Earlier this year, 14 terabytes of data and documents from more than 50 Russian government agencies and corporations were hacked and released to the public.
As soon as we got our hands on these files, we went to work, searching for the revelations about President Vladimir Putin’s regime that could be contained in the hacks.
What we’ve found has been damning. Emails and documents uncovered by The Intercept show how one of Putin’s closest allies worked to hide his control of a notorious mercenary group fighting alongside Russia in Ukraine.
But this reporting, pulling back the curtain on one of the most ruthless figures in Putin’s inner circle, may be just the tip of the iceberg. This data set is simply enormous, and just indexing these files is a massive undertaking requiring specialized technology, top data experts, and money.
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Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private mercenary force, the Wagner Group, has been deployed in support of Russian military campaigns in half a dozen conflicts around the world, where its fighters have been accused of human rights abuses that include torture, rape, and the mass killing of civilians. Prigozhin denied his links to the group for years.
The hacked data reviewed by The Intercept shows how Prigozhin worked to hide his connection to Wagner, contest sanctions, deflect U.S. prosecution, and attack journalists investigating his shadowy businesses — with the help of U.S. and British law firms.
These are the kinds of revelations we hoped we’d find when we got our hands on this hack. But we’re just at the beginning of what could be a yearslong effort investigating perhaps the largest hack our team has ever seen.
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