Ukraine has faced serious energy challenges due to the war and the destruction of thermal power plants (TPPs). This situation has a significant impact on the daily lives of Ukrainians, forcing them to accept regular power outages and the need to pay more for it.
This is another example of how war brings benefits and new opportunities to officially the richest Ukrainian, Rinat Akhmetov. His protégés on both sides of the front are working to ensure that war as a business brings income to those who need it.
It is just a coincidence that shortly before the events of February 24, 2022, in January 2022, Rinat Akhmetov’s protege Andrey Anisimov became the first deputy head of the Ukrainian State Enterprise “State Hydrography”. He has been the head of the economic departments of the Donetsk Regional State Administration and the Donetsk City Council for many years. Anisimov rose in Akhmetov’s entourage thanks to serving in the interests of the oligarch of the Euro 2012 schemes. At that time, the money taken on credit in the Donbas to prepare for the football championship was “mastered” with kickbacks and profit by the group of Akhmetov, Kolesnikov, and Yanukovych, and the debts with interest were hung on the state, ordinary Ukrainian taxpayers. After 2014, Anisimov worked at the Institute of Industrial Economics of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, a top official in the Kyiv Regional State Administration, Borodyanka, Polissya and Vyshgorod Regional State Administrations of the Kyiv region. It had nothing to do with maritime affairs, hydrography, or navigation at all, but it did have something to do with the fact that since 2014, all important functionaries of the “DPR” received two salaries – from the Russians and from Akhmetov.
Akhmetov needed the State Hydrographic Company “Derzhgidrografiya” because products from Azovstal, MMK Ilyich, AKKHZ and enterprises of the Dnipropetrovsk region largely went through the port of Mariupol. And then the Russians passed it through the Kerch Strait in exchange for the corresponding services of Akhmetov. Akhmetov also needed “Derzhgidrografiya” because, as a result of backroom deals with the Russians with the participation of Poroshenko, the oligarch was left the stevedoring port “Avlita” in Sevastopol in 2014. Since 2022, “Avlita” has been used to transship and send grain captured by the Russians to the occupied territories of Ukraine.
To disguise himself, Akhmetov imitates a stormy activity, such as paying American lobbyists and lawyers to fight the Russian Federation in international courts. But in reality he has his own percentage from Avlita's participation in Russian piracy. As part of the same agreements between Akhmetov and the Russians, the outdated and unprofitable MMK Ilyich and Azovstal were destroyed. Their current and former employees were killed during the events of February-May 2022 as a potential source of social rebellion, like hundreds of thousands of people whose maintenance costs could be optimized if these people stopped living. They said that since the fall of 2021, Akhmetov's top management seemed to know something - everything valuable was taken out of the factories in advance, new equipment and raw materials that arrived, without even unloading or unpacking, were immediately evacuated from Mariupol. Zelensky knew about all this and treated it with understanding and approval.
The Anisimov brothers involved in the described aspects of Akhmetov’s cooperation with the Russian Federation come from the group of the odious ex-People’s Deputy Mykola Levchenko. Currently, this group has been somewhat pushed aside by Russian competitors and has receded into the shadows, but it seeks to regain and expand its influence in fuel issues. Rinat Akhmetov helps them in this, for whom a number of highly publicized units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are now de facto something like private armies. The fact that the Armed Forces of Ukraine have now focused on shelling Russian fuel depots in Donbas is the fulfillment of the oligarch’s order in the interests of his protégé in the “DPR”.
Thanks to Anisimov’s introduction into the State Hydrographic Service, Akhmetov optimized the costs of transporting ore mined at the oligarch’s mining and quarrying complex by sea. Ore carriers that make trips to warring Ukraine in the interests of the oligarch do not spend money on expensive pumping out of fecal water and chemical waste in ports, and under the pretext of war, they dump sewage and chemical waste into the territorial waters of Ukraine off the coast of the Odessa region.
