In early November, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) and the National Police conducted searches of AllatRa members across the country. Law enforcement officers reported that “as a result of a multi-stage special operation in Kyiv and other regions of Ukraine, the subversive activities of more than 20 cells of this group, which acted in favor of the Russian special services, were blocked.” Slidstvo.info journalists investigated the history of this organization and found AllatRa’s offshore offices in Cyprus and Belize (a country in Central America).
Here are the findings of the investigation by Slidstvo.info.
COAL MINER TURNED DIVINE SPIRITUAL LEADER
The AllatRa organization has expanded rapidly in recent years, now boasting hundreds of offices across dozens of countries, sizable social media reach totaling many thousands, and numerous books, festivals, and conferences promoting its doomsday messages. Anti-vaccine proponents, flat Earth believers, and followers of fringe conspiracy theories are flocking to AllatRa.
This raises the question: How did such a dubious organization grow to such broad influence, and most importantly, why?
The story began 21 years ago. In 2002, former coal miner Ihor Danilov relocated to Kyiv, where he began treating patients at a spine clinic located within the historic Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery complex. The following year, a book was published titled “Sensei. The Original of Shambhala” that centered around Danilov.
Ihor Danilov
The book was authored under a pseudonym by Halyna Yablochkina, a colleague of Danilov’s at the time. Known by her pen name Anastasia Novykh, Yablochkina has gone on to write many of the organization’s core books over the years. In her works, she portrayed Danilov as a prophet and promoted the claim that he possessed divine origins.
Halyna Yablochkina
The organization “ALLATRA International Public Movement” was founded in 2014. It was during this period that numerous branches in dozens of countries began to be created, as well as numerous TV channels and social media pages.
The future AllatRa members began to aggressively promote their ideology in libraries, schools, and clinics under the guise of psychologists and therapists. In 2012, the AllatRa trademark was registered.
THE CULT GOES INTERNATIONAL
In addition to Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Slidstvo.info managed to find companies and NGOs associated with AllatRa in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova.
Location of companies and public organizations associated with AllatRa
By 2021, AllatRa had its own offshore company in Cyprus, and by 2020, it likely had one in Belize (a country in Central America – ed.). It is possible that this is not a complete list of related companies and NGOs.
Although the organizations are located abroad, they are run mainly by Ukrainians from the AllatRa movement.
For example, Tetiana Zinchenko, a representative of the AllatRa NGO in Dnipro, is also the founder of the International Association for the Study of Game Addictions, a company registered in Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Tetiana Zinchenko
Zinchenko founded the British firm together with another supporter of the cult, AllatRa TV presenter Olena Muzyko.
Olena Muzyko
Svitlana Shylivska is the head of AllatRa’s representative office in the Czech Republic.
Svitlana Shylivska
Back in the 2010s, she represented the AllatRa organization Lagoda in Prague. In 2011, she received a special award at the DobroTy festival in Kyiv as the director of the Czech publishing house IBIS.
Over the past few years, AllatRa has been actively promoting the international project Creative Society, which advocates ideas very similar to AllatRa’s ideology. In the United States, there is a whole group of organizations associated with the Creative Society.
For example, Maryna Ovtsynova, the vice president of AllatRa in the United States, was a music teacher and a correspondent for AllatRa TV in the USA before she became a top manager of this movement.
Maryna Ovtsynova
Olga Schmidt, the organization’s president, has a similar story. She used to be a radio technician.
Olga Schmidt
WHERE DID THE MONEY COME FROM?
Although the AllatRa members themselves claim that their activities are entirely volunteer, Slidstvo.info found facts that suggest otherwise.
The first thing that attracts attention is offshore companies in Cyprus and Belize. Journalists studied AllatRa’s Cypriot documents. Although they do not contain financial statements, they show the ownership structure of the company.
Cypriots are listed as directors of the Cypriot AllatRa, but the charter documents bear the signature of Andriy Mykhalchuk. This Ukrainian is listed among the founders of the Ukrainian AllatRa.
Andriy Mykhalchuk
In addition to Mykhalchuk’s signature, the documents also list his home address and place of employment: AST-Technologies LLC. Slidstvo.info had previously probed this company back in 2016, in an investigation into the abuses of the Dubnevych brothers (the prominent Lviv businessmen embroiled in corruption allegations who earned their capital through multibillion-dollar tenders of the state rail transport company Ukrzaliznytsia — ed.)
The documents for the Cypriot company were signed in 2015, when Mykhalchuk was working at AST-Technologies as a chief engineer.
One of the sources of AllatRa’s income is the sale of esoteric books published in large quantities.
Also, for seven years, AllatRa kept a crowdfunding collection open, where anyone could create a project for which caring AllatRa members allegedly donated money.
By a strange coincidence, the lion’s share of “important social projects” was devoted to spreading information about AllatRa itself.
According to the calculations of Slidstvo.Info journalists, the cult’s supporters donated almost 7.5 million hryvnias ($204,429) to this charity (about 1 million hryvnias ($27,257) a year).
WHO SPONSORS ALLATRA?
AllatRa also has a whole group of organizations that could support the movement financially. Since 2014, AllatRa has been actively signing partnership agreements with businesses.
One of the possible options for partnership is to finance the movement and implement the spiritual principles of AllatRa.
In the archived version of an AllatRa website, Slidstvo.info journalists found more than 160 companies that, according to the cult’s representatives, signed a partnership agreement with the organization. Among them are government agencies and businesses, including those under sanctions.
One of these partners is Unigran, the owner of local granite quarries near Korosten in Zhytomyr Oblast. Unigran owns a number of companies engaged in mining in the region.
At the time the agreement was signed in 2014 and until the end of 2022, the ultimate beneficiary of the Unigran Group was Ihor Naumets.
Ihor Naumets
He participated in broadcasts on AllatRa TV and even represented the organization at the events of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs in Kaliningrad in 2015.
Currently, the former owner of Unigran, Ihor Naumets, is under Ukrainian sanctions. He is suspected of financing terrorism, and the quarries’ operations are blocked.
In response to an official request from journalists, Unigran replied that the company has no relation to the AllatRa movement, and that its partnership with the organization is nothing more than Ihor Naumets’ personal position.
Other companies listed on AllatRa’s website as partners in the global agreement are mostly small businesses: hairdressing salons, service stations, psychological assistance centers, transportation and furniture companies, travel agencies, sports clubs, lawyers, insurers, and recruiters. And that’s just from Ukraine.
Companies from Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Germany, Spain, the United States, and others are also listed as partners.
However, the information about such partnerships may be outdated: some of these businesses are no longer in operation, and some have been resold. Some companies from the list of partners claim that the former management of the companies entered into agreements with AllatRa.
ALLATRA AND THE INACTION OF THE SBU
The SBU has known about the existence of AllatRa and its destructive influence since at least 2018, when the National Academy of the SBU published a monograph entitled “Strategic Communications in Hybrid Warfare: A View from a Volunteer to a Scientist”. An entire chapter was devoted to AllatRa as a “project of total brainwashing of Ukrainians.”
“According to experts in information space protection, the AllatRa case, without exaggeration, concerns the national security of Ukraine,” the SBU wrote.
At the time, the authors of the monograph suggested creating a similar patriotic project to “strike back.”
“The best new samples of Ukrainian patriotic therapeutic texts posted on the Internet are the asymmetrical ‘retaliatory strike’ with which Ukraine is able to counteract the ‘destruction strategy’ of Russian propaganda,” the monograph says.
The fact that AllatRa was “on the radar of the SBU” is also confirmed by Slidstvo.info’s sources in law enforcement. However, no real steps have been taken to counteract AllatRa’s activities to date.
Despite the exposure and blocking of the organization’s work by the special services, its social media channels continue to broadcast programs with Ihor Danilov, and another mass online conference was scheduled for December 2, 2023.
