Cults and Esotericism in Russia’s Hybrid Warfare
Luigi Corvaglia
The Story of a Man of Many Faces
The Pro-Ukrainian Party
Eduard Kovalenko ended his fiery anti-Russian speech with an outstretched arm in a Nazi salute. It was 26 June 2004. The Russian-speaking Ukrainian led a group known as the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA), one of the factions that emerged from the split of the UNA-UNSO (Ukrainian National Assembly–Ukrainian People’s Self-Defence). He had just declared his support for Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-European candidate for the Ukrainian presidency. The Suspilne archive holds sixteen minutes of unedited footage of the event. Its catalogue entry describes a march under fascist banners through European Square and along Khreshchatyk Avenue, followed by a rally in St Sophia Square. Yet just two days earlier, Yushchenko’s campaign team had distanced itself from the event. On the day of the march, his campaign manager, Oleksandr Zinchenko, denounced it as a provocation.
According to political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov’s account, this ostentatious show of support was intended to discredit Yushchenko in the eyes of Western observers. Images of the Hitler salute circulated in the media alongside the pro-Western candidate’s name, while his rejection of the unsolicited endorsement attracted little attention. Shekhovtsov points to the operation’s success in a report on the Ukrainian elections by the British Helsinki Human Rights Group, which listed Kovalenko among Yushchenko’s supporters.
The episode can be understood in terms of “active measures”, the Russian intelligence services’ term for covert influence and disinformation operations. In 2004, the immediate target was Yushchenko, who was made vulnerable to attack by being portrayed as close to neo-Nazi groups. More broadly, images of this kind helped feed the narrative of a Ukraine dominated by neo-Nazis, which could be used to justify aggression against the country. Shekhovtsov reports that Shkil, the leader of the UNA-UNSO, said the march had been orchestrated by Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Russian politician who then headed Ukraine’s presidential administration. Medvedchuk also had a personal tie to Vladimir Putin, who is godfather to his daughter Daryna.
The Pro-Russian Party
Two years later, Kovalenko was leading the pro-Russian SPAS party, the Social-Patriotic Assembly of Slavs, registered in February 2006. Its manifesto explicitly invoked National Socialism and called for a “unified Slavic system”. SPAS opposed Ukraine joining NATO and the European Union. According to the Kherson news outlet Most, after 2014 Kovalenko and his party publicly described the war in the Donbas as a “civil war”. This echoed Moscow’s framing of the conflict as an internal Ukrainian dispute in which Russia claimed the role of mediator. The ruling of 18 April 2024 dissolving the party also detailed the role of members of the SPAS branch in Crimea in the events leading to Russia’s annexation of the peninsula.
In May 2017, a court in Henichesk sentenced Kovalenko to five years in prison for obstructing the activities of the Ukrainian armed forces and calling for actions that threatened public order. Ukraine’s Supreme Court upheld the conviction on 26 February 2019. On 29 December that year, however, Kovalenko was released in a prisoner exchange with the occupied Donbas. According to Adrian Karatnycky, writing for UkraineAlert in January 2020, Moscow had insisted on his inclusion in the exchange. Karatnycky interprets the demand for his release as a sign of the value Moscow placed on figures of this kind in its hybrid warfare.
In February 2020, in a republished interview with News Front, Kovalenko claimed to have helped break up the UNA-UNSO. The man who had so publicly backed Yushchenko in the name of Ukrainian nationalism now told a pro-Russian audience that he had been dismantling the opposing movement from within.
In January 2021, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) accused him of collaborating with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and the intelligence service of the self-proclaimed Luhansk republic. The alleged activities included promoting protests over utility rates, initiatives to restore water supplies to Crimea and demands for autonomy. According to the allegations, these civic demands were used to destabilise the country. The news outlet Graty’s account also reports that Kovalenko disputed the authenticity of the confession video released by the SBU and points to inconsistencies in the investigators’ account.
In 2022, Kovalenko was indicted for high treason in a separate case. Prosecutors allege that after the full-scale invasion he passed information to Russian contacts on the positions of Ukrainian units and on military and infrastructure targets. The 2024 ruling banning SPAS from operating states that the criminal trial had already moved to consideration of the merits. The public sources consulted for case 761/28141/22 document the charge and the proceedings. Two years after the ruling, in April 2026, Ukraine’s Centre for Investigative Journalism reported that the trial was continuing in absentia. Kovalenko had disappeared while in the Russian-occupied part of Kherson region and was declared a fugitive on 14 September 2022.
The Apocalyptic Cult
On 24 October 2020, Kovalenko gave an interview to AllatRa TV Dnipro, a channel run by the Russian-Ukrainian apocalyptic cult AllatRa. The live broadcast focused on the Creative Society project. The interviewer introduced him as an “entrepreneur, socially active individual and leader of the SPAS party”. They discussed what each citizen could do to build a new society. Launched by AllatRa in 2019, Creative Society proposes a model of society based on eight principles, including the primacy of human life, free access to essential goods and services, and citizen participation in collective decisions. In this third incarnation, Kovalenko appears as an idealist working to build an ideal society alongside an apocalyptic esoteric movement. AllatRa combines UFO beliefs and apocalyptic prophecies with pseudoscientific theories that attribute the climate crisis to natural cycles and cosmic radiation. In November 2023, the SBU and the police raided more than twenty of the movement’s premises. The SBU accused AllatRa figures of justifying Russian aggression and promoting a union of Slavic peoples under Moscow’s leadership. In 2025, however, Russia’s Supreme Court banned AllatRa as an “extremist” organisation. Today the movement rejects allegations that it is pro-Russian, condemns the invasion and supports Ukraine’s territorial integrity. It has even accused its critics of being agents of the FSB and the Russian Orthodox Church.
It is difficult to gauge the sincerity of that stance in light of Kovalenko’s trajectory, which shows how a public position can serve a purpose at odds with the one it professes. What explains the mutual interest between Kovalenko and AllatRa? Could the spiritual movement be a tool of Russia’s hybrid warfare, despite its current pro-Ukrainian statements? This hypothesis was raised in the February 2025 report Investigative Report on AllatRa (“Creative Society”): Origins, Activities, and National Security Implications, which examines the possible use of the movement as a vehicle for geopolitical influence and disinformation. If so, other esoteric cults may be involved as well.
The Ideological Framework
The Ukrainian legal scholar Iryna Kremenovska places SPAS, the party Kovalenko once led, in the orbit of the KOB, a movement that combines neopaganism, the veneration of Stalin and antisemitic conspiracy theories. KOB takes its name from the Russian Koncepcija obščestvennoj bezopasnosti (“Concept of Public Security”). The doctrine was developed in the final years of the Soviet Union by a collective calling itself the “Internal Predictor of the USSR”. General Konstantin Petrov popularised its ideas in the 1990s. Another of its advocates was Viktor Efimov, who in 2003 gave lectures at the FSB headquarters in St Petersburg, as Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan document.
Its foundational text, Dead Water, combines a theory of social governance, esotericism and a conspiratorial reading of history. In this account, a hidden elite known as the “Global Predictor” is said to have steered events for centuries through conceptual power, the ability to shape the categories through which people interpret the world. Antisemitic and anti-Masonic themes recur throughout this account.
The term “predictor” comes from mathematics, specifically the predictor–corrector model.
The KOB applies this logic to society. To govern is to anticipate several possible outcomes and steer the system towards the chosen one. At the top of its hierarchy of means of governance is information that shapes people’s worldview, forming the habits through which they recognise and interpret what happens. Next come accounts of history and information that feeds ideologies, religious beliefs and explanations of events. From this perspective, “conceptual power” consists in shaping the categories through which a community judges problems and solutions. The “Global Predictor” is the doctrine’s name for the hidden hand it claims directs history. The idea of governing through categories of thought is thus absorbed into a conspiratorial and antisemitic narrative.
In their report Vile Bodies: How Fascists, Cultists and Spooks Spearheaded Russia’s War on Ukraine, Pierre Vaux and Michael Weiss devote an entire chapter to the KOB. In 2014, some of its adherents took control of television broadcasts in Sloviansk and aired lectures by the Russian general Konstantin Petrov. Another activist, Kirill Stremousov, became deputy head of the Russian occupation administration in Kherson in 2022. In the same city, the report notes the presence of Rodnovers, followers of Slavic neopaganism, and of Kirill Kirichenko, a KOB activist who founded a Rodnover temple. The authors also mention the pyramid cult of Hennadiy Turkin, who promoted a “territorial commune” in 2018, and AllatRa, which they describe as a New Age cult. They note two specific instances involving AllatRa. One is the interview with Kovalenko already mentioned. The other is the inclusion of a text on the KOB by Viktor Efimov in the movement’s online library (p. 40 and note 144). They place SPAS, Kovalenko’s tiny party, in the same milieu, describing it as a political grouping with a mystical and communist bent.
The theme of Slavic unity also recurs in AllatRa’s literature. In Crossroads. Primordial Shambhala, published under the name Anastasia Novykh, the figure destined to unite the Slavic peoples is Nomo, a character whose biography recalls that of Vladimir Putin. According to a former AllatRa coordinator, members of the movement openly discussed the resemblance. The SPAS manifesto’s “unified Slavic system” thus finds a parallel in AllatRa’s narrative of a saviour who was to bring about that union.
Pierre Vaux and Michael Weiss likewise place the two groups in the same milieu in Vile Bodies, without documenting a formal affiliation.
The Cyprus Lead
Slidstvo.Info found the signature of Andriy Mykhalchuk, one of AllatRa’s Ukrainian founders, on the incorporation documents of Allatra Science Limited (HE 341565), which was registered in Nicosia, Cyprus, in March 2015. Slovak public broadcaster STVR found that the company shared a director and a corporate secretarial firm with Genetechma Finance Limited, whose ultimate owner, according to the Paradise Papers, was the Russian government. Both intermediaries appeared in the records of numerous other companies.
Allatra Science Limited is among the many companies on the list of struck-off entities published in the Cyprus Official Gazette on 30 June 2021. The list also includes B.H.C. Buildhouse Construction PLC (HE 340654), which was registered in Limassol in February 2015, the same year Mykhalchuk’s company was established. One of its listed directors is a man named Eduard Kovalenko.
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