Officers from the Russian Armed Forces’ 291st Guards Motor Rifle Regiment, working with the Chechen “Akhmat-Vostok” battalion, set up an arms-smuggling route through annexed Crimea, according to hacked correspondence published by the OSINT community InformNapalm.
The Ukrainian hacker group “256th Cyber Assault Division” says it breached the messages of several Russian officers, including Maj. Yevgeny Dmitriev. Previously convicted of drug distribution, he signed a contract with Russia’s Defense Ministry and became a platoon commander in the “Storm V” penal units.
According to the materials, Dmitriev organized the resale of small arms from occupied areas of Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions via Crimea. The weapons, moved onto the black market in various parts of Russia as well as to countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, were transported in some cases on tankers from Russia’s “shadow fleet.” Arms for sale were procured in several ways:
- inflating the number of weapons reported lost during assaults;
- sending soldiers into attacks without their assigned rifles-troops were told to “take a weapon in battle,” while their rifles were written off on paper.
Dmitriev allegedly oversaw a network of checkpoint patrols that let the weapons shipments pass freely. He also began working with Kadyrov’s “Akhmat” fighters to benefit from their privileges—for example, getting advance word of inspections by the FSB.
