EXCLUSIVE: Butina and Torshin linked to Russian private military company working in Ukraine
This series is entitled The Torshin Files.
A high-ranking Russian Central Bank official ran a spy ring that infiltrated the NRA with the spy Maria Butina, however five years before meeting her, Alexander Torshin had another “Assistant” who runs a private army and appears to explain the real reason why Russia’s Taganskaya mafia calls him a “Godfather.”
Russia’s Taganskaya mafia is known to specialize in corporate raiding.
Russian Deputy Central Bank Governor Alexander Torshin has extremely tight ties to the elite Spetznaz commander in charge of Vityaz which means Knight/warrior, formerly a government special operations force, today it is a privatized security company and commando training center on the outskirts of Moscow.
Recently, members of Vityaz have been visually identified in Eastern Ukraine training soldiers in special forces tactics.
An unconfirmed 2014 Ukrainian news report said that Vityaz forces were in Eastern Ukraine helping control the flow of militants to the battlefield. Four suspected members of Vityaz are in the “Peacekeeper” website that tracks individual Russian soldiers’ involvement in Ukraine. (here, here, here and here)
It was the host of Dworkin Report who found the consequential photo which Maria Butina posted to her VK social media account linking she and Alexander Torshin to a soldier he identified as Col. Sergey Lysyuk.
Podcaster Scott Dworkin continued to review literally all of the rest of Butina and Torshin’s social media posts for this story, which will be featured throughout this series. The first three parts of The Torshin Files will be released today, and required an international team of experts to comment along with selfless assistance from other journalists on three continents to run down every lead, including some stories excluded as not relevant to this investigation.
We also surprisingly found that Alexander Torshin also met frequently with Alexander Zaldostanov — the sanctioned head of the Night Wolves motorcycle gang which is a closely Putin-linked group of unofficial former GRU Spetznaz troops that physically invaded the Crimea and Ukraine in 2014 on behalf of the Russian state.
Lastly, he was apparently a close associate with the recently deceased former head of FSB’s Alpha Spetznaz named Yuri Torshin, whom the deputy Russian Central bank governor led a controversial investigation while in the Russian Federation Council because of their raid on Beslan, an incident often compared to 9/11.
“I have a suspicion that he is from the Soviet security services (the KGB) because all of his roles in government involved oversight and loyalty, not any specific skills,” says Ilya Zaslavskiy, who is the Oxford educated Head of Research at the Free Russia Foundation.
Torshin’s self-declared assistant is Colonel Sergey Lysyuk — a Hero of the Russian Federation honoree — for leading the Dzerzhinsky Division, which was then one of the FSB’s Vityaz Spetznaz brigades, to stop a 1993 coup attempt in Moscow, keeping Russian President Boris Yeltsin in power
Today, Col. Lysyuk runs a private military operation just outside Moscow which appears to be the real muscle behind the NRA’s favorite Russian deputy central banker.
“[Vityaz] is an asymmetric warfare group,” says Malcolm Nance, the former naval intelligence officer, MSNBC contributor and author whose recent book “The Plot To Destroy Democracy” covers the birth of the Wagner private military company which has engaged in warfare against America’s military.
“Whereas ‘Putin’s Chef,’ Prighozin is an Erik Prince-level fixer for Putin, Alexander Torshin appears to be a subcommander who has some of the same responsibilities,” Nance says.
“But Torshin appears to be different in that he uses his Moscow ties and links to Vityaz, and to the Nightwolves, and to the Russian orthodox church as his credentials which enabled Vladimir Putin to use him as the go to guy to infiltrate the NRA.”
The published first photo of the Torshin with his two assistants, Col. Lysyuk and a 24-year-old Maria Butina is from August 2012, barely a year after she joined Putin’s United Russia party and ran in the Youth Primaries.
In September 2012, Butina posted an entire album on Vk.com (Russia’s knockoff of Facebook) containing photos of herself and Torshin inspecting the Vityaz regiment on their private training grounds outside Moscow, including the cover image for this story.
Those images are still public.
One year later, the old soldier became an honorary member of her Right to Bear Arms front group at their first “All Russia Congress” while former American Conservative Union board member Paul Erickson better known as ‘US Person #1’ and former NRA President David Keene — the ACU’s past Chairman — looked on from an English-language propaganda covered room in Moscow on Halloween five years ago. (photos below)
Early the following year, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed the territory with a vote at gunpoint.
“I saw Maria Butina’s tactical shooting videos, she’s incredibly proficient. Her fluidity is stunning,” says Nance about the red-headed leader of Right to Bear Arms who now resides in an Alexandria, Virginia federal jail, “She’s been trained by someone professional, probably a spetznaz type. She’s probably not a GRU officer, but was likely trained as a subcontractor to execute this infiltration mission.”
The Vityaz began as the Soviet Union’s first SWAT team
The Vityaz Spetznaz are known for their distinctive maroon berets with two insignia pins, one of which still bears the old Hammer and Sickle of the defunct Soviet Union.
The Spetznaz is Russia’s highly trained special forces soldiers.
Vityaz means Knight.
The unit was formed initially to thwart terrorist attacks for the 1980 Winter Olympics, but it evolved into an armored infantry unit deployed in the near abroad former Soviet Republics, spending much of its time in the North Caucasus before the 2008 reorganization that created a private security company who moved to Moscow just two years later.
“I suspect it’s muscle that’s focused domestically,” says the Obama Administration’s former NSC Russia director Michael R. Carpenter, about the real use of private military companies in Russia.
“I do recall hearing that a private military company (PMC),” says Carpenter, “later adopted the Vityaz name and logo.”
“The oligarch(s) who fund Vityaz use it to protect their own assets and settle scores with adversaries,” Michael R. Carpenter wrote, “including through raiderstvo (corporate raiding).”
In early 2007, Col. Lysyuk’s Vityaz unit made international headlines because his soldiers were using an image of the poisoned former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko — who was poisoned with radioactive polonium tea in London — for target practice.
Just a few months later, Col. Lysyuk gave an interview to “Bratishka” — a magazine for the Special Forces named “Little Brother” in English — that he had a work-based relationship with the Russian Federation Council’s Alexander Porsirievich Torshin, the second overall official in their upper national legislative body.
Significantly, the Hero of the Russian Federation told Bratishka that:
“I work as an assistant to the deputy chairman of the Federation Council, Alexander Porsirievich Torshin.”
“He is very serious about supporting special forces. He himself is ready to come forward with initiatives, including legislative ones, to provide material support for the activities of special forces, and to improve the social protection of servicemen and members of their families”
“On bare enthusiasm, it is impossible to carry out tasks. If the special forces provide security for the state [and] society,” continued Col. Lysyuk, “then the approach to their social protection must be [from the] state, not [based solely on] accounting.”
”You can not save [money] on spetsnaz, that’s what I want to say.”
The following year, Vityaz was partly privatized.
Col. Lysyuk got to keep the name Vityaz for his new, private army.
Russia’s Ministry of Interior placed the Vityaz and Rus special forces outfits under a single command called the 604th Special Operations center, and two years ago, that unit was folded into Putin’s personal 350,000 man bodyguard the RosGvard or Russian National Guard.
Today, Col. Lysyuk is still the apparent head of a sprawling group of private military companies named Vityaz which operates just outside Moscow, and Torshin is his very conspicuous political ally.
Alexander Torshin has made numerous appearances with Col. Lysyuk and the Vityaz over the years, indicating a regular and ongoing relationship.
Only months after the Litvinenko incident in early 2007, the Colonel began calling himself Torshin’s assistant, and his army was privatized the year after that.
Thus, Alexander Torshin’s history with the Vityaz Spetznaz coincides with the group’s was cleavage into a public and a private army, eventually becoming a three-headed hydra after the unit’s reorganization in 2008.
Vityaz private operations began in 2008 in the town of Perm, near the Ural Mountains in south-central Russia, which is an apparently unusual location for a special forces commander who has probably been based in Moscow for most of his career. Lysyuk began with 300 people.
The privatized Vityaz security company’s original website is preserved in Archive.org, and offered 1500 rubles a day for new recruits at its offices near the Kama River in the center of the million-person city on the European side of the Ural Mountains.
The old Vityaz Center offered a ‘comprehensive approach to ensure your security,’ including bill collectors and even VIP emergency services:
The department of personal protection consists of former servicemen of the Airborne Forces and employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, who have extensive experience in the field of security. All our employees undergo special training courses for personal protection and regularly confirm their qualifications.
Great practical experience allows employees of the Vityaz-Center group of companies to provide reliable client protection in extreme conditions.
Since 2010, the Vityaz has moved to Moscow and grown into these three entities today (chart below):
- The 604th Special Operations Center’s “Vityaz” battalion of the ODON’s Dzerzhinsky Division motorized infantry under control of the Ministry of Interior. The 604th got moved in 2016 into Putin’s “praetorian guard” — the RosGvard or Russian National Guard — and still use the outfit’s insignia and signature maroon beret. Now, they report directly to Vladimir Putin’s personal bodyguard.
- The Vityaz Center, a special forces training facility on the outskirts of Moscow.
- The Vityaz Security Concern in Moscow — which would presumably be under Col. Lysyuk’s control — a private security company providing commercial protection for malls, hotels and gas stations as well as protection and VIP services. It currently has 1,500 employees and five subsidiaries.
Colonel Sergey Lysyuk’s profile is on the RosGvard’s official website, noting that he still trains elite Spetznaz troops as the head of the “Brotherhood of the Maroon Berets.”
Russian private military companies have erupted in size and scope during the last decade as Putin’s government looks for troops that are more expendable, with less official accountability or even plausible deniability to do the regime’s dirty work from Ukraine to Syria and throughout the so-called “near abroad.”
However, there is no law formally authorizing these units, as government Ministries and the FSB fight a pitched political battle over who will control the PMCs and the Kremlin debates if it’s worth owning these irregular army units sometimes called “little green men.”
In fact, Russian law makes it illegal to be a PMC, but if the government is sending the troops off, they are de facto state actors at that point, even if they’re later disowned like the Wagner group which attacked an American position in Syria and got slaughtered this past February while government forces told the US military that no official troops were nearby on an official “deconfliction” communications channel.
One year after Vityaz moved to Moscow, Alexander Torshin became a “most active” participant in a daring corporate raid right in the heart of the Russian capital.
“As part of the Tanganska gang,” says Zaslavskiy, who used to work for the Russian oil company TNK-BP and survived being arrested by the FSB during what became one of his home country’s most notorious corporate raids, “there are stories of Torshin using private security inside of Russia with former military people. He’s also a former prosecutor.”
Indeed, Torshin’s use of prosecutors to conduct corporate raids in Russia is documented.
The “Moscow Department Store” is a Soviet-era relic built in 1963 and sits on a prime piece of real estate located a 15-minute drive from the Kremlin, and a member of the Taganskaya gang took over the landmark property over the course of several years.
The entire affair ended when Alexander Torshin used his official office in the Russian Federation to ask Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika to intervene in a March 2011 letter. The Russia Insider reports what happened the following month:
On April 6, 2011, a group of 20 men armed with batons and non-lethal weapons entered the building of the Moskva department store in Leninsky Avenue in Moscow. One of the attackers made several shots in the air. Before the police arrived, the store security guards engaged in a fight with the attackers, which resulted in three of the participants being hospitalized with injuries.
One of the attackers proclaimed himself the managing director of the Moskva company and clarified that he was the new director of the store. This public incident was yet another chapter in the Taganskaya gang’s long struggle for control over the store, of which Torshin was a most active participant.
After the Taganskaya gang took control of the Moscow Department Store, money began flowing to Spain.
“Universal Shop Moscow — a big supermarket — also had a fight with the Taganskaya mob,” says Ilya Zaslavskiy recalling another corporate raid linked to Torshin. “Deputy Prosecutor-general Victor Green supported Torshin in the fight. They won.”
Vityaz is open to the public, and the movie star who recently became a Russian envoy
What makes the story of the Vityaz even more unusual is that they are open to the public, offering training courses in their own brand of Spetznaz martial arts as a counterpoint to Israeli Krav Maga. They even offered a Vityaz training package for American tourists who presumably were lined up to pay at least $32,000 for a group of 10 to train with Russian special forces.
But their American tour operator partners had to stop offering the on their website sometime between October 2012 and May 2013, right around the time that Russophile actor Steven Seagal visited the Vityaz’s training center in Balashikha and met with Col. Sergey Lysyuk,.
Earlier this month, Putin named Steven Seagal a special envoy from Russia to the United States.
Torshin’s links to Russian special forces include two other significant groups
Alexander Torshin is obviously very close with the Viyaz Spetznaz group, but his special forces ties span two other groups, one official — the FSB’s group “Alpha” — and one group that is at the center of Putin’s hybrid-war strategy, and landed on America’s sanctions list — the Night Wolves bike club — for the role they played in invading Ukraine and the Crimea.
“They’re essentially JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] with deniability for Russians. People can come in and out, get away with murder, literally,” says Malcolm Nance about his links to multiple special forces outfits.
“Alexander Torshin appears to be a what we call a ‘key node’ in Putin’s operations.”
The next part of The Torshin Files explores Torshin’s links to the Night Wolves, who tried to expand to Florida during the 2016 election.
See Part 2 of The Torshin Files here:
See Part 3 of The Torshin Files here:
