09/20/2022
📣 The US Department of Treasury has designated Task Force Rusich, a neo-Nazi paramilitary group that has participated in combat alongside Russia’s military in Ukraine.
💡 Mercenary groups like Task Force Rusich often engage in online fundraising activities, raising money for military and tactical equipment, medicine, and care for the wounded. Most of the fundraising activities that we observe are occurring through Russian bank cards—but these groups also use .
👉🏼 Alexey Milchakov and Yan Petrovsky, who founded the militia in 2014, were included on an updated SDN list from OFAC, which disclosed five cryptocurrency wallet addresses connected to Task Force Rusich.
‣ One Rosich Ethereum donation wallet, which the US Treasury disclosed on September 15, provides a window into how Russian mercenary groups transact using cryptocurrency.
‣ This wallet was newly funded on September 7 with about .67 Ethereum (~$922).
‣ Two days later, with fresh funds at its back, Task Force Rusich posted a list of the military equipment it needed for an unspecified unit in the “Northern Military District”—likely code for Kharkiv, Sumy, and Kyiv regions, which includes the Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv and the capital, Kyiv.
‣ Then, two days after that, on September 11, a Task Force Rusich ally announced that the same wallet had received donations of more than $20,000.
🔥 Flashpoint’s intelligence team—which includes support to anti-money laundering (AML), counter-terrorist financing (CTF), and know-your-customer (KYC) compliance programs—has been aware of and its illicit funding effort since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Read our latest blog here: https://flashpoint.io/blog/russia-neo-nazi-mercenary-groups-pmcs-and-illicit-financing/