Russian gambling business is returning to Ukraine. Some SSU officials are helping it

The Russian gambling business has once again started a new large-scale expansion into Ukraine and is gathering personal data of Ukrainians. And it got local support. With the participation of high-level Ukrainian officials, there have been created optimal conditions for Russians to work and prosper.

In 2022, InformNapalm released a series of OSINT (open-source intelligence) investigations that detailed attempts by the Russian bookmaker 1XBet to gather personal data of Ukrainians. We initiated the fight against the bookmaker empire belonging to FSB-related 1XBet owners Russian citizens Sergey Karshkov, Roman Semiokhin, and Dmytro Kazorin.

Back then, we found out that representatives of Ukrainian businesses, law enforcement agencies, and authorities at various levels were involved in lobbying the interests of Russians.

It took almost a year to finally rid Ukraine of this company’s presence. On March 10, 2023, a new list of sanctions signed by the President of Ukraine finally had Your Betting Company LLC, a company used by 1XBet to enter the Ukrainian market.

Despite unwavering opposition, it became possible thanks to First Deputy Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko, who chairs the Interdepartmental Working Group on the implementation of the sanctions policy, KRAIL Chairman Ivan Rudy, and NSDC Secretary Oleksiy Danilov, who, in the last moment before the President signed the sanction list, did not let 1XBet lobbyists take away the Russian company from it. At the same time, sanctions were also imposed on 1XBet‘s main competitor, Parimatch, which exited the Russian market following a full-scale invasion, suddenly “noticing” the war that has been going on since 2014.

After this success, we spent several months analyzing what had changed in the market. As a result, we exposed a large-scale scheme to reincarnate 1XBet by turning Ukraine into an open market for any Russian online casinos and bookmakers who still wanted to make money in Ukraine and get the personal data of Ukrainians who like gambling. The plan was particularly dangerous as it involved employees of the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), who were also responsible for forming sanctions policy in Ukraine.

Why so long?

Deciding to sanction the owners of 1XBet took incredibly long and, apparently, the decision faced furious resistance. The assumption that the Russian gambling business has agents in the sanctions mechanism, unfortunately, appears justified. One of these agents has already been publicly named in the Bihus.info investigation.

Artem Shylo, a high-ranking SSU employee, has had a great influence on decisions on Ukrainian sanctions. In August 2022, under the patronage of Oleh Tatarov, Shylo was appointed deputy of the SSU Department of National Statehood Protection and head of the SSU Main Directorate for counter-intelligence support of critical infrastructure facilities and countering the financing of terrorism. Under the leadership of the SSU Deputy Head Anatoliy Sandurskiy, Shylo became one of the main people responsible for sanctions policy in the Security Service of Ukraine.

“Among Shylo’s well-known achievements, the main ones were: working as an adviser to the Office of the President and attending Oleh Tatarov’s birthday. This is what is relevant to his career success. Talking about his personal financial success, Shylo was much more successful, which allowed Bihus.Info journalists to discover two three-room apartments in the elite residential complex Novopechersky Lypky (owned by Shylo, a market value of about $700,000). Another two-room apartment and a 360 square-meter commercial real estate worth more than $2 million were also found in the same residential complex. In the best corrupt traditions, the documents mentioned his wife as the owner of these two real estates. Apart from that, Shylo’s wife has a total of 275 square meters in a clubhouse in the center of Kyiv. Nearby, she has a beauty salon with a $1 million market value. In addition to real estate, Shylo’s wife has two Mercedes and a Toyota. Shylo’s father owns a house in the Kyiv suburbs. An interesting fact: the apartments in Novopechersky Lypky were purchased already during the full-fledged war, in May 2022,” journalist Sergii Ivanov writes about this person on Cenzor.net.

Artem Shylo has already appeared in our