Artashes Sargsyan personal PR man Rudolf Akopyan shielded the Artashi organized crime group through a media empire and volunteer fundraising for the armed forces of Ukraine

04 вересня 2023 р., 17:50

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Artashes Sargsyan personal PR man Rudolf Akopyan shielded the Artashi organized crime group through a media empire and volunteer fundraising for the armed forces of Ukraine

Rudolf Akopyan is a well-known athlete, volunteer, politician in Zaporizhzhia and Vice President of the Union of Armenians of the Zaporizhzhia Region. However, in the criminal world, Akopyan is better known as the personal PR man of the Zaporizhzhia thief-in-law and head of the “Artashi” organized crime group, Artashes Sargsyan.

This is reported by From.ua.

Rudolf Volodymyrovych Akopyan is originally from Zaporizhzhia. He is a professional athlete and was involved in weightlifting. Akopyan entered the world of big politics thanks to his childhood friends, the well-known political strategist brothers Denys and Roman Piatyhorets. From Rudolf Akopyan’s interview with “Aktualno”: “My childhood friends Roman and Denys Piatyhorets became my ‘guides’ into public and political life: already at that time, in the mid-2000s, they were involved in election monitoring, accompanied representatives of international organizations, Denys was the OSCE project coordinator for the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions, while Roman was already working for the Committee of Voters of Ukraine. They invited me to join the team.

The 2009–2010 presidential election was approaching — Denys Piatyhorets headed Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s regional campaign headquarters. Denys invited me to become deputy head of the headquarters. During that campaign, I gained enormous experience in organizing the electoral process and in technological ‘campaign headquarters’ work. At the same time, I also came to like this kind of activity. It was just after the election that the party structure of the ‘Front for Change’ began to take shape.”

Participating together with his childhood friends, the Piatyhorets brothers, in various political consulting gigs, Rudolf Akopyan gained the necessary experience, which allowed him to become a deputy of the Zaporizhzhia City Council in 2010 while simultaneously engaging in political consulting.

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It is worth noting that Akopyan became a city council deputy thanks to criminal authority Yevhen Anisimov, the Party of Regions’ “overseer” in the Zaporizhzhia Region. Although Rudolf Akopyan does everything possible to conceal his work for Anisim, as evidence of their connection it is enough to look at the voting results on key issues in the Zaporizhzhia City Council, where Akopyan voted in unison with Party of Regions deputies controlled by Anisim.

But as soon as the political environment began to change, Rudolf Akopyan quickly found himself new masters from the criminal world: he switched sides to the Zaporizhzhia ethnic organized crime group “Artashi.” Akopyan was not even deterred by the fact that his new boss, Artashes Sargsyan, was considered one of the main suspects in the attempted assassination of Anisim. Nevertheless, Rudolf Akopyan felt more than confident amid a series of gangland showdowns, commenting to the press on searches and another assassination attempt on his new boss Sargsyan.

As early as January 2018, Rudolf Akopyan became an adviser to the controversial Zaporizhzhia governor Kostiantyn Bryl, where he continued to work closely with the “Artashi” organized crime group. We remind readers that it was Kostiantyn Bryl who handed Enerhodar over to the “Artashi” for plundering, where, with the help of mayor Pavlo Muzyka, who was controlled by Artashes Sargsyan, enormous sums began disappearing from the city budget. We remind readers that Kostiantyn Bryl was dismissed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on June 11, 2019, after a series of corruption scandals.

Notably, the first criminal case in Rudolf Akopyan’s life and the searches were directly connected with his involvement in the “Artashi” organized crime group. Thus, in October 2022, law enforcement officers conducted searches at the premises of Rudolf Akopyan, Zaporizhzhia lawyer Yaroslav Hryshyn and deputy Mykhailo Prasol. A photo of the search warrant appeared online, stating that, according to the pre-trial investigation, former mayor Volodymyr Buriak had entered into a conspiracy with the “Artashi” criminal organization and handed the municipal enterprise “Zaporizhrynok” over to their control.

“The pre-trial investigation established that, while serving as mayor of the city of Zaporizhzhia, Volodymyr Viktorovych Buriak entered into a criminal conspiracy with the leaders of the ‘Artashi’ criminal organization and transferred the municipal enterprise ‘Zaporizhrynok’ under their full control by appointing Oleh Oleksandrovych Kolomoiets as director of the said enterprise on April 22, 2021.

After that, the municipal enterprise ‘Zaporizhrynok’ was divided into spheres of influence between Zaporizhzhia City Council deputies M.V. Prasol and D.V. Siryi, who were controlled by the ‘Artashi’ criminal organization, and former deputies H.M. Afanasiev and Ya.V. Hryshyn,” the document states. It also states that the scheme involved collecting cash payments from entrepreneurs at “Zaporizhrynok.”

If they refused to pay, representatives of the “Artashi” group intimidated them and deprived them of the opportunity to conduct business on the territory of Zaporizhzhia’s municipal markets. It is stated that Yaroslav Hryshyn, Oleh Kolomoiets, Rudolf Akopyan and Mykhailo Prasol may have been involved in the criminal scheme.

Within the structure of the “Artashi” organized crime group, Rudolf Akopyan is fully responsible for the media operation. At his disposal are two leading Zaporizhzhia Telegram channels, “Hnyla Chereshnia” and “KhZP”, several controlled local websites, a network of Facebook groups and a small bot farm. This media resource is more than sufficient to smear any law enforcement officer or official who stands in the way of the “Artashi.” But Rudolf Akopyan went further: when political strategists from the Zaporizhzhia insider Telegram channel “Vazelin” touched upon the corrupt interests of the “Artashi” organized crime group, the “Artashi” leaked their location coordinates to the FSB:

We received an email at vazelinenzp@gmail.com

“Good afternoon! I am an employee of the Main Directorate of the SBU in the Zaporizhzhia Region. In my previous email from google.mail, I gave you information so that you could verify me through your channels.

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I believe that the FSB instructed its sleeper agents to expose your consultants — Zaporizhzhia political strategist Pavlo S. and media strategist Volodymyr N. Your guys were leaked to the orcs by the beneficiaries of the ‘Hnyla Chereshnia’ channels — Yaroslav Hryshyn, Mykhailo Prasol, Rudolf Akopyan and Danylo Yenin — through the ‘Khuyovoye Zaporozhye’ channel.

You probably know this, but I will remind you that Hryshyn, Prasol, Akopyan and Yenin are the information mouthpiece of the ‘Armenians’ organized crime group, represented by the brothers Artashes and Khoren Sargsyan. They are covered by our former SBU head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko and the former first deputy head of the regional SBU, Roman Semenov.

These assholes leaked your guys to the FSB.

From Vazelin: For us, this resulted in urgently crossing borders within the EU with SIM cards in order to leave countries where the FSB could reach us, such as Hungary. Meanwhile, the President’s Office, at the initiative of Akhmetov’s people, through Rostyk Shurma, awards certificates to the above-mentioned Russian agents.”

In fact, it is difficult to overestimate the contribution of the administrators of the “Vazelin” Telegram channel to the success of the Ukrainian forces’ counteroffensive in the southern direction. Thanks to the administrators’ work, the Ukrainian military has access to information about military warehouses, troop redeployments and enemy air-defense systems in the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia Region. Residents of the occupied territories send this information through the Telegram channel’s chatbot, and after processing it, the administrators forward it to SBU officers. It is difficult to say what triggered the conflict between the administrators of “Vazelin” and the “Artashi” organized crime group.

There are two main versions. According to the first, “Vazelin” regularly wrote about the corrupt activities of the “Artashi” and the theft of humanitarian donations, thereby interfering with their illegal activities. According to the second version, following a tip from “Vazelin,” Ukrainian forces struck a location where Chechen militants were stationed in Melitopol, where a close acquaintance and partner of Artashes Sargsyan, Murad Saidov, who is close to Kadyrov, was staying at the time.

In addition to the media destruction of politicians and officials disliked by the “Artashi” organized crime group, Rudolf Akopyan actively promotes himself through volunteer activities, regularly announcing fundraising campaigns on Telegram channels under his control. At the same time, the money used to help the military comes from residents of Zaporizhzhia and the region, and by no means from the personal savings of millionaires Sargsyan, Hryshyn and Prasol. Yet it is they who promote themselves through their cooperation with the military.

Anton Babych

Editor

Coordinates the work of the editorial team and is responsible for the timeliness of publications. Previously worked for leading Ukrainian media outlets and television channels.