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Independent newsroom focused on Russia. Investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine, corruption, and life in the country. Install our app: onelink.to/istoriesapp Support our journalism: https://istories.media/en/donations/?utm_source=blsk
How Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigozhin’s network kept operating in Africa and Latin America after his death (with Russian intelligence’s help) — an investigation by IStories, The Continent, Forbidden Stories, Dossier Center, All Eyes On Wagner, and openDemocracy 🔽
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🔴 #PropagandaMachine: An unprecedented data leak shared by our partner @thecontinent.org has helped us uncover new findings on Russian influence operations.Tomorrow, Forbidden Stories will reveal more. @istories.bsky.social
@opendemocracy.net @aeowinpact.bsky.social Dossier Center
Ramzan Kadyrov’s health is deteriorating, and speculation has resurfaced over who could become Chechnya’s next leader.
Here’s how Chechnya and the Kremlin are preparing for a change of power in the region after Kadyrov’s death 🔽
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In France, prosecutors have seized assets belonging to the head of Gazprombank Andrey Akimov and his deputy totaling more than €100 million.
IStories previously published a joint investigation with Le Monde about Akimov’s European assets 🔽
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For a deeper look at how the Russian Unified Military Registry works, how it was built, and who was involved, check out the full investigation or watch our YouTube report 🔽
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcEL...
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Because of how data is stored and processed in the registry, information on tens of millions of Russians could be leaked.
This includes highly detailed personal data — family information, addresses, health records, education, and much more.
At present, the automatic exit ban and other restrictions haven’t yet been fully implemented: draft offices and agencies have not established proper data exchange.
So people have still been able to cross the border even when the draft registry shows a travel ban flag.
If you fail to appear at the draft office within 20 days of the specified date, additional restrictions follow: you can be prohibited from taking out loans, completing property transactions, driving, or registering a vehicle.
All it takes for a draft officer is again a single click.
Under the law, a person is prohibited from leaving the country as soon as a conscription notice appears in the UMR.
A draft officer initiates the restrictions with a single click, then the travel ban is forwarded to the FSB. In the future, restrictions could be automated.
By December 2025, the Defense Ministry had introduced the UMR to local draft offices; digital conscription notices had been sent to residents in >60 regions.
The registry is designed to store data on 25 million people and can issue up to a million conscription notices per year.
We also found that the registry includes functionality for mass distribution of draft notices to Russians in case of mobilization.
For the defense minister, developers were preparing a “general’s dashboard” showing the numbers of conscripts, mobilized, and contract soldiers.
All traces of such interference are concealed — even the fact a record was deleted is itself subject to deletion.
Why hide data in the registry? To ensure that “right people” don’t accidentally receive conscription notices.
The ULC makes it possible to remove certain citizens from the registry without a trace, anonymize or replace their data with fabricated info, cancel conscription notices and imposed restrictions, or hide them from draft lists altogether.
24.12.2025 17:50 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
So what was the role of Mikord?
It developed several registry’s core components: the personal user account for the draft notice registry, analytical reports for the Defense Ministry, and a special module, Unified Linking Component (ULC), designed to delete/alter registry records.
Despite the sensitivity of the project, developers routinely ignored basic information security requirements: they shared passwords to work accounts and used unsecured laptops while testing the registry at the Defense Ministry.
These practices ultimately made the hack possible.
Within the Defense Ministry, Mikord reported to Andrei Biryukov of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.
His wife, Yulia Levitskaya, oversaw the registry on behalf of the government and was responsible for presenting the registry to senior officials.
The development of the UMR was coordinated at the government level. The registry was demonstrated at the Presidential Administration; its progress was personally reviewed by the prime minister and the minister of defense. Russia’s security services closely monitored the project.
24.12.2025 17:47 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Mikord joined the development of the UMR project in 2024. During its work, the company received at least 377.5M rubles (≈$5M) from a subsidiary of one of the biggest telecoms in Russia, Rostelecom.
The total UMR budget in 2024–2026 is 3.8B rubles (≈$48M).
Background: on Dec 5, hackers wiped the infrastructure of Mikord, one of the key developers of the Unified Military Registry (UMR). The leaked data (internal documentation and correspondence) was passed to human rights project Get Lost, which then shared it with us.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcEL...
What we learned about Russia’s Unified Military Registry: how it was hacked, its security flaws, preparations for mobilization (and who is shielded from it), the key figures behind it, and the developers’ opinions. An investigation by IStories 🔽
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❗ Roman Anin, the publisher and former editor-in-chief of IStories, has been stripped of his Russian citizenship after a Russian court found him guilty of “spreading fake news” about the actions of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine 🔽
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Authorities evict Chechen Alternative for Germany party member Murad Dadaev (Noah Krieger) from his villa in Hanover following investigation by IStories and @correctiv.org. The article established Dadaev’s connections with Ramzan Kadyrov’s people in Europe.
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How did a Grozny native whose brother participated in the assassination of Ramzan Kadyrov’s opponent become a prominent figure in the AfD party and gather German far-rightists around him — an investigation by @correctiv.org and IStories 🔽
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Hackers breach the infrastructure of key Unified Military Register developer. They gained access to data on the development of the register.
Soon we’ll reveal how the registry works and break down its main components.
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A monument to the son of CIA Deputy Director Michael Gloss, killed in the war in Ukraine, erected in Donetsk. It was installed at the school that was previously named after Gloss 🔽
www.istories.media/en/news/2025...
Companies in Russia and the UAE are involved in secretive exports of oil products to North Korea — in violation of U.N. sanctions that Moscow itself supported.
New from @istories.bsky.social, @occrp.org and @osc-london.bsky.social
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Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov proposed to Vladimir Putin to approve the immediate start of preparations for full-scale nuclear tests on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in response to possible U.S. tests.
Putin has given his approval.
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