Site that spills secrets of Putin’s Russia emerges into spotlight
LONDON — Over the past three months, a handful of highly placed Russians have discovered their secrets seeping onto the web.
It happened to a Russian Interior Ministry official whose emails were published online in April. It happened again this month, when details about a former Kremlin chief of staff’s American energy investment were exposed by Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
Last week, Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met U.S. President Donald Trump’s son during the 2016 presidential campaign, saw her ties to senior Russian government officials laid bare in an Associated Press investigation . The man behind the disclosures has said that more are coming.
A key source for the recent stories has been Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s new project, dubbed the Dossier Centre. Launched in November, the centre is billed as an investigative unit. Its website features a sprawling, interactive diagram of interconnected Russian officials described as the “main beneficiaries” of Russian corruption.
“We have no shortage of material we’re currently evaluating,” Khodorkovsky said from his office in central London.
The exiled former energy executive is funding the Dossier Center himself and said it was born out of frustration with the inability of journalistic investigations to lead to real change in a Russia dominated by his foe, President Vladimir Putin. He wanted the project to produce more than occasional stories and to gather enough actionable information on the Kremlin’s leadership to bring its members, eventually, to court.
“We understand it’s a long-term ambition,” Khodorkovsky said.
By his telling, the centre gets its data from a series of anonymous digital drop boxes . The leaks carry evidence not only of high-level corruption in Moscow, but of the Kremlin’s “illegal attempts to influence Western public opinion and Western politicians,” he said.
Although the Dossier Centre has remained relatively lowprofile — the group barely had more than 100 followers on Twitter on Tuesday — the recent stories it helped feed have attracted attention.
If Khodorkovsky’s business model — to receive leaked data anonymously and share it with journalists — sounds a bit like the early days of WikiLeaks, Dossier Centre staff members bristle at any comparison.
The Dossier Centre says it rejects the indiscriminate information dumps that made WikiLeaks notorious. Its five fulltime employees cross-reference incoming data to verify it and sift through files with an eye toward what might help build a legal case or feed a news story.
Khodorkovsky said his group has a fundamentally different mission than WikiLeaks’. “Our ambition is not simply to expose information in general, but to use material relating to Putin’s circle and his allies so that they can be put on trial in Russia,” he said.
Khodorkovsky was Russia’s richest man before he was imprisoned in 2005 for tax evasion in what was largely seen as the Kremlin’s payback for his political ambitions. Putin pardoned him a few weeks before the 2014 Winter Olympics got underway in Sochi, but the feud lives on.
From exile, Khodorkovsky supports an array of civil society groups in Russia, where authorities continue to investigate him on a variety of charges.
The Russian Embassy in London said in response to a question about Khodorkovsky’s project that rooting out corruption was one of Moscow’s top priorities.