In the beginning of August, the director of U.S. National Cybersecurity Center, William Evanina, made a blunt statement about possible Russian interference in the upcoming American presidential election.
“Pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach is spreading claims about corruption – including through publicizing leaked phone calls – to undermine former Vice President (Joe) Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party,” he wrote in a release.
Evanina’s statement signaled that, once again, Ukraine is getting pulled into the U.S. political process. Still, it’s essential to distinguish between the detrimental actions of Ukrainian politicians and Kremlin proxy operations.
There is sound reason to believe that the so-called “Derkach tapes,” supposedly of phone conversations between former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden fall into the latter category.
In the recordings, two people — supposedly Poroshenko and Biden — discuss internal political processes and the possibility of Ukraine receiving a $1-billion loan from the U.S. According to Derkach and ex-prosecutor of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office Kostiantin Kulyk, it was payback to stop the investigation of the Burisma energy firm, where Biden’s son sat on the board of directors in 2014-2019. The offices of Biden and Poroshenko have already stated that the tapes are a combination of selectively edited real conversations and fake additions.
However, it is interesting how these recordings made their way into the hands of Andriy Derkach. Are there any reasons to suspect the involvement of Russian intelligence services?
For Ukrainians who are aware of Derkach personal and political biographies, the short answer is yes. But those who are not so fully immersed in Ukrainian politics deserve a more elaborate explanation.
Who is Derkach?
Derkach is currently a member of parliament, but not a member of any party. However, previously, he was an active member of the Party of Regions, the ruling party during the reign of President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014. Like many of his colleagues, his political tendency was broadly pro-Russian. For example, he voted for the infamous Kharkiv acts, which prolonged the deployment of Russia’s fleet deployment in Ukrainian Sevastopol and was viewed by many experts as a prelude to Russian aggression in Crimea.
The most interesting part of Derkach’s biography is his time studying at the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB (now the Academy of the Federal Security Service of the Rusian Federation), the main training site of Russian secret service personnel. Derkach graduated in 1993, after the Soviet collapse, with a thesis titled the “Organization and Conduct of Meetings with Secret Agents.”
His father, Leonid Derkach, served in the KGB for 19 years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he stayed on in the Security Service of Ukraine and became its leader in 1998-2001 during the rule of President Leonid Kuchma.
Andriy Derkach is also an influential laic in the Russian Orthodox Church, a guest of its Councils, and the so-called Inter-Council Presence member. The Russian Orthodox Church has frequently played the role of a Kremlin soft power asset in Ukraine.
All the facts mentioned above indicate both Derkach’s pro-Russian political and ideological attitudes and show highly plausible links with Russian Federal Security Services.
He may also have some specific business ties with the Russian Federation. His electoral “stronghold” is the Glukhiv region of Sumy Oblast near the Russian border. The only major enterprise there is the Glukhiv Quartzite Quarry. An investigation by Ukrainian investigative journalism unit “Schemes” showed that quartzite from the quarry goes to Russian firms belonging to notorious oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and may later be used in the Russian military industry.
What about the “Derkach tapes” themselves?
Derkach claimed that he got these tapes from unnamed “investigative journalists” from the site NABU Leaks, whose name suggests it publishes leaks from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU). But real investigative journalists from the InformNapalm team did a great job of checking this claim and the site NABU Leaks itself.
The site was created in the year 2016. Despite the texts there being in English, it uses a WordPress engine with Ukrainian localization. So a real native English-speaker will have trouble even navigating the site. The first publications on the site are also from 2016: they criticize the U.S. Democratic Party’s alleged influence on NABU. In Ukrainian media, we call such a website a “toilet tank” — a site created for a specific information attack.
Derkach claims that the site and its team of investigators are his primary source of information. But this cannot be true.
First, the text of Derkach’s statement during a press conference on June 28 was published on the site a few minutes before he read it. Second, Derkach had previously promoted this site on his Facebook page. He later published higher-quality copies of some documents that were also published on NABU Leaks. It practically proves that this site belongs to Derkach — or that he and the site’s team work for the same owner.
There is also one person who claims that she has access to the records. It’s Chanel Rion, an American journalist of doubtful reputation who claimed that the tapes had come from the Ukrainian secret service, and had been separately confirmed by a source who was present during some of the recordings. But everything she revealed so far corresponds to what Andriy Derkach previously released. So we can conclude she used him or the NABU Leaks site as her primary source.
Even former Ukrainian prosecutor Konstantin Kulik, who was present during the June 28 press conference with Derkach, has one known and direct connection with Russian proxies. He was a close friend and business partner of the infamous Yevhen Zhylin, the leader of MMA club Oplot, which was used during the 2014 EuroMaidan protests as Yanukovych’s unofficial weapon against the protesters. After Maidan, Zhylin made Oplot a battalion for Russian-backed militants in Donetsk Oblast and fled to Moscow, where he was killed by an unknown assassin.
Notably, it was Kulik who actually “linked” the records to Burisma. He said that, as a prosecutor, he received information that ex-Minister of Ecology Mykola Zlochevsky used bribes and political influence to close Burisma-related cases. The recordings themselves didn’t mention Burisma – they only demonstrated that Petro Poroshenko was attentive to Joseph Biden’s recommendations.
Here in Ukraine, we can often judge who benefits from a given event by analyzing which media promoted the topic. In the case of the Derkach tapes, it was:
- media outlets affiliated with oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, the most influential pro-Russian politician and a close personal friend of Vladimir Putin,
- Russian media,
- a number of so-called experts affiliated with the abovementioned Medvedchuk or directly with Russia. For example, Vitaliy Didenko and Artem Buzila, two former journalists from Odesa charged with separatism (the latter fled Ukraine and now lives in Moscow), or former Ukrainian lawmaker Oleg Tsariov, who fled to Donetsk after its occupation by Russian and Russian-backed forces.
This raises an important question: Who could make such recordings?
On these tapes, we hear that Poroshenko’s voice sounds natural, while the voice of Vice President Biden features the standard distortion of a phone call. So, if the recordings are genuine, they should have been made in Poroshenko’s office. It’s possible, theoretically. But, in practice, it’s highly unlikely. Such calls are always held in great secrecy and with all possible protective measures.
What is much more likely is that someone compiled the “recordings” using a program of voice emulation and/or creative montage. To make it, that person would need just the voice samples of Biden speaking on the phone and Poroshenko speaking in person. It’s not so hard. And it explains why the “investigative journalists” never offered up the entirety of the records, just some selected fragments — because there is no full recording.
An operation of this scale is rather hard for one single person without specific skills. Still, it is no challenge for any secret service (or even military PsyOps unit with relevant specialists). And it’s a piece of cake for the Russian Federal Security Service — an organization that has a real interest in disturbing both U.S. presidential elections and Ukraine’s foreign policy. And Andriy Derkach has the most obvious connection with the Russian security agency.
As Dmitriy Kiselev, one of the most influential Russian TV propagandists, likes to say: “Coincidence? I think not!”
