A complaint about Sheremetyevo’s use for military purposes appeared on the airport pilots’ union website. The union said the site was hacked

A complaint about Sheremetyevo’s use for military purposes appeared on the airport pilots’ union website. The union said the site was hacked

An “Emergency Appeal” was published on the website of the Sheremetyevo Flight Crew Union on May 11, in which the union council allegedly complained about the use of the airport for military purposes, Verstka noticed.

The authors of the published message claimed that the FSB had “turned pilots into обслуживающий персонал” and was “humiliating them with endless inspections,” and was also “forcing them to participate in the illegal inspection of baggage and personal belongings.”

It also called for an end to the “use of the airport’s civilian infrastructure for military purposes,” in particular the transport and storage of especially dangerous cargo in the open, the deployment of weapons depots, and the covert use of passengers’ baggage “to transport explosive devices.”

In addition, the message called the crew killed aboard Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plane “victims of infighting between the security agencies.”

The union’s website stopped opening on May 12, but the page with the appeal has been preserved in the web archive. According to it, 13 critical comments from users were posted under the document within 40 minutes on the morning of May 12, even though there are almost no comments under other posts on the site.

Verstka was unable to reach union president Igor Deldyuzhov by phone, as all calls were disconnected. At the union’s general phone number, a man who identified himself as Sergei Gromadin, who until 2022 was the organization’s vice president, answered the journalist. He said the document had been posted on the site by fraudsters.

“The site was fraudulently hacked using various personal tools of union employees. So law enforcement agencies are dealing with this matter,” he said.

Read the full article on the website. Link not opening? Read it here.

😘 Subscribe to @svobodnieslova and support Verstka — it matters