Part of the Kherson region has been under Russian occupation since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and has been officially annexed by Russia in September the same year. The occupation and the annexation have not been recognized by any country other than North Korea.
Allegedly, the agricultural products are being shipped by Russian companies linked to the inner circle of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and the pro-Putin United Russia party, an investigation conducted by reporters of the Belarusian Investigative Center (BIC), in cooperation with Schemes (RFE/RL) claims.
The investigation is based on data leaked to BIC by the Ukrainian hacker group KibOrg who said they accessed data from the Russia’s Federal State Information System Grain (FSIS Grain).
Under Russian law, commodity producers are required to record transaction details in the FSIS Grain register, which in this instance revealed that shipping documents were issued for 4,900 tonnes of rapeseed.
These supplies to Belarus are recorded on the official website of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation or are referenced in communications with representatives of exporting companies.
In 2023, the Russian company Torgtrade shipped to Belarus 113 batches of winter rapeseed, totaling 2,600 tonnes, with the company’s director, Vadim Alekseev, confirming the deliveries in a telephone conversation.
Torgtrade, registered in 2022 in Grozny to 77-year-old Chechen citizen Roza Mollaeva, saw its revenues soar from 50,000 to 200.6 million Russian rubles (US$546 to $2.19 million) within just one year.
When journalists called the phone number listed for Roza Mollaeva, a man named Tamerlan Sultanovich Berikkhanov answered, claiming to be the owner of Torgtrade. He also claimed that the rapeseed was shipped to his Belarusian company, Trial Expert. Berikkhanov previously worked in Grozny’s Finance Department.
FSIS Grain records show that another company was also profiting from the export of rapeseed from occupied Ukrainian regions to Belarus. Russian firm Agrotrade in 2023 managed 30 shipments of rapeseed, amounting to 671,800 tonnes, of which some was from the Kherson region.
Anton Tikhomirov, listed as the company’s director, has a history of collaboration with the Russian administration of annexed Crimea dating back to 2014, when he was deputy head of the Yalta city administration.
From April 2015 to November 2016, Tikhomirov served as the secretary of the Yalta local branch of the United Russia party. In 2016, he was promoted to deputy head of the Yalta city administration, overseeing transport, communications, youth, and sports, where he stayed for a year.
Russia and Belarus may see the export as perfectly legal, but for the rest of the world it could be looting.
Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer with the Regional Center for Human Rights (RCHR), told BIC that the export of agricultural products from Ukraine’s occupied territories could point to property looting, which constitutes a war crime.