“Ideologically Powered to Fight for Russia”

IStories managed to identify the team members of one of the strangest design bureaus working for the Russian army — Stratim. This is how a former manager of the state corporation Rostec consulted with shamans and began to create new drones for war. To do this, he attracted a Skoltech graduate, Russian nationalists and a Kyiv nuclear physicist working on a project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

From “marathons of desire” to drones

In December 2023, the founder of the Stratim design bureau with the call sign Obi Wan told the propagandist TV channel Russia Today how, after conversations with “war correspondent” Vladlen Tatarsky, he decided to make drones for the Russian military. He even assembled a team of scientists from CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) and Skoltech, and is now working in an atmosphere of secrecy because the “special services of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” are trying to “track down” his engineers.

To better study the tactics of UAVs and artillery reconnaissance, Obi Wan went on a short business trip to the frontline in November 2022 with Russia Today’s "war correspondent" Andrei Filatov. There, the drone manufacturer and RT's propagandist used the UAVs of one of the “DPR” units to conduct reconnaissance, Obi Wan himself admitted.

Why the founder of the design bureau tried to hide his face and work under a call sign is unclear. Since the founding of the company, information about the director of Stratim JSC has been open — it is Ivan Bezhanov, who worked for several years in the structures of Rostec. At the HelixRussia-2024 exhibition in June, Obi Wan was interviewed on camera for the first time. After comparing Bezhanov's social networks and footage of Obi Wan's speech, Important Stories was convinced that it was the same person.

At first, his Stratim took a site on the territory of one of the defense research institutes, the manager himself said. Based on the advertisements on hh.ru and the list of Stratim engineers’ Telegram chats, the company is talking about Rostec’s Moscow Radio-Technical Institute near the Yuzhnaya metro station. In Soviet times, the first particle accelerators were developed there, and in 2015 MRTI completed work on a ADS gun to fight drones.

Although Bezhanov himself decided to make money from the war by supplying weapons to the front, he preferred to protect himself from mobilization. In October 2022, he himself admitted in an open chat in Telegram that he made a fake enrollment in graduate school in order to “live peacefully for the next three years.” In the message, he does not mention the university, but talks about a certain company “that can help with this quickly." He was “deferred from mobilization in three days.”

Before the war, the future drone supplier had built a successful career in management consulting, worked in the offices of the British PricewaterhouseCoopers and the American McKinsey, and then went on to senior positions in the structures of state corporation Rostec. Together with Vasily Brovko, the PR man for Rostec head Sergei Chemenzov, Bezhanov was a member of the board of directors of the corporation-controlled Oktava plant.

In social networks, the head of Stratim posted photos from social events, impressions of motivational speaker Tony Robbins’ speeches, and boasted that he lived next door to Vagit Alekperov, number three on the Forbes list and LUKOIL’s major shareholder (at the time), who was guarded by machine guns. The geolocation of Bezhanov's 250-meter apartment in Patriarch Ponds neighborhood was helped by numerous photos that he himself posted on Facebook.

Before the war, the Rostec manager tried to achieve success with the help of esotericism and “marathons of desire:” he took courses with the creator of “marathons,” blogger Elena Blinovskaya, went to shamanic rituals in Buryatia, and was treated for coronavirus with the help of a master in “psychosomatics”. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Bezhanov decided to find out from shamans “how to find the business of life in a professional sense.” And began assembling combat UAVs for the Russian army.

Ukrainian nuclear physicist for the Russian army

Oddly enough, the chief designer at Stratim is a nuclear physicist from Ukraine — Alexander Makhnyov, a graduate of Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. He is now working on a project at CERN as part of a team from Russia.

Makhnyov is originally from Luhansk and lived there until at least 2014. His father, Igor, is a scientist in the field of nuclear instrumentation. Makhnyov Jr. became involved in science while still at school and was even included in the book “Inventors of Ukraine — the elite of the state.”

After the seizure of Lugansk by pro-Russian formations, the family moved to Kyiv, where Makhnyov graduated from the prestigious Lyceum of the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI). In 2015, he entered the KPI itself for the radio electronics program, but continued his studies already at the master’s program of the Russian MIPT.

Since then, Makhnyov has worked under the supervision of Fyodor Guber of the Institute for Nuclear Research (INR) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) in Troitsk. As stated on the Institute’s website, Guber participated in a number of international experiments: at the CERN facilities in Switzerland and at the gas pedal complex near Darmstadt. In April 2022, the first paper co-authored by Makhnyov as part of the Russian team at the CERN Geneva experiment was published.

A few months later, the young scientist joined KB Stratim. Based on Makhnyov’s posts in one of the drone enthusiasts chats, the bureau’s engineers had already prepared the first UAV prototypes by November 2022. But Stratim started serial production in the spring of 2023, when the nationalist channel “Tyl-22” announced the collection of two million rubles for Chinese components for FPV-drones. They were to be prepared by a “friendly design bureau in Moscow.” Later, “Tyl-22” announced that Stratim would do it, and in the summer the ready-made drones were sent to Russian units fighting in Ukraine.

In August 2023, Stratim presented the first samples of its own production at the Dronnitsa-2023 exhibition: drones Shchegol, Krasava, Rusak and others. Alexander Makhnyov appears in one of the videos, pictured tidying up the company’s stand.

Makhnyov is now in charge of the bureau’s engineering team. Bezhanov spoke about Makhnyov’s role in the same RT interview: “The person who holds the position of chief designer at Stratim was, before the special military operation, one of the scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider project at CERN.” The person Bezhanov is talking about was obviously Makhnyov. And he has not stopped working on CERN experiments until now.

Articles on the results of experiments at CERN facilities bearing his name were published until April 2024 in the European Physical Journal C. Makhnyov is now a junior researcher at the Experimental Physics Department of the INR in Troitsk. In June, Mikhail Kovalchuk, head of the Kurchatov Institute, sent a letter to Putin asking him to merge several scientific organizations, including the Institute of Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, into the institute.

The Scientific Council of INR opposed the merging with the Kurchatov Institute and sent appeals to the Ministry of Education and Science and the RAS. The Institute, in particular, explained this decision by the risk of falling under the sanctions already imposed on the Kurchatov Institute. This “will almost completely cut off access to foreign technologies and equipment,” the authors of the appeal write. As a result, the project “Baikal deep-sea neutrino telescope” and the Institute’s participation in international research may be jeopardized. At the same time, the scientists explicitly say in the appeal that they also “perform research in the interests of the country’s defense and security.”

Projects at CERN are one of the examples of international cooperation that the INR fears to lose. Scientists from Russian institutes continue to work with the organization even after CERN’s decision to end cooperation with Russia and Belarus. The fact is that the agreement will expire only in November 2024.

However, the decision of CERN will not affect another organization, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna. Formally, this institute has the status of an intergovernmental organization, like CERN. In June 2024, CERN extended the cooperation agreement with JINR despite the objections of Ukraine’s representative in the scientific organization, Borys Grynyov.

“This is a very bad decision. Being under sanctions, Russia is looking for technologies to modernize its military. Scientists from JINR can transfer information about materials, detectors and connectors, for example, to produce drones,” he told Geneva Solutions.

One of the Russian scientists working at CERN, on condition of anonymity, told IStories that after the outbreak of full-scale war, many scientists from Russia have switched affiliations to European or American institutes, but more often refuse to travel because of the high cost of tickets and the complexity of the connecting route.

“CERN's decision to continue working with JINR was perceived positively, it gives a chance for many Russian scientists to continue working at CERN,” he says. — “It is hard for me to imagine that any information obtained at CERN could have a significant impact on drone production. CERN uses solutions provided by industry everywhere, and access to this information does not require access to CERN.”

According to him, Russian scientists “if they have contacts” can get a job at JINR at 1/10 of the rate to continue their work in the European organization for nuclear research. At the same time, it is easier for employees of RAS institutes and Moscow State University to do this than for scientists from organizations that are part of the Kurchatov Institute.

Makhnyov himself did not respond to a request to talk about drone production and work at CERN. He said it would “publicly link several aspects of life” that he “tries to divide.”

CERN did not comment on Makhnyov’s activities either, saying that “CERN’s activities are aimed at peaceful fundamental research” and there is “no military aspect” to them. “After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the CERN Council took a number of actions, suspending observer status for Russia in March 2022 and terminating the Agreement on International Cooperation with Russia and Belarus in June 2022 and in December 2023,” the scientific organization added.

Replicas of American UAVs

In August 2023, another “secret” employee from the Stratim bureau team appeared at the Dronnitsa exhibition. This is the head of the multi-rotor direction of the bureau, who, as Bezhanov puts it, “worked on the topic of robotics” at Skoltech. Using facial recognition services and social network analysis, we identified this person as Kuzma Fedorovich.

Fedorovich has been studying at Skoltech’s master’s program since 2021. This university has long been considered one of the leading research institutes in Russia and even cooperated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in 2019 was included in the ranking of the best young universities in the world. However, with the outbreak of war, Skoltech fell under US sanctions for its cooperation with the Russian defense sector.

Another engineer of the design bureau was found by IStories on hh.ru — he indicated the experience of working in Stratim in his CV. This is the bureau’s lead design engineer, who joined the team in December 2023.

In his CV, he states that he copied the ALTIUS-600 drones that the US provided to Ukraine. These drones can be used both for reconnaissance purposes and carry a combat unit, flying over 400 kilometers. On the Stratim website, one can find the Lastochka drone, which outwardly resembles the ALTIUS-600. However, in terms of its characteristics, it is behind the American competitor.

IStories established who posted this resume. The data on previous jobs, education and date of birth specified in it fits only one person — Dmitry Kruglov, a graduate of the Tupolev Kazan Technical Research Institute and the Moscow Aviation Institute.

Not only top engineers work in the Stratim team. Alina Barsegova, a former McKinsey designer, designed the presentation with the bureau’s lineup, according to the file’s metadata. In social networks she names her current position as design director, but does not specify the company.

Editor: Nikita Kondratyev