by Jeff Wise
A coalition of organized crime, robber barons, and the security forces emerged to hold the society together. In the West, these groups rarely intersect, but in Russia they’re a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap. “A mafia state as conceived by an advertising executive,” is how journalist Michael Weiss memorably described it.
Putin’s rise illustrates the interdependence of these elements. In 1999, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically elected president, was teetering. He and his coterie of oligarchs had looted the country and amassed great wealth, but there was a danger that once Yeltsin stepped down they would be prosecuted and jailed. To prevent that, Yeltsin selected Putin, then a little-known functionary from St. Petersburg, to be the new head of the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. Soon after, he anointed Putin as his chosen successor.
When Putin took power, his first official act was a decree that Yeltsin and his family would not be prosecuted.
No one thought Putin would last. He was a political nobody, and headed up a wildly unpopular government that seemed doomed to fall. But in September of 1999 the country was galvanized by a series of deadly bombings that struck four apartment buildings in quick succession, first in Buynaksk, then Moscow and Volgodonsk. Nearly 300 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. The government blamed Chechen terrorists, and launched a war of reprisal in which as many as 200,000 civilians were killed. Putin’s popularity soared.
The blasts’ timing was unlikely the product of good luck on Putin’s part. Kremlinologists believe that Russian security forces carried out the apartment bombings as a pretext for a war that would boost Putin’s popularity and shift public attention away from government corruption. Among the evidence: undetonated explosives found in the basement of another apartment building that were determined to have been planted by members of the FSB. Arrested by local authorities, the FSB agents were ordered released by Moscow.
Putin ruthlessly consolidated power, jailing oligarchs who failed to toe the line and assassinating journalists who asked too many questions. He was determined to build a strong central idea around which to rally the population, but in the wake of communism’s disaster, no abstract ideology would do. Instead, Putin spun together a notion of national Russian-ness that combined a strong central state, patriotism, Orthodox Christianity, and a mythologized vision of Russian history. Putin positioned himself as a combination of tsar and echt-Russian everyman, riding horseback shirtless like a cossack, straddling a motorcycle, and flying an ultralight to guide the migration of endangered Siberian cranes.
Beneath the shiny new veneer of nationalism, the machinery of corruption rumbled along as before. After a spectacular run of growth from 1996 to 2008, the Russian economy stalled in the wake of the worldwide financial crisis.
In 2013, deteriorating conditions in neighboring Ukraine sparked a full-blown crisis. The country had been led by Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin ally. But a people power revolution in February 2014 toppled Yanukovych and replaced him with an interim government that sought closer ties with the West. From the Kremlin’s perspective, this represented not a popular yearning for freedom but an act of aggression by the United States and its allies against a country that lay within Russia’s proper sphere of influence. It could not be allowed.
Russia had the military might to simply roll its tanks over the border and take control of Ukraine. But it couldn’t afford to trigger a world war. Instead, it decided to act undercover by using a military doctrine that Russian forces have been developing since before the Second World War. Called maskirovka, it encompasses a broad range of techniques for multiplying the effectiveness of one’s forces by deceiving and distracting the enemy.
On February 27, 2014, men wearing military uniforms without insignias or badges seized key government buildings in Crimea, eventually annexing it. The operation was designed to look like an internal uprising, but the troops belonged to elite Russian military units, including the powerful and wide-ranging military intelligence agency known as the GRU.
Inside Russia, the move was wildly popular. Putin’s approval ratings skyrocketed. To ordinary Russians, he had stood up to foreign predation and burnished the nation’s greatness. Outside Russia, the reaction was outrage and fear. The crisis in Ukraine dominated headlines as Western politicians weighed sanctions.
With the deception phase underway, a distraction was needed.
Remember when Air France flight 447 disappeared en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, in 2009? I believe that Russian intelligence watched that story carefully—and learned that under certain circumstances, it would be possible to make a state-of-the-art airliner appear to vanish into thin air. At the cost of a few hundred civilian lives, you could create a worldwide news sensation, a kind of informational smoke screen to be deployed when you wanted to divert attention from something else.
In early March, international tensions rose as Russia tightened its grip on Crimea. European and American officials issued messages of condemnation. Then, on Thursday, March 6, President Obama took punitive action, signing an executive order imposing sanctions against “individuals and entities responsible for activities undermining democratic processes or institutions in Ukraine.”
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, declared that sanctions “would inevitably hit the United States like a boomerang.”
The following day, MH370 disappeared.
CNN went to its round-the-clock coverage of the missing plane. Media everywhere turned their attention away from the unrest in Ukraine. Western governments continued to exert diplomatic pressure on Russia to withdraw, but the public was not engaged.
Just about four months later, on Wednesday, July 16, Obama announced new sanctions against Russia. Putin responded with a public statement warning that sanctions “generally have a boomerang effect,” and added, “I am certain that this is harmful to the U.S. Administration and American people’s long-term strategic national interests.” The next day, during a phone call with Obama that had been scheduled the day before at the Russians’ request, Putin broke the news of the MH17 shoot-down.
Why did Russia destroy MH17? For many, the lack of an obvious motive made it hard to believe that the Kremlin was responsible. But they were missing the point. “In this kind of warfare,” writes U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Alex Grynkewich, “attribution and intent are challenging if not impossible for friendly forces to ascertain.”
Chapter 30
Passengers
As the official search for MH370 wound down I turned my attention back to the Russians aboard the plane.
Having already probed Brodsky’s personal life, I decided to see what I could find about his business dealings. It was interesting to me that his life had turned around after he fell under the tutelage of Vitaly Mashchitsky. Mashchitsky, a wealthy and powerful oligarch with interests in the oil business, is ranked by Forbes magazine the 144th richest person in Russia, But when he and Brodsky first met in the early ‘90s, Mashchitsky was just getting started, having founded a timber export business called Sibmix.
Among the Russian industries most affected by corruption is the timber trade. According to a 2011 report by Vitaly Nomokonov of the Vladivostok Center for Research on Organized Crime, 80% of the wood in warehouses in the Far East has been harvested illegally.
Could Brodsky be linked to what writer Garrett Graff has called “the Russian octopus—the strange mix of politicians, intelligence officers, oligarchs, criminals, and professionals who surround the Kremlin”?
Looking for clues, I dug into the registration records for his seven companies. I couldn’t see any evidence of organized crime links, but did find something else that surprised me. It turned out that between 2007 and 2011, all Brodsky’s assets had been liquidated, with the exception of some real estate he owned jointly with four other people. Of particular note was that his main company, “NB,” was wound up in 2011, apparently due to bankruptcy. Yet three years later, at the time of Brodsky’s disappearance, NB’s
website indicated that it was processing more than 35,000 cubic meters of timber per year, with an integrated production line that ran from cutting down trees to the assembly of completed homes.
Further evidence that the family was not struggling economically came from business registrations filed by Brodsky’s wife, Elena. Between 2004 and 2015 she registered six companies, including a travel agency and several involved in forestry products. The year before NB went bankrupt, she and her two sons founded “NB Company.” In 2015, she registered “NB Export.” None of her companies has been liquidated.
It looked to me as if in the run-up to his disappearance Brodsky had deliberately wound up all of his business dealings and shifted his assets to Elena.
When I turned my attention to the Ukrainians, I found similarly unusual dealings. With the help of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a nonprofit that supports investigative reporting around the world, I was able to retrieve business registration documents for Chustrak and Deineka’s company, Nika Mebel. On paper, Nika was a failure, reporting small revenues and chronic losses in the years before the men disappeared. Yet when Chustrak and Deineka’s families joined a lawsuit against Malaysia Airlines filed by next-of-kin in a Kuala Lumpur court in 2016, their lawyer said that each man had been earning US$2 million a year.
I reached out to Olga Lautman, a researcher who specializes in Russian and Ukrainian organized crime. “It smells like a front company,” she told me. “One hundred percent. No one in Ukraine makes $4 million a year off furniture.” She added that as Ukraine’s main seaport, Odessa is a notorious haven for mob activity. The city’s mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, has been linked to the international drug and weapons trade, has ties to some of the country’s most powerful gangsters, and is under multiple investigations for illegally profiting from the sale of public property.
Deineka’s page on the Russian social media site Ok.ru gives the impression that he did have money. In the images he posted there he and his family scuba dive in the Red Sea, dine al fresco in Istanbul, and pose poolside in Egypt. Deineka looks trim, fit, and well-muscled.
I was able to track down a former high school classmate, who told me that Chustrak and Deineka had been best friends at their automotive high school in Odessa. “They weren’t particularly good students,” he said. “Their interest was chasing girls.”
After school both were conscripted into the Soviet Army, as were most of their contemporaries. Deineka served in a tank regiment in Hungary; I’ve been unable to find out where Chustrak served.
According to court papers filed by Chustrak’s wife, the two men had boarded MH370 because they were traveling from a furniture trade show in Kuala Lumpur to a subsequent one in Guangzhou, China. Was that the simple fact of the matter, or was the trip a cover story? The Malaysian International Trade Fair took place from March 4 to 8, 2014, so if they really had gone as legitimate attendees that means they skipped the last day of the show to get to the next one. But the 33rd China International Furniture Fair (CIFF) didn’t start until 10 days later. And it seems strange that the men would fly to Beijing to get to Guangzhou, when there are plenty of shorter flights direct from Kuala Lumpur to Guangzhou. Traveling via Beijing means flying past Guanzhou and continuing another 1200 miles, then doubling back. It’s like going from New York to Dallas by first flying to Los Angeles.
In photographs Chustrak and Deineka look like they could still hold their own in a brawl. Florence de Changy, who has seen closed-circuit camera footage of the men passing through security, describes them in her book Le vol MH370 n'a pas disparu as arriving together, “in the last minutes before the plane boarded, clearly more energetic than their fellow travelers. With their Navy SEAL physiques clad in form-fitting black t-shirts, each carried a big carry-on bag that they tossed on the scanner conveyor belt with practiced ease. Among all the passengers to board this flight, if you had to pick out two hijackers, the Ukrainians would be the only ones to fit the stereotype: age, physical condition, appearance, attitude…”
As of late 2017, two years after Chustrak and Deineka were declared legally dead in Malaysia, they were still listed as the company’s owners. Similarly, Deineka remained the legal owner of his family’s apartment and the commercial space where his wife runs a beauty salon. His and Chustrak’s situation seems to be the reverse of Brodsky’s: while Brodsky’s holdings were dismantled before his disappearance, Chustrak and Deineka’s affairs continue to be conducted in their names. “This is odd,” said Ukrainian business lawyer I consulted: usually partnerships of this type are dissolved when the owners die.
Is it possible that Chustrak and Deineka were not really dead, but had successfully hijacked MH370 and taken it to Kazahkstan?
As I researched further I was rather surprised to learn that it is not unknown in Ukraine for intelligence and organized crime figures to fake their deaths. In 2015, a pro-Russian Ukrainian militant named Alexander Mikhailovich Evtody attempted to fake his death after taking part in the artillery shelling of a civilian neighborhood in the Black Sea port of Mariupol.
In October 2018, French police arrested Odessa-based businessman Dmytro Malynovskyi after he forged a death certificate in Ukraine and then holed up in a 12th century castle near Dijon with a small collection of Salvador Dali paintings and a vintage Rolls Royce Phantom.
And the so-called “Don of Odessa,” Aleksandr Angert, who made his fortune moving Russian oil through Odessa in the 90s and went on to become a chief patron of the city’s mayor, resurfaced nonchalantly in 2019 after being reported deceased in 2017.
Given the questions surrounding Deineka’s status, I was intrigued by some of the postings that his daughter, Liza, made on social media. In the year after MH370 vanished, Liza, then 16, frequently visited a site called Sprashivai where users can anonymously ask short questions. Most questions seemed to come from her friends, and asked about typical teenager stuff. Some were about her father, and these she mostly swatted away. But occasionally she gave a different kind of answer.
August 17:
Q: What about your dad (if not secret)? Does he live with you?
A: My dad is temporarily on an unscheduled trip.
September 4:
Q: Forgive the question, but what about your father?
A: Alive, healthy.
Perhaps she was just messing around with her readers. Perhaps she still clung to the belief that, though she had no particular evidence to that effect, her father must still be alive somewhere. Whatever the case, Sprashivai was not the only website where she referred to her father as being alive. On March 26, 2014, just 11 days after her father and all the other passengers aboard MH370 had effectively been declared dead by the Malaysian prime minister, Liza posted a photo of herself with her father on Instagram with the comment, “Happy Birthday, Daddy.” Several friends added comments with their own well-wishes. “With the birthday boy!” wrote one. “Thank you,” Liza replied. Another wrote, “With the birthday boy! Let everything always be good for him,” followed by a string of emojis: a blushing, smiling face; a gift wrapped with a bow; a noisemaker; confetti; a toy balloon; a bow. “Thank you,” Liza responded, with a kissy-face emoji.
The ebullience struck me as odd, but I wondered if it might be a cultural thing. For clarification I turned to Olga Lautman, who’s part Russian and part Ukrainian, and asked her what she thought. “To put balloons, after someone just died, that’s not normal, even in Russian culture,” she said.
Understanding that Sergei Deineka’s birthday was March 26 helped put another Sprashivai exchange in context. Shortly after midnight on March 26, 2015, someone had asked her: “What are your plans for tomorrow?” She answered: “University, then DR.” In Russian, DR is the abbreviation for “den’ rozhdeniya,” or birthday. It sounded like she planned to celebrate her father’s birthday—an odd thing, it seemed to me, if he’d been presumed dead for over a year.
A followup question came immediately: “Are you going to be together tomorrow
?” Liza replied warily: “Watching who you are.”
Then, that evening, at 9:25pm, someone broached the subject again: “How was the DR?”
Liza answered: “I do not want to talk about this.”
Chapter 31
Blaine Alan Gibson
If the hijacking of MH370 was a Russian plot, and MH370 flew to Kazakhstan, then the pieces of debris collected in the western Indian Ocean must have been planted by the Russians in an effort to support the misleading southern narrative. Blaine Alan Gibson had demonstrated an uncanny knack for locating and publicizing this debris. Was Gibson somehow connected to Russia?
Ever since he’d first crossed my radar screen, half a year before he found “No Step,” I’d struggled to understand this eccentric character. In the media, he consciously styled himself after Indiana Jones, with a brown fedora and a brown leather jacket. He portrayed himself as an inveterate adventurer and world traveler who before MH370 had pursued any number of quixotic international quests, including an attempt to find the lost ark of the covenant (more shades of Indiana Jones) and an expedition to the site of the Tunguska explosion in Siberia. His was a wonderfully appealing persona. After I wrote about him in New York magazine, TV producers started getting in touch with me, hoping I could hook them up with him to pitch reality shows about his life.
I wondered how, exactly, he was able to support such an exotic lifestyle. He described himself as a retired lawyer, based in Seattle, who inherited the money to fund his search after his mother passed away. He said that he’d started watching the MH370 coverage on CNN and gotten obsessed with the case while packing up her belongings. The inheritance must have been a tidy sum for a 60-year-old man, with decades of expenses ahead of him, to have the financial freedom to travel the world full-time. Yet his background did not suggest lavish wealth.
