Alexander Torshin’s special relationship with the FSB’s “Alpha” commander, Yuri Torshin
This series is entitled The Torshin Files.
Then Russian Federation Council Chairman Torshin was pictured with Alpha Group’s longtime commander Yuri Torshin — his “namesake” but unrelated per his tweets — in 2015 around the time he left official service.
Alexander Torshin has posted frequently on social media about Yuri Torshin since his demise in 2016 from a motorcycle accident, and the two have a history that goes back to at least 2004 and their ties to an event considered the Russian 9/11.
We found a photo of Yuri Torshin on Alexander’s Twittter account in late 2012 around the time he started becoming more active with the Night Wolves leader Alexander Zoldostanov.
Unlike Torshin’s posts about the Vityaz group, his posts about “Alpha” are more limited to Yuri Torshin and a few former commanders whom he’s meeting at what appear to be social events.
Two years ago, Alexander Torshin shared an image of himself on Twitter with a Soviet-era commander of Alpha. This year he shared a photo on Twitter of himself with Sergey Goncharov, a leader of the Alpha Veteran’s association, a counterpart to the Vityaz’s Col. Lysyuk who is Torshin’s assitant.
It was Yuri Torshin who led the controversial operation to free a thousand hostages in the Beslan school siege, and Alexander Torshin who led the official parliamentary investigation into the Beslan incident.
Two members of Torshin’s investigation refused to sign off on the final report, denouncing the panel as an official cover-up and casting doubt upon its findings.
Just last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against Russia and in favor of petitioners seeking civil relief for the state’s excessive use of force at Beslan which resulted in over 300 hostage deaths.
In September 2016, Yuri Torshin died in the Caucasus after falling off his motorcycle while working as a private military consultant advising government troops.
Since then, Alexander Torshin has posted a total of no less than ten tributes (with photos) which memorialize the fallen Alpha commander Yuri Torshin.
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It is apparent from Alexander Torshin’s graveside mourning that the two men with the same last name, had a lasting relationship in life.
Torshin’s rise through the ranks of Russian government became most noticeable after he led an investigation into FSB’s Alpha group.
That investigation is widely disputed as favoring the Russian government over the victims of Beslan.
Alexander Torshin is linked to numerous top-level special forces commanders in Russia, both formal and informal leaders, and he is called the Godfather by other gangsters in a racket that specializes in corporate raiding.
One may reasonably conclude that Alexander Torshin’s people, the Vityaz are his muscle, and he has sway with the Night Wolves and FSB’s “Alpha” and that is the real reason why he is called “Godfather” by the Taganskaya mafia.
Part 1 of The Torshin Files series:
Part 2 of The Torshin Files series:
The international effort it took to report this story
This entire story came about when Scott Dworkin and I were looking deeper into the posts on Maria Butina’s public social media profiles in the wake of her indictment last month by DC prosecutors, which cited social media posts published in a late June story on this website.
Dworkin reviewed every post on Butina’s VK account — the Russian knock-off of Facebook — and shared an image, which is featured as the cover of this story, pointing out that she and Torshin had military ties. Then, Scott identified Col. Lysyuk in the photo, which is what tipped me off that Torshin wasn’t at a military installation at all but with a pseudo-legal private military company.
I asked widely followed Russia expert and researcher Olga Lautman if she could help identify the military unit, and she quickly determined that they were called Vityaz and housed in the RosGvard, which ultimately led us to learn about the unit’s public/private operations for this report.
Scott Dworkin subsequently reviewed every photo on Alexander Torshin’s Twitter account with me, which yielded the rest of the images that helped shape reporting about the Night Wolves and Alpha group.
A source in Ukraine was also instrumental in piecing together the involvement of Vityaz in Eastern Ukraine and ruling out other groups with similar battle dress or names. That source is Yuri Zoria of the Euromaidan Press, who identified four suspected Vityaz soldiers and unearthed both the 2014 and 2017 reports about Vityaz, the latter which provides irrefutable visual evidence of the “Knight” Division’s presence in Eastern Ukraine just last year.
