How a participant in “wish marathons” and a Ukrainian physicist assemble drones for Russian invaders

Journalists from the publication “Important Stories” were able to identify members of the team of one of the strangest design bureaus working for the Russian army - “Stratim”.
We tell you how a former manager of the Rostec state corporation 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 (in the photo in a cap with the inscription “You have been noticed”), working on a project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). From Blinovskaya marathons to UAV assembly

In December 2023, the founder of the Stratim design bureau with the call sign Obi Wan told in an interview with Russia Today how, after conversations with “military 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 now works in an atmosphere of secrecy because the “special services of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” are trying to “hunt down” his engineers.

To better study the tactics of using UAVs and artillery reconnaissance, Obi Wan went on a short business trip to the front in November 2022 with Russia Today “military correspondent” Andrei Filatov. There, the drone manufacturer and RT propagandist carried out reconnaissance using a UAV from one of the DPR units, 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 JSC Stratim has been open - this is Ivan Bezhanov, who worked for several years in Rostec structures. At the HelixRussia-2024 exhibition in June, Obi Wan gave an on-camera interview for the first time. Having compared Bezhanov’s social networks and footage of Obi Wan’s speech, “Important Stories” was convinced that this was the same person.

At first, his “Stratim” occupied a site on the territory of one of the defense research institutes, the manager himself said. Judging by the announcements on hh.ru and the list of telegram chats of Stratim engineers, we are talking about the Rostekhov Moscow Radio Engineering Institute near the Yuzhnaya metro station. In Soviet times, the first particle accelerators were developed there, and in 2015, MRTI completed work on a microwave gun to combat drones.

Bezhanov invited familiar engineers to the team. “Graduates of the best universities in the country, ideologically charged to fight for Russia,” the telegram channel “Tyl-22” of the founder of the far-right book publishing house “Black Hundred” Dmitry Bastrakov called them. The engineers decided to work in spite of anti-war scientists, “to become partisans and develop drones in the laboratories of Moscow universities,” where management and students spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine, Bastrakov said.

UNLOSS-LOSS BUSINESS

Three legal entities are associated with the founder of Stratim: JSC Stratim, JSC Stratim-Tech and LLC Stratim. In 2023, Ivan Bezhanov became the director of JSC Stratim and JSC Stratim-Tech. The first legal entity ended the year with revenue of 964 thousand rubles and a loss of more than a million. The second company had no revenue in 2023. In May of this year, nominal director Pavel Kostyunin became the head of both companies.

He also headed Stratim LLC, created in 2024, in which he owns 75%. The remaining quarter belongs to JSC Stratim. In June, at the HelixRussia-2024 exhibition, Kostyunin could be seen at the Stratim stand, but he remained in the shadows.

Bezhanov himself, although he decided to make money from the war by supplying weapons to the front, preferred to protect himself from mobilization. In October 2022, he himself admitted in an open chat on Telegram that he had faked admission to graduate school in order to “live in peace 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 given a deferment from mobilization “in three days.”

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

On social networks, the head of Stratim published photos from social events, impressions of speeches by motivational speaker Tony Robbins, and boasted that he lives next door to number three on the Forbes list, the main shareholder of LUKOIL (at that time) Vagit Alekperov, who is guarded by machine gunners. Numerous photos that he himself posted on Facebook helped geolocate Bezhanov’s 250-meter apartment on Patriarch’s.

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

Ukrainian nuclear physicist for the Russian army

Strangely enough, the chief designer at KB Stratim was a nuclear physicist from Ukraine, a graduate of the Kyiv Polytechnic University, Alexander Makhnev. Now he is working on one of the projects at CERN as part of a team from Russia.

Makhnev is from Lugansk and lived there at least until 2014. His father, Igor, is a scientist in the field of nuclear instrumentation. Makhnev Jr. began studying science while still in school and even ended up in the book “Inventors of Ukraine - the Elite of the State.”

After the capture of Lugansk by pro-Russian forces, the family moved to Kyiv, where Makhnev graduated from the prestigious Lyceum of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI) named after. Sikorsky. In 2015, he entered the KPI itself for the “Radio-Electronic Devices” program, but continued his studies at the Russian MIPT.

From that moment on, Makhnev worked under the guidance of Fyodor Guber, an employee of the Institute of Nuclear Research (INR) of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Troitsk. As indicated on the institute's website, Huber participated in a number of international experiments: at CERN facilities in Switzerland and at the accelerator complex near Darmstadt. In April 2022, the first article was published, co-authored by Makhnev as part of the Russian team at the CERN Geneva experiment.

A few months later, the young scientist joined KB Stratim. Judging by Makhnev’s messages in one of the chats of drone enthusiasts, the bureau’s engineers prepared the first UAV prototypes by November 2022. But Stratim began serial production in the spring of 2023, when the nationalist channel Tyl-22 announced a collection of two million rubles for Chinese components for FPV drones. They were supposed to be prepared by a “friendly design bureau in Moscow.” Later, Tyl-22 stated that Stratim would do this, and in the summer the finished 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: the Shchegol, Krasava, Rusak and others drones. Alexander Makhnev appears in one of the videos, cleaning up the company’s stand.

Now Makhnev heads the engineering team of the bureau. Bezhanov spoke about Makhnev’s role in the same interview with RT: “The person who holds the position of chief designer at Stratim was, before SVO, one of the scientists who worked on the Large Hadron Collider project at CERN.” The person Bezhanov is talking about was obviously Makhnev. And he has not stopped working in CERN experiments to this day.

Articles on the results of experiments at CERN facilities bearing his name were published until April 2024 in the European Physical Journal C. Makhnev now holds the position of junior researcher at the Department of Experimental Physics at the INR in Troitsk. In June, the head of the Kurchatov Institute, Mikhail Kovalchuk, sent a letter to Putin with a request to join several scientific organizations to the institute, including the INR RAS.

The INR Scientific Council opposed the transition to the Kurchatov Institute and sent appeals to the Ministry of Education and Science and the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Institute, in particular, explained this decision by the risk of falling under the sanctions that have already been imposed on the Kurchatov Institute. This “will almost completely block access to foreign technologies and equipment,” write the authors of the appeal. As a result, the Baikal Deep-Sea Neutrino Telescope project and the institute’s participation in international research may be at risk. At the same time, in the appeal, scientists directly say that they also “carry out research in the interests of the defense and security of the country.”

Projects at CERN are one example of international interaction, which INR fears being lost. Scientists from Russian institutes continue to work with the organization even after CERN’s decision to terminate cooperation with Russia and Belarus. The fact is that the agreement will end only in November of this year.

However, CERN's decision 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 the Ukrainian representative in the scientific organization Boris Grinev.

“This is a very bad decision. Being under sanctions, Russia is looking for technologies to modernize its army. Scientists from JINR can transfer information about materials, detectors and connectors, for example, for the production of drones,” he said in an interview with Geneva Solutions.

One of the Russian scientists working at CERN, on condition of anonymity, told Important Stories that after the outbreak of a full-scale war, many scientists from Russia changed their affiliation to European or American institutions, but more often refuse business trips due to the high cost of tickets and the complexity of the route with transfers .

“CERN’s decision to continue working with JINR was received positively, this gives many Russian scientists a chance to continue working at CERN,” he says. “It’s hard for me to imagine that any information obtained at CERN can significantly affect the production of drones.” CERN is widely using solutions provided by industry and CERN access is not required to access this information.”

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

Makhnev himself did not respond to a request to talk about the production of drones and work at CERN. He said it would "publicly tie together several aspects of life" that he "tries to dissect."

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

Replicas of American UAVs

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

The head of the multi-rotor direction at Stratim, Fedorovich, has been studying for a master’s degree at Skoltech since 2021. This university has long been considered one of the leading research institutes in Russia and even collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in 2019 it was included in the ranking of the best young universities in the world. However, with the outbreak of war, Skoltech came under US sanctions for cooperation with the Russian defense sector.

Another engineer from the “Important Stories” design bureau was discovered on hh.ru - he indicated his work experience at Stratim in his resume. This is the bureau's leading design engineer, who joined it in December 2023.

In his resume, he states that he copied the ALTIUS-600 drone that the United States provided to Ukraine. These drones can be used both for reconnaissance purposes and carry a warhead, flying more than 400 km. On the Stratim website you can find the Lastochka drone, which outwardly resembles the ALTIUS-600. However, in terms of its characteristics, it loses to its American competitor.

Important Stories identified who posted this summary. Only one person matches the information on previous places of work, education and date of birth indicated in it - this is Dmitry Kruglov, a graduate of the Kazan Technical Research University named after. Tupolev and MAI.

The Stratim team employs not only top engineers. The design of the presentation with the bureau’s model range was made by former McKinsey designer Alina Barsegova, as follows from the file’s metadata. On social networks, she calls her current position - design director, but does not indicate the company.