Putin Ally's Email 'Hack' Reveals Plan for Territorial Claims in Arctic

Hacked emails of an aide to former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have outlined Moscow's plans to increase Russia's territorial claims in the Arctic, it has been reported.

Medvedev has a very close relationship with Vladimir Putin and served as head of state between 2008 and 2012. Now the deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, Medvedev's rhetoric about Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has become increasingly hawkish, involving repeated threats against the West.

Hackers from group InformNapalm, a volunteer initiative set up in response to Russia's aggression in Ukraine, said it had accessed the email traffic of Alexei Zaklyazminsky, whom it describe as one of Medvedev's six personal assistants.

The group said it had monitored the emails since the start of this year and while some of the obtained information would not be disclosed because it was being used by Ukrainian defense forces, it revealed other details of the correspondence it could make public, and posted screen grabs of documents it said backed up its claims.

Newsweek cannot confirm the veracity of the group's hacking claims and has contacted the Kremlin and InformNapalm for comment.

The group said it found that Medvedev's aide had regularly received research from the the Institute for Strategic Studies and Knowledge Economics at Moscow's Higher School of Economics (HSE), a key Kremlin think tank, about Russia's plans for the Arctic region.

It said that the email traffic showed that the HSE had proposed Russia "substantially increase its maritime state territory in the Arctic," the Ukrainian publication Ukrainska Pravda reported.

This would be by clarifying "baseline systems" from where Russia's Arctic maritime zones are measured. It would also review the "straight baselines along the Arctic coastline" so as "to extend additional waters of the Arctic seas to the historical waters of the Russian Federation."

These proposals "fit into the overall aggressive policy of the Russian Federation," the hackers' website said, according to a translation from Ukrainian. It referred to a decree last month that was later deleted after appearing on the Russian government website that said Moscow was looking to change Russia's maritime borders in the Baltic Sea.

Russia and NATO have scaled up military exercises in the Arctic region where Moscow has oil and gas megaprojects and military bases. In 2023, the U.S. government-wide Arctic strategy said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has "raised geopolitical tensions."

As well as purported plans for the Arctic, the hackers also said they had found documentation of Medvedev visiting nuclear power plants and overseeing a project by state nuclear firm Rosatom about protecting "critical information infrastructure."

InformNapalm said its findings also showed that Medvedev is involved in transitioning the Russian economy to a wartime footing, citing recommendations for subsidizing Russian engineering company JSC Kronstadt to produce more drones, and developing new steel grades for armor by the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works.

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