Multiple sources tell Rolling Stone that a Ukrainian businessman offered payouts for a false flag operation aimed at bolstering Putin’s claim that Ukraine was a Nazi hotbed. In the months before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, an oligarch with Russian ties allegedly paid for locals to paint swastikas around Kharkiv, sources say. The effort, according to the sources, was part of a false flag operation to exaggerate Ukraine’s Nazi presence at a time when Putin was using it as a pretext for war. The alleged plot, according to multiple sources, involved Pavel Fuks, a real estate, banking, and oil magnate who, the sources claim, was co-opted by Russian security forces to participate. Through intermediaries, Fuks allegedly offered between $500 and $1,500 for street level criminals to vandalize city streets with pro-Nazi graffiti in December, January, and February. The accounts of Fuks’ alleged efforts to stir up animosity in Ukraine is derived from multiple sources, including U.S. intelligence reporting
rolling stone: Exclusive: Sources Say Oligarch Funded Scheme to Paint Swastikas in Ukraine
zu Kuks siehe auch: Oligarch, friend of Trump: Who is Pavel Fuchs? Al Jazeera probes a businessman who conspired to buy frozen assets linked to former Ukrainian President Yanukovich. (…) Born in October 1971, in Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv, Fuchs earned the nickname “Naemnik”, Mercenary, according to restricted Russian interior ministry records. He graduated from Kharkiv State University’s department of economic and social planning in 1994 and headed to Moscow. Currently, he sits at the helm of a huge business empire with holdings in oil, gas, luxury real estate and banking. His investments span Russia, Ukraine, the UK, the United States and many of the world’s tax havens. He is so influential that Russian President Vladimir Putin has honoured him for his services to the Russian economy. (…) Fuchs has told Russian media he made a name for himself working for two of Russia’s richest men, Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Prokhorov. They made their money in the 1990s buying up huge stakes in the precious metals sector, before investing in numerous other industries. Prokhorov ran for president in Russia in 2012. Fuchs is now extremely well-connected in his own right. Russian company records put his name beside some of the most powerful and well-connected Russian politicians.