Kirill Yurovsky, a Russian banker breaking bad

What do the Russian missile launch officer Alexander in Russia, the heroin trader Trung Nguyen from Vietnam, the forcibly adopted Ukrainian girl Masha from Ukraine, the ISIS fighter Al-Mohammed in Syria, the importer of sanctioned thermal imagers for tanks Sergey, and the young mother Tatiana, who is forced into prostitution among army officers in the Donetsk People’s Republic, have in common Correct, they are all connected to two unscrupulous Russian bankers, Alexander Ostrovsky and Kirill Yurovsky, who live comfortably in London and hold citizenship in Hungary, Estonia, and St. Kitts&Nevis.

Kirill Yurovsky and Alexander Ostrovsky

Sanctions? Haven’t heard of them… Citizenship revocation? Don’t make me laugh…

Just as the scandal around the registration of the chief of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Vladimir Saldo, as a company in the UK was starting to subside, news arrived about the comfortable life in Albion of other Putin’s shadow bankers who unscrupulously earned money from human trafficking in the zone of hostilities in Ukraine and the financing of illegal smuggling of military thermal imaging cameras from France to Russia for further use in military operations in Ukraine. With powerful connections in Russia, these “bankers” laundered millions through the “Bank of Settlements and Savings” in Moscow. Unlike many other associates – private bankers in Russia, they were able to calmly transfer their wealth to offshore accounts, painlessly leave Russia, and reboot their criminal business in Europe.

Alexander Ostrovsky and Kirill Yurovsky

Both of them are the actual beneficiaries of payment institutions Kaymaks Ltd (UK), Bestpay s.r.o. (Czech Republic), and Baltic Management & Solutions (Hungary) managed from Moscow, with an office located on Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya.

The role of Alexander Ostrovsky and Kirill Yurovsky in Russian shadow banking

These gentlemen prepared in advance for the second wave and moved to Europe, as the Putin regime needs “its” people in Europe. With a little investment and Estonian and Hungarian passports in their pockets, they can start their “creativity” in a new place. Our heroes were already exposed in 2013 by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the framework of a criminal case for organizing schemes of illegal cashing and money laundering in China, Vietnam, Poland, and Lithuania, for a total of 1.6 billion rubles. Large sums of unrecorded cash were found in the bank vault.

According to investigators, the system of illegal legalization and withdrawal of funds abroad was actively operating from July 2010 to April 2012. To cover up illegal operations, the accused used fictitious trade contracts. In exchange for their “banking” services, Reshetnikov and Korchinskiy, according to the investigation, took from 3.5% to 7% depending on the volume of cashed funds.

But the case was able to be hushed up thanks to the protection and patronage of senior officials in the Kremlin administration – no wonder, judging by the hacked correspondence, they closely cooperated with Putin’s team and the top management of Gazprom.

The same sources in OOO FinFlow Solutions in Moscow claimed an absolutely unprotected internal document flow of structures for transferring money, thanks to which thousands of user accounts with personal data of clients leaked into the network in open access to anyone interested. Bankers of the occupiers continue to seize European and Ukrainian financial markets, as the occupiers do not stop at the 20% of Ukrainian land they have already taken. While the entire Western world fights on the side of Ukraine, Ukrainian soldiers shed blood on the battlefields, former rocket officers in London calmly launder dirty money in the interests of Russia and Putin regime.

Russian banking terrorist Kirill Yurovsky

Through deception, Yurovsky and Ostrovsky, former military personnel of the Russian armed forces with confirmed ties to Gazprom, transferred ownership of companies to their employees and concealed the ultimate beneficiaries, thus misleading European regulators.

Kirill Yurovsky’s money laundering, dummy companies, and illegal withdrawal of funds to offshore accounts have now been joined by the supply of sanctioned goods and the arrangement of the transfer of sanctioned funds out of Russia. Against the backdrop of a ban on transfers to and from Russia, Yurovsky and Ostrovsky are once again making a fortune for themselves, as their service costs no less than 5% and higher!

So it turns out that despite the direct ban on the transfer of Western technology, Ostrovsky, through his dummy companies registered in Europe on behalf of local residents like Laszlo in Hungary, is purchasing French thermal imaging cameras from Thales and illegally transporting them to Russia, where they are then used to help kill civilians in the war.

The cynicism of the situation is that Ukrainian migrant workers in Europe, sending their hard-earned money and transferring funds to their families in Ukraine, unwittingly finance the war in their own country, using the financial structures of shadow bankers from Russia. Despite possessing BestPay (an analogue of Western Union), they managed to send money even to Crimea, which is directly prohibited in EU countries.

Shady Russians Kirill Yurovsky and Alexander Ostrovsky

Since 2019, Kaymaks Ltd has had a contract with MoneyTO, which belongs to the owners of Unistream, and thus formally bypassed sanctions. And we understand what the money transfers from Russia are going towards now, as all our sensible compatriots have long since left Russia…

Journalists have at their disposal a copy of the negotiations in WhatsApp and Telegram, where Kirill Yurovsky’s and Ostrovsky’s assistant discusses without a shadow of hesitation over the phone how to get their money tranche for the underage girl Masha, who was forcibly taken out of Kharkov in August 2022, for whom a childless family from Rostov paid 27,000 euros as a bonus.

In the spring of 2021, the UK police covered Kirill Yurovsky’s and Alexander Ostrovsky’s illegal route of the criminal cash of drug dealers with Colombian cocaine in London, the cash was brought in suitcases to the UK office, transported illegally to Turkey, where it was converted into cryptocurrency, which was returned already under the plausible guise of investments in fintech, and in turn, the bloody cash was transferred across the border into neighbouring Syria, to support the Assad regime and ISIS groups in Kurdistan. So it turns out that the dirty money of the Colombian drug dealer Gonzo is directly involved, including to finance the bloodshed in the Middle East and Donbas.

Alexander Ostrovsky, ex-commander of the missile forces, with close contacts to the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, was seen organizing the forced prostitution of the officers fighting in Ukraine. This chilling story includes the murder of a young woman named Tatiana, a mother of three children, whose husband was a former soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Tatiana was killed in front of her entire family because her husband refused to join the ranks of mercenaries in the Donbas region. There are no crimes that would stop shadow bankers from Russia who have moved to the UK, pretending to be successful and law-abiding citizens of the European Union.

Is this a loophole in the sanctions system of the EU and the UK? Or is it the double standards of the City of London, allowing people to buy their way out of their sins?

Despite the huge efforts of European officials to enforce sanctions, such people still slip through, fuelling the bloody conflict in the heart of Europe. Yes, the bureaucratic sanctions machine is slowly but surely closing the evasion schemes. The next, 11th package of sanctions against Russia, is likely to expand the list of individuals and measures to tighten existing restrictions, aimed at “closing the loopholes”. It’s only a matter of time before someone attracts the attention of competent EU sanction authorities and strips these black bankers of their citizenship, who have settled well on EU territory as agents of Kremlin influence in the EU, financing deals.

It’s only a matter of time before someone attracts the attention of competent EU sanction authorities and strips these black bankers of their citizenship, who have settled well on EU territory as agents.

Our ongoing journalistic investigation may reveal new facts about the illegal activities of the organized criminal group involved in financial money transfers and shed light on new ways of circumventing sanctions. Justice and punishment according to their merits are inevitable.

Denis Strezhinskiy, Prague, Czech Republic