Leaked Emails Directly Tie Russia to Unrest in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine has escalated on not only on the battlefield but also in the realm of cyberspace. With the war in eastern Ukraine’s rebel region of Donbass grinding on, Ukraine has looked to gain victories wherever possible. RUH8 (pronounced Roo-Hate), a Ukrainian hacktivist group, claimed to have hacked the emails of one of Putin’s personal aids. According to several anonymous interviews conducted with Radio Free Europe, the BBC, and other news sites, the hackers of RUH8 make up a hacking collective. RUH8 alongside CyberHunta, Falcons Flame, and Trinity have gained access to the emails of Vladislav Surkov, a businessman and advisor to Putin. Ukrainian authorities deny any official sanctioning of such activity.

Surkov, also known as the Gray Cardinal of the Kremlin, has been a right hand man of President Putin since the late 1990s trial of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. According to the Business media group RosBiznesKansaltin, Surkov is one of the primary ideologues and founders of the United Russia Party and earned his eponymous nickname through his political intrigue and involvement in creating new ideological movements within the party, such as Moving Together and Ours.

The collective claimed to Radio Free Europe that these emails directly connect Russian federal agencies to the separatists in Ukraine. The messages include reports about daily casualty rates in 2014 from Denis Pushilin, the Chairman of the People’s Soviet of the Donetsk People’s Republic. He also emailed Surkov with budget requirements to set-up a Ministry of Information and center for propaganda in the fledgling republic. RUH8 also obtained a map sent between Pushilin and Surkov, which divides Ukraine into New Russia, Little Russia, and Galicia.

The messages also indicated future cooperation between the rebel republics and Russian authorities. Pavel Karpov, a handler in the Luhansk Republic, sent an email to Surkov’s office that discussed the need to destabilize the situation in Ukraine. Karpov, known as Nikolai Pavlov, outlined a strategy of infiltrating the Ukrainian parliament and supplying Pro-Russian activists with genuine evidence of corruption in the Poroshenko administration in a timeframe of November 2016 to March 2017.

The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) has confirmed the authenticity of the documents. However, Oleksandr Tkachuk of the SBU admitted to RFE that while the material seems compelling, "there is not enough evidence to believe the entire [collection] of documents found in Surkov's e-mails is actually original or authentic."

However, Ruslan Deynychenko of stopfake.org claims that the number of references to people and events in the emails mean that the majorities of documents are genuine.

According to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism website,  the exact details of the released data is not significant, but the quantity of the messages have great implications concerning the relationship between Russia and the Donbas rebels.

Higgins told the BBC that, "We haven't seen a hack of this type before, showing so much direct linkage between the Kremlin and separatists on the ground."

In response to the leak, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that Vladislav Surkov refuses to use email.

The release of these emails by these hacktivists has put a halt to any immediate plans Russia may have to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. From this hack, it may be possible to tie any political unrest or leaks of information about Ukrainian officials back to Russian authorities. The denial of this operation by the Ukrainians shows that they too are willing to try any means to win the war in Donbas.