A supporter of Navalny and FBK's IT contractor, 25-year-old programmer Alexander Litreev was born in the Leningrad Region but lives in Europe.

“Since 2016, he has been performing a lot of IT contracts: both for candidates who went from the fund to the elections, and for the FBK itself and its friends,” Vitaly Serukanov, ex-lawyer of the FBK, said about Litreev’s work.

“He was such a home IT specialist that everyone trusted.” 

Since then, Litreev has got a passport of Ukraine, a business and a residence permit in Estonia.

In 2020, he went there to escape criminal prosecution: he is accused of buying drugs (Article 228 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and concealing dual citizenship (Article 330.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).

Litreev, a public figure, the author of a Telegram channel about cybersecurity, is also known for organizing false blocking of Channel One, Russian Railways, Mail.ru and other resources.

In addition, he developed a service that publishes the personal data of the security forces, and the Red Button project to help detainees at rallies.

Litreev's new project, as RT found out, is designed to help circumvent the legal ban on access to certain information in Russia.

To do this, the programmer creates his own VPN - but not the usual one.

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"Bypassing Blockages"

After leaving Russia with the help of the Estonian diplomatic mission and provoking a diplomatic scandal, Litreev focused on a new project.

In April 2021, he opened his second legal entity in Estonia - Solar Labs OÜ. 

According to the company's annual report, in the first two quarters of its existence, it earned €40,000. 

Another €3.3 thousand in 2020 was earned by his first company, Vee Security OÜ.

Three years earlier, this firm had developed a proxy service to bypass Telegram blocking. 

From the publications in Litreev's telegram channel, the main project that the new Solar Labs is doing is known.

This is a decentralized VPN service called Sentinel. 

The VPN (Virtual private network) protocol allows you to hide the IP address of a computer or smartphone: sites accessed via VPN do not see the user's real location.

Therefore, VPNs are often used to access online resources that are blocked in a certain area at the legislative level.

For example, in Russia, Roskomnadzor.

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Russian government agencies are rather negative about VPN: the use of this protocol is not considered an offense, but the RKN regularly blocks certain providers of such services, because they allow access to resources prohibited in Russia. 

According to the manifesto published on the Sentinel website, the project will be different from other similar programs.

Usually, the owner of a VPN service knows everything about his client: from which computer and from which country the user accesses the network, which site he accesses through the VPN.

That is, the system is not anonymous: law enforcement agencies can request information about clients, and hackers can hack central servers.

Litreev, on the other hand, promises to make the service decentralized, that is, independent of the servers or the owner.

This protocol is called dVPN, and anonymity in such a network will be higher than in a regular VPN. 

As a rule, the work of decentralized systems is provided by its users themselves: they provide space on the computer’s disk, provide network connections, install powerful video cards for the extraction of cryptocoins.

In the case of a decentralized VPN, you access the Internet through a random device owned by another dVPN user. 

virtual disguise

Unlike the usual one, dVPN connects the user not to a single server, where thousands of the same ones access, but to a random node, programmer Andrey, a former technical consultant of the K department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, explained to RT on condition of anonymity.

“It can be a phone, a laptop, or a volunteer server on the other side of the world who allowed it to be used,” says the programmer.

- While this device is turned on or until the owner has closed access, your Internet traffic is passed through someone else's device.

This is how you disguise yourself from government agencies or site owners: it becomes more difficult for law enforcement agencies to find out where you go and what files you download, and sites do not see who specifically visits them.” 

The principles of cryptocurrencies, torrents, and the anonymous Tor network, through which they access the darknet, are built on the absence of a single center. 

“The authorities of any country cannot do anything: blocking individual nodes is meaningless, and it is impossible to influence the entire system, otherwise you will have to turn off half the Internet in the world,” the expert explains.

“For the same reason, it will be more difficult for Roskomnadzor to block Litreev’s new brainchild if he implements his idea.”

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Dashing earnings

According to Estonian government agencies, Solar Labs OÜ officially employs four employees with an average salary of €1.7 thousand. And the founder of the company himself is no stranger to luxury.

So, in the fall of 2021, Litreev placed an order for a new Tesla for $60,000, which is how much all his firms officially earned in a year.

In his Telegram channel, he wrote that he tried to order an electric car online, but due to difficulties with delivery and technical support, he abandoned Tesla and instead bought a BMW SUV. 

This is his second car of the same brand.

A year earlier, Litreev boasted on his Twitter how he drives a BMW around the Sverdlovsk region at a speed of over 200 km / h.

At the same time, judging by what the programmer himself wrote on the social network, he was sure of his impunity, since his car had Estonian numbers. 

“I’m in Russia, EU numbers, cameras don’t issue fines,” he signed the published photo of a BMW speedometer with an arrow at 200 km / h.

Alternative financing

Experts interviewed by RT admit that Litreev's firms can be used to transfer grant money to the Russian FBK.

He is not the only FBK employee and partner who opened companies in the Baltics.

As RT wrote, Georgy Alburov, an employee of the investigation department, has a company in Latvia.

FBK lawyer Lyubov Sobol and former head of Navalny's headquarters Leonid Volkov, who opened a business in Vilnius, live in Lithuania.

And the team of Mikhail Khodorkovsky settled in Estonia: the oligarch registered his media assets there because of the ease of management and low administrative costs.

Since the entry into force of the court decision recognizing the FBK as an extremist organization, any donation to the fund is considered as financing of extremism, reminds a member of the scientific advisory council of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, a retired colonel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Ivan Solovyov.

“When the opportunity to receive funding from direct Western donations and donations from sympathizers was closed, the question arose of creating a scheme for maintaining the financial stability of the organization and its active members,” the expert says.

— Old Europe has serious tax and anti-money laundering laws.

Therefore, the Baltic countries were chosen as the holders of Navalny's new wallets, which are ready to turn a blind eye to financial and tax violations.

According to the lawyer, the creation of firms in Lithuania and Estonia, where the founders are former top managers of Navalny's team, "is a scheme to keep afloat an extremist organization that has died in the Bose." 

“The declared profit is not in the literal sense the result of the entrepreneurial activity of the Baltic “merchants,” Solovyov believes.

“This is what their old masters throw at them for life.” 

According to him, Russian law enforcement agencies are able to trace not only the sources of funds received by these firms, but also to whom and for what these funds will be directed in the future. 

Firms of escaped oppositionists abroad are not subject to Russian laws, therefore they can openly transfer money to organizations banned in Russia, agrees Vitaly Borodin, head of the Federal Security and Anti-Corruption Project (FPBK).

“I think that through the firms of Navalny’s friends abroad, they can easily pump funding in favor of the FBK,” Borodin said.

“His supporters fled from persecution abroad and developed such a tool.”

From the point of view of Russian laws, the expert notes, this is a criminal offense - the leaders and owners of these firms can be prosecuted for financing extremist activities.

In particular, the Prosecutor General's Office can send an international request to local authorities.

* The organization was recognized as extremist, its activities are prohibited on the territory of Russia by the decision of the Moscow City Court dated 06/09/2021.