In a suburb of the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, locals were growing curious in 2019 about why their city council seemed to pave and repave their local roads over and over again. “You won’t believe it,” an author wrote on Kherson Online. but we’re going to repair the roads in the city, and in neighboring Antonovka, again.” What Kherson and Antonovka citizens didn’t know at the time was that state prosecutors and investigators would soon begin a massive criminal case against the man behind the road construction spree, a local government official named Igor Semenchev. Newly leaked document ..read more

An aviation company awarded a $615,000 contract by the Florida Department of Transportation for the relocation of migrants purchased aircraft in 2018 from a Russian government entity recently sanctioned by the U.S. for its material support to the Russian military. Forensic News reviewed corporate and shipping records to confirm the transactions. The move to relocate dozens of migrants seeking asylum to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts made by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis captured the nation’s attention and drew sharp criticism from civil rights groups, among others. Forensic News believes i ..read more

The Russian oligarch who once purchased one of Donald Trump’s properties for $95 million hired a team of private agents to spy on a romantic partner in New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles in late 2015, according to a trove of thousands of pages of documents acquired by Forensic News.  Dmitry Rybolovlev, a multi-billionaire businessman who made his fortune in the Russian fertilizer industry and now owns the football club AS Monaco, used an offshore company to pay the private intelligence company, Arcanum, more than $1 million per month.  The agreement between Arcanum and a company re ..read more

A multimillionaire Los Angeles-based podiatrist co-owns the Cypriot company behind a prominent pro-Kremlin propaganda website, Forensic News can exclusively report. The podiatrist, Dr. Vladimir Zeetser, owns a minority share of DRN Media, the company behind the Duran, a website promoting false conspiracy theories echoing Russian state messaging. He was added to the company’s board of directors in 2018. Zeetser has met with other shareholders of the Duran in Moscow and frequently espouses pro-Kremlin talking points in his personal social media posts on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.  I ..read more

A top financier for Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and the legal charade to overturn the results of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election spent three days in 2019 on a now-seized superyacht owned by an influential Russian oligarch, Forensic News can reveal. Photographs posted on Instagram from an account belonging to Bill White and a private account belonging to his husband Bryan Eure offer indisputable evidence that the two vacationed with Russian oligarch Andrey Melnichenko aboard his yacht, Sailing Yacht A, off the coast of Italy in summer 2019. The trip raises questions about White’s “b ..read more

The first digital trace of Leo Radvinsky dates back to 1997 when Radvinsky, then just 15-years-old, acted as a webmaster for an online science fiction strategy game called X-COM: Apocalypse, where players fend off attacking aliens invading from space.   During the ensuing 23 years, Radvinsky built an online operation of pornography worth well over $1 billion. But despite his extensive business interests, including full ownership of the sex worker-driven, pop-culture sensation OnlyFans, extremely little is publicly known about Radvinsky. Just a handful of photos of him have ever surfa ..read more

Bills banning stock trading by lawmakers are gaining traction in the U.S. House and Senate amid mounting public attention on the market moves made by leadership and the rank-and-file alike.  Some of the proposed bills impose restrictions on lawmakers’ immediate families. The “Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act,” introduced by Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA), require members, their spouses, and their dependent children to place their stock portfolios in a blind trust controlled by a third party. Others, like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), introduced legislation that would only app ..read more

A Russian cybersecurity company placed on a U.S. Commerce Department export ban list for having “enabled the activities of malicious Russian cyber actors” has maintained an active U.S. presence that has attracted the scrutiny of federal investigators, a Forensic News investigation can reveal. Open Joint Stock Company Information Technology and Communication Systems, a/k/a/ “Infotecs”, produces encryption tools and other cybersecurity products meant to safeguard critical information for businesses and organizations.  The company was founded in 1991 by Andrey Chapchaev, a shadowy engineer a ..read more

If 2021 is known for anything, it should be remembered as the year with the most restrictive state legislation to date. Republican lawmakers across the country have proposed a record number of bills that limit voting rights, target LGBTQ+ people, curtail gun control, and obstruct Covid-19 prevention measures. They aren’t alone in this effort; Professional associations and national corporations have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to sponsors of these bills, helping to keep them in office.  Forensic News combed through the sponsors of state bills in the following categories: voting ..read more

A former senior Soviet Foreign Ministry official in the U.S. filed as a Foreign Agent for a top aide to Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who has been described by the U.S. Senate as a key figure in the Kremlin’s malign influence operations.  The paperwork filed under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) has raised numerous concerns from experts who have noted that the aide, Yevgenyi (Evgeny, Evgeniy) Fokin, has reportedly been flagged by the FBI as a former senior Russian intelligence official.  In addition, the filing raises questions about the involvement of a former senior ..read more