One notary’s office in Bulgaria. One ministerial appointment in Kyiv. One engineering role that nobody explained. Four years. This is how it ends.
The deed
It started with a piece of paper you can hold. On July 8, 2022, a notarial deed was registered at the Pomorie District Court in Bulgaria: a two-story house and a plot of land, sold for 25,000 euros. The assessed value was north of 150,000. The buyer was Yana Litvinova. Her husband, Artem, was at the time running small commercial operations in Donetsk Oblast. He had no maritime background and no public profile.
Four years later Artem Litvinov became director of Ukraine’s largest commercial port.
The sale was the opening move, and most of what followed was already folded into it. Scovitin created the leverage; Litvinov was the man it moved into place. Shevyakov handled the money. The operations deputy, Yanishevsky, came over from a company owned by Konstantin Furtatov, whose father, Yuriy, was installed as chief engineer with access to every technical document in the facility.
None of these appointments were coincidental. Each person brought in was already tied to the others, so every new hire quietly locked the next one into place.
“The most effective operations do not look like operations. They look likepaperwork.”
February 4, 2022
Eighteen days before the full-scale invasion, Yuriy Furtatov boarded a flight from Simferopol to Moscow: SU1625, passport number 002433371. Two days later he flew back to Simferopol on SU1624.
He had been formally recruited as a GRU agent, and he’d spent years servicing the Russian Black Sea Fleet in occupied Crimea. His name was already in Ukraine’s Myrotvorets database. He still flew to Moscow and back eighteen days before Russian tanks crossed the border, and no one stopped him at any checkpoint.
What he did in Moscow, we can’t say. No source would go on record, and we found no way to confirm who he met. The travel history is another matter. He crossed between occupied Crimea and mainland Ukraine five times in 2021 alone, including trips to Kyiv and to Odesa, and not one crossing was flagged. He was in Moscow on February 4 and back on February 6. The war began on February 24.
What the network produced
Litvinov took over at Port Pivdennyi in March 2026. Within months, monthly cargo throughput collapsed from 1.1 million tons to roughly 200,000. Legitimate operators were squeezed out one by one. A grain scheme moved 100,000 tons of cargo, worth an estimated UAH 350 million, without paying a Hryvnia in tax. His advisor, meanwhile, was pocketing bribes from freight forwarders, and his operations deputy answered, indirectly, to a company owned by Konstantin Furtatov, his son.
Then the strikes changed. After Furtatov took over as chief engineer, the port started taking hits more precise than anything it had seen in the war: administrative buildings that appear on no public map, tugboats moored at specific berths, infrastructure you’d need inside knowledge to even locate. A facility already being hollowed out from within was now being targeted from above, by people who seemed to know exactly where to aim. The two forms of damage fed each other.
The Russian intelligence document underlying this investigation states its objective plainly: “the complete destruction of the infrastructure and the draining of the state budget.” That isn’t the language of theft or incompetence. It describes a campaign of destruction set down in advance and executed patiently, over years.
The method
No one kicked in a door.
Russia didn’t need soldiers to take Port Pivdennyi. It needed a property sale, a job posting, and a man who already knew the layout. It spent four years assembling that, moving the right people into place through channels that looked entirely routine, and then it waited. The whole thing ran on patience, paperwork, and somebody on the inside willing to feed information to the country trying to destroy his own.
Every piece of this method has been used before — against power stations, pipelines, airports, any piece of infrastructure with people inside it who can be reached. Here, unusually, the paper trail survived: a notarial deed, a flight record, a criminal case number. Documents that exist, and that nobody can quietly make disappear.
What hasn’t happened
Nobody named in this series has been arrested. No public inquiry into the port appointments has been announced. The grain-smuggling case, No. 72025161050000022, remains open. Litvinov is still the director of the port, Furtatov continues to be its chief engineer, and Shevyakov is continuously advising him. The port is still running.
The people who built this network took four years to get it ready. There’s no reason to think they’re in any hurry now.
Port of Shadows | An investigation by RusWatch | End of series