Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
A film shoot billed as a European documentary looked ordinary until reporters wired up a microphone.
A Moscow-organized crew had been traveling through Europe on what its producers described as a documentary series about the continent’s social and economic mood.
The team asked to interview lawmakers, retired military officers, and energy analysts, moving on residence permits issued by EU member states.
This week, Czech police detained two members of the crew in Prague, Vitaly Chashchukhin and Igor Dolmatov, and ordered them out of the country within three days.
Investigators concluded the pair were working for Rybar, the pro-Kremlin military Telegram channel now under EU and UK sanctions.
Reporters at the Czech outlet Seznam Zprávy set up the sting, arranging a Prague meeting by posing as intermediaries for Bohumil Kartous, a Czech expert on media literacy and disinformation.
On a hidden microphone, Chashchukhin told the reporters: “It’s the Rybar project. You might know it. It’s Rybar.”
A trail that leads to Russian intelligence
Chashchukhin, who has held a German residence permit for more than ten years and is a regular contributor to the sanctioned Russian outlets Izvestia, Channel Five, and Ren TV, was interrogated for roughly nine hours.
Both men told police they worked for Izvestia, a newspaper under EU sanctions.
The shoot was organized by Boris Dvorkin, a Moscow-based producer. Seznam Zprávy found that Dvorkin’s exhibition projects have been backed by the Fatherland History Foundation, established by a decree of Vladimir Putin and headed by Sergey Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).
Rybar was founded in 2018 by Mikhail Zvinchuk, a former press officer at Russia’s Defense Ministry who once organized press tours to Syria for Russian journalists. The channel now has more than 1.5 million Telegram subscribers and is widely cited by Western analysts for its front-line maps of the war in Ukraine.
A Schengen-wide operation
The crew’s planned itinerary stretched across the open-border area.
According to Seznam Zprávy, the shoot was slated for Slovakia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria, Hungary, Belgium, and France, in addition to the Czech Republic.
Chashchukhin and Dolmatov arrived in Prague from Berlin.
Czech security services said they had briefed their German counterparts and were continuing to investigate. Under Czech law, breaches of EU sanctions can carry up to eight years in prison, or an administrative fine of up to 50 million Czech koruna.
Zvinchuk was placed on the EU sanctions list in June 2023 as a member of a working group set up by Putin in December 2022 to coordinate Russian mobilization for the war in Ukraine.
Seznam Zprávy notes that the United States offered a reward of up to $10 million in 2024 for information on Rybar, which has been funded by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group and by the Russian state arms conglomerate Rostec.
