Thread by @kromark

⚛️🇹🇷🧵Next year, Turkey’s 1st nuclear power plant, Akkuyu – built by Russia’s state-owned Rosatom – is finally set to go live after years of delays and scandals. Among its staff, we found a former GRU psyops officer. Our new investigation with @pustota exposes the full story 🔽

Meet Maxim Balabanov, who served for nearly 10 years, until 2017, in military unit 03126 in Leningrad Oblast – a SUPsO (psyops) unit of the Leningrad Military District.

He also listed as one of his addresses the location of another GRU unit, 20697 (St. Petersburg). As was discovered back in 2023, unit 20697 is another GRU psyops unit, whose officers pretended to act as politologysts and experts in their 'civic' life.
ms.detector.media/internet/post/…

Read more about the structure of the Russian psyop units by @InformNapalm here:
informnapalm.org/49314-podrazde…

While serving in unit 03126, Balabanov was promoted to captain. There are even some genuine open-source traces of him serving in that unit. But in 2017, he suddenly left the military and became an employee of the state company 'Inpredservice'. archive.is/H5Cfi

Interestingly, what 'Inpredservice' does is provide housing to foreign diplomats and companies in St. Petersburg. At the same time, Balabanov also began working in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office.

Balabanov was employed as the head of one of the divisions in the External Relations Committee of the mayor’s office. Remember who else began his political career there – eventually becoming Russia’s 25–year–long tsar?

BTW, It was when Putin was head of that External Relations Committee that he became involved in the theft of a metric ton of cocaine seized by Russia while it was en route from Colombia, the plot we investigated back in 2022.

https://x.com/kromark/status/1527166550599417856

All the time Balabanov didn't lose connections with his GRU psyops colleagues, with meticulously marking their B-days in his public Google calendar and getting 'likes' from them on Facebook. calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/e…

One of those close colleagues was Nikolai Berzeitis, who, after serving in the GRU psyops, became the Head of the Foreign Military Information Department of the Leningrad Military District, and was caught spreading disinformation since the war in Chechnya. kommersant.ru/doc/966199

As Head of the committee's Department for Relations with International Organizations, Balabanov met with many Western officials and politicians, such as Swedish MP Magnus Berntsson and former EU ambassador to Russia Markus Ederer (on the photo with Putin taken back in 2017).

In April 2022, shortly after the full-scale war in Ukraine broke out, Balabanov suddenly left the St. Petersburg mayor’s office and became an employee of JSC Akkuyu Nuklear, the Rosatom subsidiary constructing the first Turkish nuclear power plant.

That was a time when the Akkuyu NPP project was in the midst of many controversies, ranging from Rosatom ousting Turkish companies from the project to ecological concerns.
neimagazine.com/news/turkish-e…

But the most worrying aspect was the 'buy-own-operate' scheme of the Akkuyu NPP, which many in Turkey see as Russia’s attempt to tie the country to its energy supplies for years to come.
turkishminute.com/2025/02/05/opi…

Sanctions also loomed, forcing Rosatom to postpone the end of construction and attempt to substitute Western equipment, particularly from Siemens.

But the real bomb exploded in February 2025, when The Wall Street Journal revealed that Moscow had used loans to Rosatom’s Turkish subsidiary as a 'cash stash' to circumvent US Treasury Department restrictions. wsj.com/politics/polic…

The Treasury even managed to freeze one such payment worth USD 2 billion, which led to salary delays and a strike by the workers constructing the Akkuyu NPP. intellinews.com/strike-breaks-…

Rosatom tried (and still tries) to sell 49% of the Akkuyu NPP constructing company to get funds for jumping on the 2nd Turkish NPP project, Simop, but still didn’t succeed.

Now Russian plans to build a second nuclear power plant in Turkey may be even more elusive, after Erdogan’s recent meeting with Trump at the White House and the announcement about talks with the U.S. and South Korea regarding the construction of the NPP.
nordicmonitor.com/2025/10/turkey…

Read the full story here (Google Translate for your language please): smarturl.click/QbwZ6