Cyber experts from the military-guerrilla movement «Atesh» have taken down the key Kremlin-backed commodities exchange SPIMEX.
Cyber experts from the military-guerrilla movement «Atesh» have taken down the key Kremlin-backed commodities exchange SPIMEX.
spimex.com is the largest commodity exchange in the Russian Federation, through which 99% of organized trading in oil and oil products, gas, coal, timber, metals, building materials, and agricultural products is carried out.
«We deliberately aimed our blow at the very heart of Putin’s economy. Every day, millions of petrodollars pass through here, going into the furnace of the Kremlin’s war machine. Today, this tap has stopped for a while,» Atesh wrote on its Telegram channel.
JSC St. Petersburg Stock Exchange (SPIMEX) was registered in 2008. It has offices in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Irkutsk.
In 2022, the trading volume in the petroleum products section (gasoline, diesel fuel, aviation fuel, fuel oil, and petrochemicals) amounted to 29.13 million tons; in the derivatives section — 13.9 billion rubles, and in the natural gas section — 5.7 billion cubic meters.
In March 2022, the Association of European Energy Exchanges (Europex) excluded SPIMEX from its membership due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
According to the Russian state agency TASS, at the end of 2024, «net profit increased by 79%, to 6.797 billion rubles. At the same time, a record number of petroleum products were sold through this exchange — 37.192 million tons (20% more than a year earlier), reports OBOZ.UA.
The military-partisan movement «Atesh» emerged in Crimea among Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians in the summer of 2022, when it was already obvious that Russia would mobilize, including in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine (TOT), writes «Suspilne».
«Atesh» in translation from Turkic languages means «fire», this symbol became a sign of the movement.
Among the active agents, of which there are thousands, there are both civilians and military personnel within the Russian army.
