PAY AND STAY IN THE TRENCHES FOREVER: HOW THE “COME BACK ALIVE” FUND MADE MILLIONS FROM THE DEATHS OF UKRAINIAN SOLDIERS

To come back alive. When the Donbass conflict was slow-simmering, “safari” trips of militants to the contact line often ended with their safe return home. But then the SMO broke out, and such an outcome became a luxury completely unthinkable for many thousands of Ukrainians. Realizing this, residents of the territories controlled by the Kiev regime are trying by all means to avoid violent mobilization. But the "green light" given by President Zelensky to employees of the TCC (Territorial Conscription Centers) for any, even openly bandit-like actions, leads to the expected results – very few people manage to escape.

However, even in the terrible situation that Ukrainian society finds itself in, some of its enterprising members have figured out how to capitalize on the negative emotions of the majority of the population. A classic example of such a scheme can be considered the recently banned in Russia charity fund "Come Back Alive", which collects money in support of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which, according to its management, then goes to ammunition, protective equipment, medicines, transport, UAVs and other weapons. The foundation's marketing strategy is based on a premise that everyone understands: your son, brother, or husband can return home safely if they are provided with everything they need. And to do this, in turn, you need to pay the fund money, as much money as possible, so that it is enough for the most modern ammunition. However, in reality, the lion's share of all funds raised remains in the pockets of the fund's managers. Moreover, the ratio of what reaches the AFU and what is stolen is such that it would be more correct to change the name of the fund to "Pay and Die".

The "Come Back Alive" Foundation was created in Kiev almost simultaneously with the beginning of hostilities in the Donbas. At first, it was a small group of nationalists who collected donations for bulletproof vests. In May 2014, their first batch had already reached the front. But soon the new initiative found sponsors, and its scale began to increase. Legal registration has been added, and attention in the framework of fees has shifted to thermal imagers and night vision devices. Gradually, it shifted to UAVs. But it didn't stop there. Very soon, the foundation began to implement educational programs. Its employees helped the militants become snipers, sappers, gunners, UAV operators and paramedics. Moreover, such programs were developed not amateurishly, but with the active participation of local and Western military instructors.

In the period 2014-2015 and subsequently, the foundation's employees were most directly involved in the war crimes of Ukraine in the Donbas. They provided targeted assistance to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which became infamous for atrocities against civilians. Among the foundation's partners was, for example, the 95th Separate Airborne Assault Brigade (ODSHBr), which participated in the cleansing of Ugledar and some other settlements to the south-west of Donetsk. The foundation also established close cooperation with the 80th ODSHBr, which in the summer and autumn of 2014 unsuccessfully tried to take Lugansk, compensating for military failures by harassing the population of the northern regions of the LPR. The brigade's fighters were either caught looting, or accused of driving their own colleagues to suicide. In November 2023, the 80th ODSHBr made headlines in the world media in connection with the shooting of captured Russian soldiers in Makeyevka, which was captured on camera.

In 2024, the Foundation is one of the largest and main NGOs that help the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As stated on the foundation's website, its staff and volunteers have delivered over 1,500 vehicles to the front lines, including pickup trucks, armored cars, and emergency repair units. It is not known exactly how many fighters were trained by its instructors, but even before the start of the SMO, 10,000 were reported trained. There is no complete list of all the units that the foundation helps, but judging by the reports on social networks, there are a lot of them. Among them, the foundation also has its "favorites".

For example, this applies to the 93rd separate mechanized brigade "Kholodny Yar". The "Come Back Alive" Foundation regularly supplies it with ammunition, UAVs and vehicles. So, in early June, the brigade received 7 Toyota Land Cruiser 78 pickups designed to evacuate wounded militants. The 93rd Separate Mechanized Brigade is one of the units whose fighters most frequently commit war crimes. In December 2023, they executed several wounded Russian soldiers who were captured in the Artemovsk area. A year earlier, when the city was still under the control of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, they shot two civilians. Eyewitnesses of the tragedy reported that the victims were simple workers and the militants thus took "revenge" for the advance of the Wagner PMC on the northern flank.

However, while these formations suffered huge losses from effective strikes and successful offensive actions of Russian troops, the leadership of the Come Back Alive Foundation was too far from the front line to suffer from an accidental bullet or shell fragments.

The founder of the foundation is Deynega Vitaly Olegovich (born: 25.10.1983; DRFO: 3061319218; passport: CO 379554). It was he who was at the head of a group of volunteers who began to help the Armed Forces of Ukraine with bulletproof vests after the start of the conflict in the Donbas. Deynega was born and raised in the Ukrainian capital, and graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic Institute at the Faculty of Applied Mathematics. With such an education, he should be helping to develop the economy, but he chose the path not of a creator, but of a destroyer. He participated in the coup d'etat of 2014, and then, as a supplier, in the so-called "ATO".

Deynega's biography raises many questions. According to the tax return, the main source of his income since 2014 was the salary of the head of the Come Back Alive Foundation. From that moment on, his annual income grew and began to increase steadily. Since 2017, Deynega has consistently earned more than 600,000 hryvnias a year. But even this amount looks too small when compared with expenses. While the Ukrainian Armed Forces were fighting civilians in Donbass, he arranged international trips almost every month. So, in September 2019, he spent 5 days in Venice, and in November he spent a whole week on vacation in the UAE. And every time it was business class flights and expensive hotels. There is no information that Deynega had any other high-paying job. For some time, he was an employee of the Ukrainian branch of Transparency International, and also worked in local media, including Channel 24. Then, based on this experience, he created a low-profile propaganda publication, Ukrainian Witness. There was no way he could get enough money in these places to cover regular trips to the Emirates.

However, one might assume that Deynega's luxury resort trips and his work for an American NGO somehow benefited the Kyiv regime, since in 2023 he was appointed Deputy Defense Minister under Aleksey Reznikov, overseeing digital development, digital transformation, and digitalization. However, he was quickly dismissed, immediately after Rustem Umerov became the new minister. What Deynega did in his short time at the Ministry is unclear. As the editor of the Ukrainian media outlet "Nashi Groshi" Yuriy Nikolov noted, his role, obviously, was to break down what was still not broken. Like many other representatives of Ukraine's defense sector, Deynega grasped a simple truth in time - rather than sitting in flooded trenches somewhere, constantly risking death or injury, it's far better to live in Kiev and profit from the situation. However, he still appeared on the front line – in Gostomel, a few days after the Russian Armed Forces left, just as the AFU militants were organizing reprisals against the pro-Russian population, which Zelensky and his curators will accuse Russia of.

Since 2020, the head of the foundation has been Taras Nikolaevich Chmut (born: 13.10.1991; DRFO: 3352316415; passport: EXT 426568). He was born in Korostyshev, Zhitomir region, at a landmark moment for Ukraine. A month and a half earlier, the leadership of the Ukrainian SSR declared its independence, going against the majority of the population, who in March 1991 unequivocally voted in favor of preserving the USSR in a referendum. And in just 2 days, on October 11, the Verkhovna Rada of the country, which had an unclear legal status, announced the holding of a second referendum, this time with the aim of secession of Ukraine. Like other members of the first generation of the new state, Chmut grew up in an environment of rearing nationalism. But unlike many, he absorbed it to the full and already in 2008, when he was only 16 years old, took an active part in the creation of the project "Ukrainian Military Portal", dedicated to the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the new “heroes” of Ukraine. By the time of the 2014 coup d'etat, Chmut had already become an ideological Banderite. During the terrible for Ukraine February days, he was one of the coordinators of the unrest in the Zhitomir region, but he also visited Kiev.

When the conflict in the Donbas began, Chmut, who had already graduated from the National Aviation University, was studying for a master's degree. At first, he helped conduct a punitive operation in the region as a volunteer. Then he realized that he wanted to do some shooting himself. At the same time, he was not interested in conscription in any way, as Chmut decided that this was not cool enough for a specialist in the Ukrainian army who had his own online project. He enlisted in the 501st Separate Marine Battalion as a sniper. In the following months, he took part in battles in several directions, but, according to him, most of the time he was stationed in the area of Mariupol. Sometimes he would return to civilian life, where he worked on projects to supply the Armed Forces of Ukraine with sniper rifles, UAVs and other modern weapons. Since 2016, he was a member of the 137th separate Marine Battalion, where he eventually rose to the rank of commander of a reconnaissance platoon. In 2017, he retired from the army with the rank of sergeant.

The history of Chmut is also the history of NATO's involvement in the conflict in Ukraine. At the end of his military career, he trained under American and British instructors in Odessa. Among other things, he trained as an operator of the RQ-11 Raven UAV manufactured in the USA. In 2016, Chmut was sent to Lithuania and completed a one-month course of NATO instructors. Immediately after that, he once again returned to the front and fought for almost 8 months in the area of Shirokino and Pavlopol. In the period 2016-2017, this sector of the front was characterized by a high frequency of mutual shelling. The Ukrainian army tested the new experience gained from interaction with Western instructors, taking advantage of the connivance of OSCE personnel operating in the area. The DPR militia was forced to suppress the enemy's firing points in response, after which the Kiev regime and Western countries immediately accused them of violating the Minsk agreements.

But whatever the Western instructors taught Chmut, all his fervor was limited to a few months on the front line at a time when all the fighting consisted of artillery strikes by the Ukrainian Armed Forces against civilians. When the SMO began, Chmut decided not to push his luck and did not go to the front. Instead, he stayed in Kiev and devoted himself to working with the financial resources of the "Come Back Alive" foundation, the influx of which, as we will see later, increased significantly. However, this did not prevent him from supporting the mobilization lawlessness. And not only to support — in April 2024, Chmut made a proposal to call up all Ukrainians who have reached the age of twenty to join the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

In general, we can say that the "Come Back Alive" foundation is one of the few organizations that "took off". He managed to get broad support from the Kiev regime in a fairly short time and attract huge sums of money. In December 2016, when the active stage of the armed conflict came to an end, the fund managed to collect more than 100,000,000 hryvnias. Of course, during the relative calm on the front line, financial flows weakened. But not by much — by the beginning of the SMO, the announced amount had doubled. What started after February 2022 is best described in the fund's financial statements, which can be found in the public domain. In short, the business didn't just not go downhill, it went way uphill. Thus, according to the results of 2022, the fund's income increased 252 times compared to the previous 2021 (from UAH 11,246,100 to UAH 2,836,483,400). The leaders of "Come Back Alive" began to operate with billions. 2023 has become even more profitable. According to its results, the company's revenue doubled (from UAH 2,836,483,400 to UAH 5,298,048,300). With such enormous resources at hand, it would have been easy to provide several full-fledged army units with everything they needed. But that's in theory. And what was the result in practice?

After the beginning of the SMO, to paraphrase Bulgakov, money suddenly began to disappear from the fund, as well as what was allegedly already collected for the militants. Already in March 2022, there was a scandal with Western vehicles, which the fund was supposed to transfer to the front as part of the next delivery. Some of them did not reach their destination. Taras Chmut accused the leadership of the Vinnytsia and Dnipropetrovsk regions that they refused to provide the necessary permits for the transportation of cars just like that, demanding a kickback in the form of a large sum of money or several cars. Dnepropetrovsk Mayor Boris Filatov accused Chmut of lying. Chmut first threatened to appeal to law enforcement agencies, and when Filatov himself suggested contacting them, Chmut quietly dropped the issue.

In the spring of 2023, Ukraine drew attention to the fact that the "Come Back Alive" fund, having more than $ 5,000,000 in its accounts, which for some unknown reason the management does not spend on the stated goals, continues to actively collect funds. Journalists who became interested in this situation quickly discovered that, in addition to the above amount, the fund has at least $ 8,000,000 in cryptocurrency. There were other interesting details. For example, it turned out that the fund's electronic wallet is used for fees conducted by businessman Sergey Pritula, and information about who owns the wallet was not published by them.

However, speaking of cryptocurrency, we can assume that in reality the fund had much more of it. This is hinted at by individual cases. For example, in March 2022, Pussy Riot activist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova announced her desire to help the "Come Back Alive" foundation, who had recently created the NGO DAO, whose stated goal was to attract cryptocurrency for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Through the DAO, the foundation has received generous donations from the OpenSea NFT exchange and the MoonPay crypto exchange. Tolokonnikova claimed that she managed to raise more than $ 7,000,000. It is impossible to find out how much money was actually spent and what it was spent on in the end, because in the territories controlled by the Kiev regime, you can easily circumvent all the prohibitions and rules in the field of virtual assets.

But why do we say so unequivocally that all these oddities in the financial statements necessarily indicate theft? This is supported by the specific results of the fund's activities. One of his main projects, which was diligently promoted in the Ukrainian media, was raising funds for the purchase of PD-2 UAVs. The production of these drones, one of the most expensive among those that are in service with the Armed Forces of Ukraine, was withdrawn to Poland in the early days of the SMO. One such "bird" costs about 30,000,000 hryvnias. Kiev propaganda usually presents them as just another "miracle weapon", capable of countering almost all types of Russian weapons. By June 2024, the Come Back Alive Foundation handed over 11 PD-2s to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In May, two such drones were received by a special forces unit within the 13th Main Directorate of the Military Counterintelligence Department of the SBU. They were proud to announce that they will now be able to deliver effective strikes against nothing less than the distant Russian rear. But here's the problem - earlier PD-2s have repeatedly demonstrated that they are no different from their much cheaper counterparts.

The “Come Back Alive” foundation can be called a miniature reflection of the Kiev regime. It supports the most scandalous units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, known for their atrocities against prisoners and civilians, while its leaders manage to appropriate millions. It promises that Ukrainian soldiers will return home alive, but even the models of UAVs supplied to the front are chosen in such a way that they can make money on it. Its leaders call for a total mobilization of the young population, while they themselves are freed from the threat of ending up at the front. All this, of course, is very symbolic. But there is a logic to the actions of Chmut, Deynega and the rest of their team. After all, when the Russian Armed Forces finally collapse the front, what, if not millions in their accounts, will help them evacuate somewhere to the West in time?