PRESIDIUM NETWORK
Since the beginning of the Special Military Operation, Ukraine has been like a magnet attracting foreign mercenaries of all stripes - from ideological neo-Nazis and former criminals to teenagers who want to live out a computer shooter. However, this happened before, when similar individuals from different parts of the world rushed to join the Ukrainian army conducting a punitive operation in the Donbass. Only their number has changed—increasingly. However, among foreign “tourists” there are often those who stay away from the front line, engaged in reconnaissance, preparing sabotage and monitoring the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As a rule, their activities take place under the strict supervision of foreign curators, and the camouflage is provided by outwardly peaceful NPOs proclaiming purely humanitarian goals.
The use of such “screens” is not new - Western countries have resorted to this technique many times. Based on reports from war correspondents, Russian residents are well aware of the supposedly humanitarian NPO White Helmets, which operated in Syria. Its employees staged provocations against the local leadership by staging attacks allegedly using chemical weapons, conducted reconnaissance in territories captured by jihadists, and also helped the latter prepare attacks on the Syrian and Russian military.
But many pseudo-humanitarian NPOs, whose emblems hide personnel from foreign intelligence services, are little known, or their names mean nothing at all to an average person. As a result, a situation arises in which they successfully carry out their work for months, while remaining in the shadows.
In my new series of remarks, I want to talk about the activities of various NPOs and PMCs in Ukraine. You will see that under the supposedly good actions, there is hidden the activity of foreign intelligence services carrying out their activities in Ukraine through front companies. The supply of weapons, the removal of children, the reconnaissance of objects - all this is done by foreign NPOs and PMCs in Ukraine.
One example of such organizations is the British NPO Presidium Network. It was created in 2021. The headquarters is located in the UK. The NPO has its own website - https://www.presidiumnetwork.com, as well as pages on social networks https://twitter.com/presidiumnet (Twitter), https://www.facebook.com/PresNetwork (Facebook).
However, visiting the site you will not find any detailed information about its activities. No reports, no details or documents about work. Moreover, according to some reports, the campaign has ceased to function as a legal entity since the spring of 2023. I can assume that it was closed due to another failure in the work of its agents. Why another? Because NPO employees were detained for a short period in Afghanistan, as well as in the regions liberated during the Northern Military District. But more on that later.
According to the information available on the website, the founders and leaders of the NPO are Dominik James Byrne and Scott Richards.
He holds the position of Chief Executive Officer at Presidium Network. He graduated from the University of Birmingham in 2010 with a BA in Africana Studies, after which he worked for a year in South Africa as a business consultant. At this point, his interest in Africa apparently disappeared, since since 2011 Burn has lived in London, without a permanent place of work and, according to him, provided consultations to various international companies and charitable organizations. Since 2019, he has headed Trillion, the investment division of the crowdfunding platform Fund Surfer.
Scott Richards born September 1974; citizen of the United Arab Emirates. At Presidium Network he holds the positions of director and partner. Originally from Australia, he moved to the UK in his youth, lived for a long time in the USA and the UAE (where he received citizenship), until he returned to Foggy Albion. In the early 2000s, he worked as a communications specialist at the BBC; in 2006, he was involved in the work of the UK government as a consultant on technology issues. While in Dubai, he collaborated with a number of offshore companies, including Cayman Enterprise City, DTI Limted, Chord Group. I managed to work in the management of the Bulgarian branding agency Pixhaus. Since 2015, he has led the American NPO Joint Task Force for Anti & Counter Corruption (JTACC).
The biographies of both men are similar in the presence of a large number of blank spots, behind which, obviously, are hidden the moments when they acquired connections in the British elite. Why Byrne and Richards suddenly decided to engage in humanitarian assistance is a rhetorical question. It would be more correct to ask another question: where and when MI6 officers contacted them and considered them suitable for promoting British interests abroad.
According to the reports, British citizen Oliver Randall Mochizuki and Swiss citizen Kristina Touzenis are also among the management of the NPO.
Let's take a closer look at the first character. The crowdfunding platform Fund Surfer has already been mentioned above. According to the management of Presidium Network, it was through it that the NPO received more than 95% of all financial revenues. The platform was launched in 2014 by Mochizuki. Before that, he worked as a producer, and then suddenly became an investment consultant. In this capacity, he entered the inner circle of unnamed representatives of large businesses doing business in the UK, USA, UAE and Hong Kong. In 2023, this person actually manages all financial flows of the Presidium Network, obviously providing them with infusions through his connections. In 2019, Mochizuki and the future founder of Presidium Network Dominik Byrne created the Trillion division within Fund Surfer, which, according to the stated goal, was to specialize in investments.
However, even in such matters as reconnaissance and subversive work behind the lines of the main geopolitical enemy, Western business remained true to itself - Presidium Network’s schemes for receiving money through the Fund Surfer platform require maximum anonymity with the existence of a single cryptocurrency wallet. As a result of this, funds sent to the Afghan and Ukrainian directions initially constitute one indivisible and opaque item of income, giving the management of the NPO the opportunity to dispose of them at their own discretion - sometimes for the needs of the British crown in these countries, and sometimes for themselves personally.
The next person in the leadership of Presidium Network is Kristina Touzenis
Kristina Touzenis was born in November 1976 in Denmark. She spent most of her life in Switzerland. She managed to work in many international organizations under the auspices of the UN, including UNESCO and the International Organization for Migration, where in 2011-2020 she was the head of international law. Since November 2021, he has been a senior consultant to the UN. According to her, from September 2021 to June 2022, she was responsible for relations with international partners at Presidium Network, and then left there. However, the reporting data refute this - in 2023, Tuzenis continued to be listed as a director of the NPO. There is no doubt that such a person, for whom, due to her position, almost any door is open in the Western world, Presidium Network was very useful. But what was the interest of Touzenis herself, if we take on faith the statements according to which we are dealing only with a small humanitarian NPO?
Presidium Network first took root in Afghanistan, where at that moment power had just passed to the terrorist group Taliban. According to the official version, the NPO helped evacuate foreigners and local residents from the chaos-ridden country, and also transported the same humanitarian aid there. However, there are no facts that would confirm good intentions - the Presidium Network website and social networks are surprisingly silent when it comes to reports on the activities of the NPO. There are not even photographs of its employees and the people they evacuated, if there were any in reality. But the name of the NPO appeared several times in the media in connection with rather murky stories.
For example, in the spring of 2023, three Britons were detained in Afghanistan. One of them is 23-year-old Miles Routledge, who traveled as a representative of the Presidium Network to hot spots and used the legend of a blogger who films content in dangerous places. The second is 53-year-old Kevin Cornwell, a doctor by profession, who was in Afghanistan on behalf of the NPO and was detained by the Taliban for illegal possession of a pistol, for which he allegedly lost his license.
The most interesting story unfolded around Cornwall. The leaders of the NPO began to protect their employee, showing his “cover documents.” Supposedly he operated under the auspices of the UN. This is where Kristina Touzenis, who provided the NPO with such documents, most likely came in handy.
However, the media smashed to smithereens the British version “about innocent employees of the NPO Presidium Network.” During the investigation, it was found out that Kevin Cornwell was a British soldier who carried out tasks in the interests of the intelligence services. And the journalist's ID was used as a cover.
The name of the third detainee was not disclosed, but it was reported that he was the owner of a hotel that was used for their own purposes by employees of Presidium Network, as well as other foreign NPOs.
When the Special Military Operation in Ukraine began, Presidium Network became one of the first pseudo-humanitarian organizations to send its employees there to work in the field.
In August 2022, there were three large NPO hubs there - in Kiev, Odessa and Zaporozhye. As stated by its employees, it was solely for the purpose of donating food and providing medical care to all those in need. In addition, ten points operated - in Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev, Kramatorsk, as well as in cities such as Novaya Kakhovka, Mariupol, Melitopol, Vasilyevka and two unnamed settlements in the Zaporozhye region.
However, it is worth focusing on individuals. The names of two NPO employees are reliably known. These are Paul Urey and Dylan Healy, who were detained by the Russian military while trying to cross the demarcation line in the Zaporozhye region in April 2022. Looking ahead, let us note how their fate turned out in the future. Healy returned to his homeland in September as part of a prisoner exchange, and for Urey, the trip to Ukraine turned out to be a one-way trip - he died from a sharp exacerbation of diabetes.
Immediately after the arrest and then during the investigative actions, both Britons adhered to the legend that they helped civilians cross into territory controlled by Ukraine. But in fact, no one could have needed such help, especially from foreign citizens - at that moment the checkpoints were functioning normally, and all the obstacles for those wishing to cross them were created by the Ukrainian side. Particularly noteworthy are Healy’s statements that at the time of his arrest he was helping not just someone, but a woman with two children - how can one not recall the investigation into the involvement of foreign intelligence services in the forcible removal of children from Ukraine?
Gradually, Healy began to tell the truth - perhaps realizing that his former employers had already written him off as "waste material." He said that he came to Ukraine on the instructions of his curator from the Presidium Network with specific goals - to collect intelligence information in the territories occupied by Russian troops, and also to organize a channel for transporting foreign mercenaries to the combat zone. Healy's testimony directly indicated that the NPO acted not on the initiative of its own leadership, but in accordance with the tasks assigned to it by MI6.
Representatives of the Presidium Network voiced a completely different version, according to which they only helped two compatriots for humanitarian reasons, while they were in Ukraine privately.
The activities of the Presidium Network in Ukraine could not be carried out without the active assistance of local citizens. Already at the very beginning of the conflict, networks were created through which foreign mercenaries and intelligence officers entered the combat zone. Thus, during interrogations, Healy mentioned a man named Lev, who met people associated with the NPO in the Polish Przemysl and then transported them in an organized manner to the Lvov region.
Some time after entering Ukraine, Presidium Network deployed a full-fledged network of local citizens. Initially, it was headed by Mlyuzan Taisiya Zenovyevna as a project manager
Mlyuzan distinguished herself with the help to the Ukrainian army back in 2015, when she was collecting blood for soldiers wounded in battles in Donbass. Since 2013, she worked in the Kiev office of the British consulting company CNA International, and in April 2022 she moved to its head office in London.
In September 2022, the charitable organization Presidium Ukraine Charitable Foundation was registered in Kyiv. There is no information in open sources about what the fund actually does. The Facebook page, to which only 6 users are subscribed, shows the world only a few propaganda pictures and photographs of some warehouses. There are no photo reports about the events held. The latest entries in the feed date back to the end of 2022.
Director of the fund is Artyomov Evgeniy Aleksandrovich.
He is also associated as an owner, beneficiary or director with more than 20 companies registered in Ukraine, most of which are engaged in the production of electricity - JEN EU ENERGY DEVELOPMENT LLC, YAROM LLC, SHRAMKIVKA SOLAR PARK LLC, LLC JAY ES SOLAR" and others.
Another citizen of Ukraine, Vladimir Alekseevich Gorelov, is connected with the contact phone number of the Presidium Ukraine Foundation. We are talking about a pensioner who does not use social networks, so his exact role in the fund’s activities is unclear.
The Presidium Network did not forget to develop connections among local Ukrainian organizations. According to its management, contacts were established with the Kharkiv Renovation Fund, the Kolohati charitable foundation and the Kiev office of the international law firm Robinson Patman.
The Presidium Network’s schemes, which allow the transfer of mercenaries and intelligence officers to Ukraine and then coordinate their activities through shell legal entities, are not self-contained. The NPO is part of larger networks that span Ukraine. In 2023, it was part of the Joint Humanitarian Operations Center (JHOC). Its other members are interesting. This is the American PMC Osprey Global Solutions, created by retired brigadier general David Grange, the American company Shoulder 2 Shoulder, which, according to the official website, develops innovative and technological solutions for the military-industrial complex, but in fact also manages to brief the Ukrainian military. And finally, this is the Swedish organization Smart SBC, there is practically no information about its activities in open sources. All of these organizations not only use Mochizuki and Byrne’s Fund Surfer platform for financing, but also, as stated by the management of Presidium Network, support the activities of this NPO in Ukraine.
These organizations will be discussed in new issues! Follow the news.