Eurasia Press & News
In early November, the First Ministerial Conference of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum will be held in Sochi. The consulting firm “Bureau Legint” from Yekaterinburg, which is backed by former GRU officers and career officers of the FSB’s Fifth Service, had a hand in the arrival of some African guests. In the past, they were involved in high-profile international scandals, including Russia’s interference in the US presidential elections. Such structures had no problems with financing until Africa became Yevgeny Prigozhin’s sphere of interest.
GRU office
Since 2018, Russia has begun to actively penetrate the African continent, gradually squeezing out the influence of the United States, France and other European countries. Key roles were assigned to the 4th Directorate of the GRU, which oversees Africa and Israel, and the African department of the FSB’s Fifth Service. Both intelligence agencies dusted off the collapsed Soviet GRU and KGB residencies and began actively recruiting new agents from among politicians, military personnel and journalists.
For these purposes, several foreign economic associations with African countries were created and a dozen consulting firms with a wide range of activities were founded. One of these firms was “Bureau Legint” with an annual budget of 100 million rubles. “Legint” was founded by Viktor Boyarkin, a former GRU naval intelligence officer , and his wife Tatyana, who had previously worked as an accountant at the GRU headquarters on Khoroshevskoye Shosse 76 “b” (military unit 45807).
Boyarkin has a rich biography: in 1986, he took part in the evacuation of Soviet military personnel and diplomatic staff from Yemen, when Moscow’s protégés quarreled among themselves and a civil war began, which took 10,000 lives. After studying at the Military-Diplomatic Academy of the GRU, Boyarkin was appointed assistant military attaché at the Russian embassies in the United States and Mexico, where he spied until 2003. Later, the GRU officer sat on the management board of the Almaz-Antey concern and was engaged in the sale of small and medium-sized military ships to Africa.
In 2005, Boyarkin headed the security service of RUSAL CEO Oleg Deripaska and carried out his special assignments in Africa. For example, he identified the instigators of strikes at the aluminum oligarch’s bauxite plant in Guinea. An internal RUSAL document is circulating on the Internet , in which instructions are given to Boyarkin and the former head of the United Russia support fund in Yekaterinburg, Alexander Dedkovsky, to work out issues of removing ministers and prefects in Guinea who supported the strikers from their positions and replacing them with loyal officials.
In 2006, when Deripaska owned an aluminum plant in Podgorica, Boyarkin instructed a pro-Kremlin party in Montenegro to ensure that its supporters voted correctly in the independence referendum. And he even allegedly brought suitcases of money there. True, he himself denies this. However, these details surfaced in 2018, when Boyarkin, on Deripaska’s instructions, tried to knock a debt out of Paul Manafort, the head of Donald Trump’s campaign headquarters, who advised the very same “opposition” party in Montenegro.
“He owed us a lot of money and suggested ways he could pay it back,” Boyarkin told reporters. As a result, Manafort ended up in the dock, and the names of Deripaska and Boyarkin were on the front pages of American media for a long time, and eventually the US Treasury Department added both to sanctions lists.
An official from the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election, asked Boyarkin to meet, but he rudely refused. Along with pro-Kremlin political scientist Sergei Karaganov, who recently proposed preemptive nuclear strikes on Europe, Boyarkin sits on the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and publishes his advice to the Kremlin on how to counter Western sanctions.
Service in military intelligence taught Boyarkin to stay in the shadows, and American sanctions only increased his reluctance to appear in public events, so he assigned all official work at Leginta to his wife’s distant relative , Anastasia Samarkina , appointing her CEO.
While still studying at the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Samarkina became the youngest member of the public Youth Chamber at the Yekaterinburg City Duma and in her interview with Cosmopolitan magazine she stated that in ten years she “will at least be the president’s wife.”
Samarkina has not yet become the First Lady, but now foreign ambassadors receive her at their residences. She sits on the presidiums of international forums, participates in negotiations and signs memoranda of cooperation with the largest Russian state corporations, such as Novatek, Zarubezhneft and RUSAL.
“Based on the results of our fruitful cooperation, I have the honor to express my gratitude to the management and staff of Bureau Legint for their effective assistance in promoting our interests in the Latin American region,” Dmitry Bondarenko , curator of the GRU residency in Latin America , who was assigned to the Rosneft branch in Cuba, thanked Samarkina.
Traces of Legint were also found in distant Mexico, where in 2019 Samarkina held a meeting with the chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, Cora Pinedo.
That same year, Ms. Pinedo flew to Moscow, where she was met at the airport by Farit Ganiev, a member of the State Duma Committee on Security and Anti-Corruption, and her subsequent care was entrusted to deputy Pyotr Tolstoy.
Anastasia Samarkina initially agreed to answer The Insider’s questions, but the next day sent a message: “Since the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office has recognized The Insider (a foreign agent) as an undesirable organization, believing that your activities ‘pose a threat to the foundations of the constitutional order and security,’ further communication appears illegal and therefore impossible.”
Cosmonaut, Diplomats’ Wives and the “Russian World”
In addition to the “Bureau Legint”, Boyarkin founded the Association of Economic Cooperation with African Countries (AECAC ). Its official representative is Putin’s former special representative for the Middle East, Alexander Saltanov .
The number of employees of AESSA is not disclosed, it is only known that the holder of officer’s ID AF 91*** Vladimir Kurchenko, who previously served in the Main Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of Defense (military unit 64176), was appointed to the position of managing director, and the position of director of economic programs is occupied by Ukrainian citizen Andrey Albeshchenko. The latter previously worked at the Russian-German Trade Bank, until the Central Bank revoked its license for inaccurate reporting data.
AESSA has its representatives in Madagascar and Congo, and since November last year, together with the Russkiy Mir Foundation, the association launched the program “Russia – Africa: Friendship Through Years and Distances.” The first stage took place in Senegal and Mali, and even Russian cosmonaut Sergei Kud-Sverchkov was brought there, who convinced local students of the advantages of friendship with Russia.
The Russkiy Mir website mentions that the cosmonaut made a separate speech to the Wagner PMC fighters in Mali, who support the local military junta. However, the article refers to the mercenaries as “Russian military personnel.” Similar propaganda events involving Kud-Sverchkov are planned for Tunisia, Morocco, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Côte d’Ivoire, and Zambia, with the Presidential Programs Foundation listed as the main sponsor.
In Moscow, AESSA operates in the best traditions of the Soviet KGB — through embassies. For example, it organizes free excursions for the wives of African diplomats and through them makes the necessary operational contacts. Over the past two years, the diplomats’ wives have visited the Bolshoi Theater, the Cosmonautics Museum, the Diamond Fund, the Tsaritsyno Estate Museum, etc.
Chekist Sosonkin
Another brainchild of Boyarkin is the Business Advisory Council for Libya (BACL). A source of The Insider in the special services reported that BACL was created at the insistent request of the FSB, which urgently needed to expand its residency in the Middle East to counter Turkish intelligence. Therefore, it is no coincidence that Yevgeny Sosonkin, a career officer of the FSB Fifth Service (military unit 26047), was appointed executive director of the council .
Before becoming Libya’s curator, he graduated from the information security department at the FSB Academy and worked as an expert on Syria at the Center for the Study of the Middle East and Central Asia, which is headed by retired colonel and well-known pro-Kremlin political scientist Semyon Bagdasarov. As executive director of the Center, Sosonkin participates in various roundtables on the Middle East and laments Russia’s loss of influence in Libya.
In July 2023, during the major Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg, security officer Sosonkin met with officials from Senegal and Nigeria.
At the summit, he was announced as the director of economic relations for the Legint Bureau. This is confirmed by the letter of thanks sent to him by Putin’s assistant Anton Kobyakov.
Now Viktor Boyarkin has left the founders of all organizations and disappeared from the radar. As can be seen from the financial statements, in 2021-2022, Legint suffered significant losses, and then completely stopped publishing data on its financial status. The Moscow office had to be closed and registered in the apartment of Anastasia Samarkina on Azina Street in Yekaterinburg.
The Voenkadry agency, which was created with the help of Boyarkin and the aforementioned GRU officer Dmitry Bondarenko, who was seconded to Rosneft’s subsidiary in Cuba, also suffered a sharp decline in assets . Officially, the agency recruits retired military personnel to work as security guards at state corporations, including at Russian gas and oil facilities in Venezuela, Syria, and Africa.
Two sources of The Insider in the “Voenkadra” reported that the culprit of the financial losses was the now deceased “Putin’s chef” Yevgeny Prigozhin: “Using the cover of friendship with the president, he violated all preliminary agreements and forced his way into Africa. The finances went to him in Wagner instead of us.” The second source is optimistic: “I think that after Prigozhin is eliminated, everything will be fine again.”
The Insider sent a request to Viktor Boyarkin for an interview, but at the time of publication no response had been received.
