InformNapalm volunteer intelligence community received from Ukrainian hacktivists of the Cyber Resistance team the e-mail dumps and other private correspondence of a Russian war criminal, commander of the 960th Assault Aviation Regiment (military unit 75387), Colonel Sergey Atroshchenko. His regiment is stationed at an airfield near the city of Primorsko-Akhtarsk in the Krasnodar Krai, on the shores of the Sea of Azov.

The hacktivists monitored the colonel’s correspondence for several months and made the most effective use of the leaks in the interests of the Ukrainian Defense Forces. At present, given the refusal of Col. Atroshchenko to cooperate with the Ukrainian intelligence agencies, a decision has been made to make public the fact of the hack as well as some sensitive information about him and his regiment. We were also informed that during the preparation of this feature, materials on Atroshchenko and his subordinates were being submitted for execution of an arrest warrant to the International Criminal Court. Therefore, we had to delay the release of this article for more than a week, following the announcement on our Telegram channel.

Introducing Colonel Atroshchenko

Sergey Valeriyevich Atroshchenko was born on 5/5/1981 in Ovruch, Zhytomyr Oblast, Ukraine. He went on to live in Lipetsk, Russia, then he was registered in the city of Voronezh at 96a Leninsky Prospekt, apt. 89. Then for some time, he was registered near his duty station, the military unit 46451 in the village of Hvardiyske in the occupied Crimea. Phone number: 79186505185, e-mail addresses: serega.368@mail.ru, gn-grisha131@mail.ru.

He currently resides in a rented apartment at an address which could be established through his COVID-19 vaccination records.

His current dwelling is in an upscale residential development located 350 meters from the embankment at the address 151 Mira str., ap.2, Primorsko-Akhtarsk, Krasnodar Krai, Russia (coordinates: 46°02’59.6″N 38°09’56.9″E). His current duty station, the permanent deployment airfield of the 960th Assault Aviation Regiment (AAR), is just about 5 km away.

Financials

You might be wondering how much does the commander of an aviation regiment earn? Perhaps this will also be of interest to his wife, who will feature below in this material.

The hacktivists gained access to Atroshchenko’s personal account on the official portal of the Russian Ministry of Defense and retrieved information on the pay and allowances for the period from February 2022 to January 2023 (see the payroll sheet extract in this PDF).

Among the large volumes of correspondence and spam in the mail dumps of the 960th AAR commander, Col. Sergey Atroshchenko, we managed to find and isolate various detailed lists of pilots, performance evaluation records of officers, bulletins, memos, theoretical and practical calculations, etc which are of material interest for the Ukrainian intelligence.

Therefore, for now we are not posting the entire dump for public viewing. We believe that it is not up to us to make life easy for the Russian counterintelligence, so we will let them figure out the scope of the leak for themselves.

However, we can note some funny details. It was quite amusing to stumble in the mail of Col. Atroshchenko across an old explanatory note to the master’s paper of 2016 with the rationale for the commander’s decision to destroy an enemy’s AWACS aircraft. Ironically, a month ago, on February 26, 2023, the Russian AWACS aircraft A-50U was damaged by partisans using a drone at the Machulishchi airfield in Belarus.

Let us have a look at some materials from this dump.

The video footage of the hack is available here.

Col. Atroshchenko was not the only source of the abundant leaked data about his regiment and the personnel subordinate to him. A significant role in this was played by his wife whose mail was also penetrated by the hacktivists.

Introducing Mrs Atroshchenko

Lilia Aleksandrovna Atroshchenko was born on 11/11/1982. Phone numbers: 79186454934, 79883613157. Passport: 2005 591208. E-mail: lady.land17@mail.ru. The hacktivists noticed that Lilia liked to send “photo surprises” to her husband (we picked a couple of more decent pictures where she wears some clothes, to give an example).

While this material was in the making, at the request of the hacktivists, Lilia rendered the team a small service, thinking that she was communicating not with Ukrainian hackers, but with an officer from her husband’s regiment.

With this “officer”, they agreed to make a new “surprise” to Col. Atroshchenko and other officers of the regiment. The wives would do a “patriotic photo shoot” at the airfield in formal uniform jackets of their husbands with full decorations. The photos were exclusively meant for private collections and not intended for the general public. Lilia readily supported the proposal and organized everything.

This allowed for additional reconnaissance of targets and brought together all the wives of Russian pilots and, as a result, bundled together an array of additional data useful for further OSINT.

On March 16, 2023, Lilia Atroshchenko sent her video surprise with slides made up of photographs from this “patriotic photo shoot”.

Lilia did very well – there were close-ups of women posing in the jackets of their pilot husbands, who are normally very careful with their own photos and try to keep a low profile on social media. But thanks to their wives, their connections and personal data were easily established. Moreover, the “New Year’s corporate parties” of the regiment were also helpful, where the wives of regiment’s officers posed with their husbands for family albums (but that’s another story for further publications).

In addition, Lilia gave us some wide shots of the airfield and airplanes, showing that at 960th AAR it became a common practice to paint the rashist Z-shaped swastikas right on top of the red stars. Which is quite unusual, as most photographs we came across in the media would normally show the letter “Z” drawn side by side, without overlapping the star. Perhaps this is a personal initiative of the regiment commander to designate his airplanes in a special way.

P.S.

This is just a small part of this story. The commander of 960th Assault Aviation Regiment of the Russian Federation (military unit 75387), Col. Sergey Atroshchenko and his subordinate officers will surely feature in other publications on our site.

We thank our hacktivist friends from Cyber Resistance for the exclusive opportunity to make this exciting story public. We invite readers to subscribe to our telegram channels, where we publish much more information than gets to InformNapalm website.

The fight against Russian aggressors is fought on different fronts, and the cyber-front is an important component for the intelligence and the overall success of operations to liberate the occupied territories of Ukraine, identify and bring Russian war criminals to justice.

United we stand. Glory to Ukraine!

P.S: An important detail, on March 28, 2023, the adviser to the mayor of Mariupol Petro Andriushchenko indicated that according to their data Russian war criminals took off from the Primorsko-Akhtarsk airfield to bomb the drama theater and the maternity hospital of Mariupol.

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