"We have obtained official documents confirming that the so-called volunteer battalions are completely outside Kiev's control," CyberBerkut notes in its introduction to the documents. "Factually, they have turned into organized crime groups, robbing and killing their own people. In the course of their punitive operations, they have become so accustomed to impunity and all-permissiveness that they feel themselves to be above the law and outside [any] moral code," the hackers add.
The fighting groups in question include Aidar, Donbass, Chernihiv, Luhansk-1, Kiev-12 and other volunteer battalions, most of them under the formal command of Ukraine's National Guard. Bogutsky's report, which 80 pages in length, shows that over the past months, the battalions in the area of the Lugansk Region under Ukrainian control have committed over 200 crimes, ranging from armed assault and robbery, to kidnapping and murder.
The documents uncovered by CyberBerkut also show that personnel from the Ukrainian Security Service are also "actively engaged in criminal activity. Whether by their own initiative of under secret instructions, they kidnap people viewed as objectionable to the regime [in Kiev]. Relevant appeals by citizens have been made to Deputy Southern Region Military Prosecutor K. Ignatov," the hacker group notes, citing a document by Ignatov asking to check on the SBU's activities in the Dnipropetrovsk Region.
CyberBerkut is a group of hackers opposed to the post-Maidan government in Kiev. Since the start of the conflict in Ukraine in late 2013, the group has released a series of high-profile hacks. It has previously reported on the details of US plans to send arms to Ukraine, released information revealing the high casualty figures among the Ukrainian Army, information about snipers on Maidan Square, and Victoria Nuland's famous "F**k the EU!" exchange with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt.
