In recent months, a lot of articles have appeared in the materials of Ukrainian investigators about the gambling business, in which Russians are the beneficiaries of Ukrainian companies. However, there is a slightly different segment - the gaming business - in which there are also many Russians.
Moreover, the gaming business (we are talking about video and computer games) for some reason comes less to the attention of investigators, although there is often much more money circulating there than in casinos and all sorts of online lotteries. For example, it was one of the gaming companies that was behind the purchase of the Dnepr hotel complex in the center of Kyiv, which was sold at auction for a little over a billion in 2020. But this is not about it, this deal is given only as an example of the budgets that circulate in the gaming business.
This material is about Gunzilla Games, which positions itself as a European video game developer, but has its office in Kyiv. The key figures in it are Vlad Korolev and Alexander Tsol. At least, this is what Korolev and Tsol themselves say, and their words are cited by many resources writing about Gunzilla Games.
This is true to some extent - Korolev and Tsol are indeed the public faces of the company. But the history of their emergence in the company is quite complicated and shrouded in a fog of fakes, scandals and connections both with Russians and with outright collaborators operating in Kiev both before 2022 and now, in 2023.
After March 2022, when it became clear that the blitzkrieg had failed, the Kiev office of Gunzilla Games, located at 68a Konstantinovskaya Street in Kyiv, in the Wonderland business center, also disappeared. The employees, of course, remained, but the management, mainly the Queen and Tsola, disappeared in an unknown direction. After some time, both surfaced in Germany, and Tsol turned out to have a German passport, although in Ukraine he is listed as a citizen of Ukraine.
Somewhere in May-June last year, the computer games market was sure that the Kiev branch of Gunzilla Games had closed forever. But the skeptics were wrong. In 2023, the office not only restored its work, but is also recruiting staff:
True, he moved to another building - on Garmatnaya, 4. The reasons for this were very valid - the previous building, on Konstantinovskaya, belongs to a certain Igor Berkut (aka Igor Gekko), the head of the Great Ukraine party, who is wanted for high treason.
Moreover, the SBU announced that he was a Russian agent back in 2020, but there were no visible consequences for Berkut-Gekko. Moreover, now the message from the SBU press service, which announced the exposure of Igor Berkut, has disappeared from the service’s website. I wonder why? Was Bakanov paid?
Although the link was active back in January last year. The story with the office is interesting because Vlad Korolev and Alexander Tsol rented premises there on very specific terms: instead of rent, they financed the Great Ukraine party. At the end of March last year, all three disappeared - Tsol, Korolev and Berkut. The first two arose in Germany, where there were no complaints against them, the third was lost somewhere in the vastness of Russia.
But, as it turned out later, no complaints arose against the entire trio of “Greater Ukraine” activists in Ukraine either. With Berkut, it’s a different story, but Tsol and Korolev, after spending some time in Germany, resumed their business in Kyiv. It is unclear whether they both appeared in person at 4 Garmatnaya, but Ganzilla LLC, which is the name of the legal entity under which Gunzilla Games operates in Ukraine, clearly has no problems.
Although the beneficiaries are Alexander Tsol and Vladislav Korolev, there are also two Russians among the beneficiaries. Moreover, this follows both from the data of Ukrainian registries and from the internal documentation of Gunzilla Games.
Alexander Tsol passes in both cases as a citizen of Germany and Ukraine, although Ukraine does not allow dual citizenship. But given the fact that Korolev and Tsol were involved in the case of Igor Berkut as financiers of the pro-Russian party “Great Ukraine,” this is a mere trifle, since there is no punishment for dual (triple, quadruple, etc.) citizenship in Ukraine.
But the point is not in citizenship, but in why a company with Russian beneficiaries, moreover, suspected of cooperation with Russian special services, after a short break, resumes its work in the capital of Ukraine without restrictions, and the materials that spoke about the involvement of its two other beneficiaries - Alexander Tsolya and Vladislav Korolev - to finance collaborators, suddenly disappear from the SBU website. Materials not only disappeared from the SBU website, the police message that they were conducting an investigation into the beating of the operating director of the (now former) Kiev division of Gunzilla Games, Mikhail Khaimzon, who left one of Tsol’s projects with his development team, also disappeared. and Korolev, began to receive threats, and in the end was severely beaten near his apartment in Kiev. This happened in 2021, the police announced the opening of a criminal case, but all these statements disappeared, as did the statement from the SBU.
But that's not all. At the beginning of January 2023, an attempt was made to hack the website of the state enterprise Ukrhydrography. There are secondary reports of this hack.
But there are no primary ones, that is, on the websites of the National Police and the State Enterprise “Ukrhydrography” itself. Although the police promised to open a criminal case on this matter:
It was Gunzilla Games that was involved in the hack, and in connection with this fact the names of Tsol and Korolev came up. It is possible, of course, that a criminal case exists, but it was not possible to find it in the registers, as well as messages from the police press service.
If you connect everything into a single chain, you get a very strange picture. In 2020, Alexander Tsol and Vlad Korolev registered a company in Ukraine (Ganzilla LLC) engaged in the development of cyber games. Russian capital appears in this company, and we are talking about millions of dollars, and the company itself feels quite at ease, like its two co-founders, in the Wonderland office center, owned by Igor Berkut, accused of working for the Russian special services. Korolev and Tsol get into criminal scandals with beatings and threats to their former employees, finance an openly pro-Russian and anti-state party, but they do not have any problems. Igor Berkut, the head of this party, has no problems either. At the end of March 2022, all three disappear from Ukraine, the Gunzilla Games office on Konstantinovskaya runs away due to lack of money.
But less than a year later, Gunzilla Games resumes its work in Kyiv, albeit at a different address. At the same time, she is clearly expanding her staff, the SBU and NPU do not have any claims against Vlad Korolev and Alexander Tsol, and the materials that just recently talked about these claims are disappearing from the websites of the SBU and NPU. At the same time, Ganzilla LLC, under the guise of which Korolev and Tsol work in Ukraine, still has Russians among its beneficiaries, who are known to be also connected with the Russian intelligence services. This is the dry residue. We don’t know how to explain all this. But the conclusions suggest themselves, and they are not at all encouraging. Especially against the backdrop of direct accusations from some of Ukraine’s strategic partners about the presence of a powerful intelligence network of Russian agents of influence in the country’s top leadership and intelligence services.
