won’t provide any further details in relation to the assumed “Russian hackers,” it would mean they are protecting those “hackers” to continue using them to harass people and entities in Ukraine and to blame Russia for it. As for the new owners of the Grid Dynamics, if the Chinese won’t clean the house from Bandera followers and Soros foot soldiers, they might end up with a huge problem on their hands, which wasn’t what they paid for.

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38 Comments

  1. It looks as if the SBU have got their hands on the latest releases of traceroute and ping – the ones that notify you if the user at the far end is “controlled by the Kremlin”. (Whatever that might mean).

  2. Interesting article, as always. However, when it comes to Kseniya Sobchak, I have to express my surprise at her choice for presidential candidate. Western backed NGO’s in Russia are not only having trouble finding intelligent people whom to recruit, but they are foolishly trying to apply the American mentality.

    Sobchak was picked as a women and TV personality, the NGO’s hoping that she would draw votes from female voters. She will not. She is not the only non entity whom the NGO’s have picked, hoping to somehow outmaneuver Putin during the elections. It wont work. Putin is just too popular, and everybody remembers the Yeltsin years, when Russia was plundered by Western banks and corporations; nobody wants to see a pro-Western candidate as President of Russia.

    Yes, the West will most probably force Poroshenko to attack the Donbas, hoping to disrupt the elections in March. Such a foolish course of action can only cause harm to Poroshenko, not to Putin.

    • Readers will find this very interesting (posted on RT, January 12, 2018):

      Ukraine’s former PM claims more than eight million citizens have emigrated since the Western-backed Maidan in 2014. If he’s right, it adds to growing suspicions that Kiev’s population calculations are utterly out of whack.

      Posting on Twitter, Nikolay Azarov noted: “More than 8 million Ukrainians left the country after the coup: 4.4 million went to Russia, 1.2 million to Poland, others went to other countries. Neither Libya, nor Syria, nor Afghanistan, nor other war-torn countries saw such a mass emigration.”

      This, ofcourse, is not surprising, certainly not the figure of 4.4 million Ukrainians going to Russia. Ukrainians are all of Russian origin, and the Ukrainian language is a dialect of Russian. The actual name of Ukraine means “frontier region”, and it is an old Slavic name, derived from the Slavic word “Krajina”.

      • In 1991 Ukraine’s population stood at 52 million (approx) today its stands at 42 million approx. Has there ever been such a dramatic fall in population in peacetime I wonder? It’s bond ratings are below El Salvador or Nigeria – i.e., Junk status. It is essentially a failed, and like the Baltics, a rapidly depopulating state which will be on present trends extinct in one generation. It is kept alive by the Anglo-Zionist empire and its institutions such as the IMF.

        • That coup d’etat against Yanukovich in 2014 is an example how a minority is used to control the majority. Ukraine was sacrificed for an anticipated attack against Russia (NATO intended to place missiles against the Russian border, and give itself an advantage in a potential nuclear war, real or intended, as Russia would have been given an ultimatum to surrender or face destruction). It did not turn out that way. The country has been reduced to a feudal state, run and plundered by oligarchs. There is no way it can survive in its present political and economic shape. The money which the EU gave it was basically stolen by oligarchs, who transferred it to their own private bank accounts in the West. Analysts have stated that the only thing which can save Ukraine is a federalization of the country into three parts. I think it is too late even for that. The country will most probably implode and disintegrate. And Putin ? He is just playing the waiting game, waiting for that to happen. The eastern regions will eventually join Russia, while central Ukraine will, in due course, probably too join Russia. This leaves Western Ukraine, the former Galizzia. Its future is going to be interesting.

    • Right now, in the West, the most crazy people are taking over at every level. They get the job. They get the title. They are there, to advise us, to show us the way. Even chain stores are being managed not just by dumb pro company people, but by absolute lunatics. You’re lucky to have a moron in charge, actually.

      In accordance, Western Intel agencies pick a libtard, d-list celebrity who isn’t even attractive to men. Women can’t appreciate her because she looks like a crack head. She’s not Grace Kelly, nor even Madonna. She can’t attract anyone, at all. Nothing the libtard does makes sense. But that’s their new standard.

      I have to bring up french philosopher Foucault here. He’s was a meaningless homosexual that died like one — i.e. from a venereal disease. Yet he, as a liberal fanatic,used his position in the academy to give a voice to the mad. When he proposed this in the 60s and 70s, he was dismissed. Being a madman disqualified you from the conversation. How can we discuss things, reasonably, if we pay lunatics the same respect as everyone else? Others argued that being mad, by definition, excluded someone from the conversation, in the same way that a bark or a baa or a moo does. However, we see now that this Foucault project has succeeded. The dog’s bark has been let into the discussion, because it is louder. The critics dismissing Foucault did not imagine that the crazies intended to take power by forcing the issue. So now, we have madmen making senseless films with titles like “Syria: A Fire Within.” Such a title is not simple banality. It indicates a departure from reality; it’s author is probably a simpleton, but more importantly, he does not desire truth; he carelessly substitutes truth not just with a lie, but with a cheap and stupid imitation of truth. He doesn’t care how cheap and stupid “A fire within” sounds because he’s crazy.

      Scott Humors work has improved over the last year. It seems he’s let go of some illusions concerning the West. Regrettably, with better analysis, comes more disturbing truth. It must be that the liberal fanatic becomes an intolerable, disgusting thing, more so even than a Nazi. Know that these madmen will carry out more and more evil. Some of the most heartbreaking events of Russia’s past may come again. The way to prevent the nightmare is simple, however: treat the monster as such. If it’s a monster, don’t make believe otherwise. Monsters are real. Regard them as such and only as such. Don’t let them in the conversation.

    • It seems to be the result of interbreedings in the far NW of Malorossia with Khazars (converts to Talmudism) , the depletion of the birthplace – the Kievan Rus by the Golden Horde with the help of the equally marauding slavetrading racist fanatic Ottoman Turks’, exploitation raids from the north by Teutonic knights, Swedes a. Lithuanians, repeated anal conversion approaches by the Vatican / Jesuits (Uniates) through Polish , Austro-Hungarian missionary agents who handed the keys to village churches (traditional Russian orthodox ) to Khazars
      (called “jews” now), then the separatist policies of the zionist/masonic Bolsheviks (Lenin,Trotzky,Stalin,Chrustshjev) with the German High Command in WWI and Himmler in WWII.
      Also then Gorbatschow (a mason!), Jeltzin and to a certain degree Medwjedjew.

  3. Thanks, Scott. I really don’t know how you do it. Absolutely great research.

    What is it with this Ukrainianism? It appears to be some strange form of psychosis. I call it Ukieosis. It is a sister movement to Zionism, which is a pretty much identical form of mental illness, which a Jewish friend of mine calls Zionosis.

    Malignant narcissism – Me, me, me, me. Win, win, win, win. And in the end, they lose everything.

    Nick

    • Fantastic article – the Empire is in it’s last throws, all of it is so cheap so plastic and ugly ! It’s really simple, augmented reality offers also a very seductive intoxication to the ego of the stagers, believing that the whole – in fact – becomes the truth, and thought to it’s conclusion THAT’s exactly the future of the whole ‘Western Liberal’ undertaking a gigantic self delusion project. It’s like Nietzsche f****ng himself in the a**e really. One can fail while having faith in god, but one will certainly fail in the faith of self – which IS the Western modern project. Why does it happen ? Perhaps to make a point ? God’s ways of intervention are subtle but irresistable, because truth always trumps delusion. Are there hidden masters holding the threads ? Certainly but they are puppets themselves chained to their own delusions of money, grandeur and power.

    • It seems to be the result of interbreedings in the far NW of Malorossia with Khazars (converts to Talmudism) , the depletion of the birthplace – the Kievan Rus by the Golden Horde with the help of the equally marauding slavetrading racist fanatic Ottoman Turks’, exploitation raids from the north by Teutonic knights, Swedes a. Lithuanians, repeated anal conversion approaches by the Vatican / Jesuits (Uniates) through Polish , Austro-Hungarian missionary agents who handed the keys to village churches (traditional Russian orthodox ) to Khazars
      (called “jews” now), then the separatist policies of the zionist/masonic Bolsheviks (Lenin,Trotzky,Stalin,Chrustshjev) with the German High Command in WWI and Himmler in WWII.
      Also then Gorbatschow (a mason!), Jeltzin and to a certain degree Medwjedjew.

  4. Thank you Scott for this very detailed great investigative research.

    I hope the Russian security services are watching this closely – especially with the elections and World Cup.

  5. Let’s get this straight,we have a pro-Western company,sowing dissent against Russia. And it is openly permitted to operate in Russia.It appears that the Russian government learned “nothing” from what happened in Ukraine.Where pro-Western NGO’s and companies were “also” freely allowed to operate.Over time they were able to infect a large part of the public with anti-government propaganda.And over these last years we’ve seen the results from that.I remember seeing on VK reports of people going to training camps in Estonia where those people from Ukraine,etc,were also being trained with weapons.And fed anti-Russian propaganda while there.Its “stunning” that the authorities in Russia today don’t see how dangerous it is to allow these companies to operate in Russia.

    • Oh, they see it. But the current situation in Russia is rule by a merger of the oligarchs and the siloviki. Angering a powerful oligarch is not something Putin or his allies want to do. Sure, these oligarchs are not quite as bad as the Ukrainian ones, but they aren’t better by much. So it isn’t “stunning”; it is that Brzezinski was right when he asked whose elite they are. If their families and assets are in the West, they are colonial administrators for the West, not Russia’s elite.

      Does anyone really think Moscow would have screwed up remotely as badly as happened over the last 15 years in the Ukraine if it weren’t for the fact that the oligarchs in the Ukraine are so closely tied to the oligarchs in Russia? The US spent $20bn and won, while Russia spent $200bn and lost. Yes, due to a timely response in the Crimea, the situation is not a total catastrophe for Moscow, but if the exact same situation had resulted with Medvedev in charge, many would be saying that the Kremlin is quite incompetent or corrupt. “We gave Mariupol back and didn’t take lots of territory that was empty. All because Medvedev’s buddies are friends with Akhmetov. Now far more are living under Nazi rule or being shelled all the time than needed to happen.”

      • I think you have summed it up pretty well, Paul. The former Soviet bureaucrats, transformed into kleptocratic oligarchs by declaring themselves the owners of the public companies and institutions they were entrusted with managing, identify with their fellow criminal oligarchs in other former Soviet republics and the Western kleptocratic oligarchs they drink champagne with on their yachts, not with the ordinary people in the countries they stole their wealth from. Putin is in large measure a prisoner of these criminals while Medvedev is their willing assistant, and no doubt, a well paid one.

        A very good comprehensive article, Scott. It kind of wanders off along various related tangents in the middle of the report, but all the various branches are neatly pulled together in the concluding paragraphs.

        • Terry, you have described well a key part of modern Russia. What’s worse, many assume that this is sustainable. Besides the continuing decline in various relative rankings in the world for Russia, there is no real way for new blood to rise. It is the bad parts of Communism mixed with the bad parts of Capitalism.

          Also, where is the long term planning? It was obvious that the Ukraine was the big weakness for Russia. Now, Colonel Cassad has an article on how the Atlantic Council talks about how a revolution of 200 technocrats can get rid of the oligarchy, and no messy Maidan will be needed. In other words, the US can aim to get rid of the oligarchs and just create a fake democracy that will be far more of a problem than Poroshenko could ever be. What then? Can some former bureaucrat/thief with Kremlin influence come up with some good strategies for regaining influence in the Ukraine? Once the old business relations are broken, and oligarchs weakened, Moscow will have a tough time offering a good business case for doing much of anything with Russia except fight. The standards, products, and laws will be based on Western norms.

      • Don’t forget the Russian Patriarchy. It’s as corrupt as anything else.

        Tired of being a priest in the boonies? It costs 200,000 $ to get a post in Moscow.

        I have inside stories about the corruption within that business organization, sorry – dont feel save to post direct info.

        Just ask yourself: how much do Kirill’s watches cost?

        • Anonymous on January 12, 2018 · at 7:12 pm UTC

          There’s no such thing as the “Russian Patriarchy.”

          There is the Russian Orthodox Church legally known as the Moscow Patriarchate, and it’s is one of the autocephalous Eastern Orthodox churches

          Kirill’s watches were a gift. He proved this beyond reasonable doubt. The car he uses is, also, a gift. He doesn’t own house he lives in. He also doesn’t own any of those precious items that he uses during the services.

          I know of a priest from Ukraine who got a job in Moscow after being almost killed by those who hate the Orthodox church, or as you call it, the Russian Patriarchy. How much do you think he paid for a transfer?

          I happened to be a supporter for the Russian Church to own businesses and lands. The Church is one of the biggest mechanisms of eliminating homelessness in Russia. The local church communities are also the foundations for volunteer local emergency services and fire fighting forces. The Church also supports small rural schools and hospitals. The Church has restored and built new 25,000 churches from 1990 to 2015. It’s 1000 churches every year. Three new churches a day!

          BTW, in 1900 to 1917 only about 70 churches were built a year.
          Images of some of the new churches and their architects are here
          https://daniil-skitalec.livejournal.com/25779.html

          All of these programs need money, and to own businesses is one of the ways to generate funds.

          You wrote: “dont feel save to post direct info.”

          You absolutely shouldn’t post it here. Don’t email me with offers of “insider information.” I won’t consider it.

  6. I just wanted to correct the author on the matter of ISPs blocking large amounts of outgoing emails as “suspicious”.

    Although that statement is correct and that is indeed the case, it only applies to the users who use email servers provided by the ISP.

    It is a trivial matter of installing any of the flavours of Linux operating systems which all come with their own email server. It can be installed on a separate machine (a “Linux box”) or within a “virtual machine” that runs within Windows (VMWare is well known). The user can then use its’ own email server and send any amount of emails to whomever, and this is all a regular “upload” internet traffic which will not be looked at by the ISP in any way. It can be “port filtered” or the user may have to enamble the email ports at his ISPs configuration page, but is in any case a trivial matter.

    • +Mikie,
      I would like to make a correction to your point. Although, some ISP may still allow an outgoing mail, some like mine block it. My sendmail can receive the mail, but to send one I have to use email relay services. Of course my sendmail had to be set up to use a port which is not blocked, but acceptable by the relay.
      So, to make the story short “men in black” can intercept any message. The only way to send non-interceptable message is to send highly encrypted to a machine on a different port, not the relay, which by law has to surrender it’s transfer to “Men in black”. Also, as far as I know your encrypted message is considered illegal by “Men in black”, so your “A$$” would be in the sling automatically. Unless you surrender your public PGP key to some suppository, which allows them to snoop on your email anyway. Also, the horsepower behind their “cerberus” is such that it can decrypt a 1024bit key in no time.

  7. Uncle Bob 1 said this:

    “Let’s get this straight,we have a pro-Western company,sowing dissent against Russia. And it is openly permitted to operate in Russia.It appears that the Russian government learned “nothing” from what happened in Ukraine.”

    My first superficial take was the same.

    Then it hit me.

    Some Sarmatian DNA is in a lot of us, and it certainly made its way north of the Black Sea. The reason Rome’s emperor Marcus Aurelius conquered some of the Alans was he NEEDED their special expertise in holding borders. For instance in Britain, and later Italy itself.

    The chief Sarmatian strategy is to give your enemy lots of room to trip over himself, let him pass into territory of yours where you know every nook and cranny. Then, at a time and place of the Sarmatian chief’s own choosing, rip them apart and leave no room for “two sides of the story”.

    Let ’em in and track them. As another tribe put it, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

    Or I can hope so.

    • I’m not sure how much Sarmatian DNA we would find in the region after thousands of years of dilution. But regardless of that,lets remember that the majority of the area those tribes lived in, is today part of Ukraine.And that is the very region that was destroyed by allowing the pro-Western elements subvert them.With that in mind,I don’t feel comfort in your thinking about that.Another saying in rebuttal to the “friends close” saying is,”don’t turn your back” to your enemy.

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  9. Very well written and informative article. I’m sure that the FSB monitors this matter and keeps those that need to know informed, but laws in Russia are not quite as stringent as here in the USA, as to surveillance. It is amazing the arrogance that these ‘actors’ portray..

  10. The latest “flaws” of common Intel, AMD and Cortex A75 CPUs means all computers running on grids are currently vulnerable. Grid computing is only really useful for compute hungry applications. Those that need to make a lot of system calls (read file system, use network interface, print files etc.) are often better off in-house.

    Most of the technology they are promoting is open source. There is nothing stopping the customer from setting up their own grid in-house (I would recommend it). Cloud computing exposes all your data to third parties. If they are kept in house, you would need a judge to issue a warrant to snoop (at least theoretically – do not rely on it).

    They are promoting SAP Hybris for E-commerce. As a minimum this means two load balancers, two integrated web/application servers and two database servers. I would say you need at least one more if not two of each to have a proper testing environment.

    This means they are targeting their services to large chains or multinationals, organizations mostly run by oligarchs. This is a long way away from a collective organization or cooperative or corner capitalist.

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