“This year, transportation from the occupied territories to Belarus is ongoing, though on a much smaller scale”, – WRITE: www.radiosvoboda.org
Cargo from the occupied territories of Ukraine to Belarus, according to journalists, is delivered by a company that was linked to the former Ukrainian politician and oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk last year, also known as Putin’s godfather.
This was found out by Ukrainian BRC partners. As a result of her investigation, the BRC learned what large Belarusian enterprises cooperate with this company.
In 2024, Belarusian enterprises received 674 wagons of different goods from the occupied territories of Ukraine. Of this amount, more than 40% occurred in the last quarter. The BCC journalists learned from the documents that their partners from the Belarusian Railway Community were accessed. The carrier was the Russian Florence LLC.
The company mainly transported metal and mineral raw materials, but at the end of 2024 a new position appeared – anthracite. It was in the fourth quarter that nine wagons of this type of coal were set for OJSC Skidal Sugar Factory.
This year, transportation from the occupied territories to Belarus is ongoing, albeit on a much smaller scale. According to the “Community of Railways of Belarus”, in the first quarter of 2025, Belarusian enterprises received 30 freight cars through Florence. 14 wagons with various steel products were received by the Metallurgical Company of the Prombadmetal. The seven wagons of sheet steel received CJSC “OZTM” (Osipovitsky plant of transport engineering), and the same number of wagons of foundry coke during this period was delivered for OJSC “Homelbuda Materials”.
According to the “Community of Railways of Belarus”, the logistics chain looks like this: cargoes are transported from the occupied regions of Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson by rail to Russia, and from there to Belarus. Florence is the organizer of transportation on the Russian section of the route and further to the Belarusian border, after which the responsibility is taken by Belarusian freight forwarders.
BRC was able to identify additional details of this scheme. In February 2025, about 70 tons of metal products went from Yenakiyev in the occupied part of Donetsk region to the Stepianka station near Minsk. The recipient was the metallurgical company “PMBUDmetal”, and a freight forwarder in Belarus – LLC “Aventraine”.
BRC journalists also found out where part of the cargo came from: last year the product sent the Donetsk Acid -resistant LLC. He put two batches of 69 tons of diabase powder for the private enterprise “Special Khimom complex”, registered in the Minsk region.
Among the main Belarusian plants that consume goods coming through Florence are the Belas Automobile Giant, the Osipovichi Plant of Transport Machine and Minsk Manufacturer of Building Materials.
At the end of 2023, the system “System” first announced the connection between Florence and Viktor Medvedchuk. Journalists found that in the occupied Donbass the little -known company replaced the previous carrier related to oligarch Sergey Kurchenko and became the main logistics operator. It is claimed that Viktor Medvedchuk is the godfather of one of Putin’s daughters. In September 2022, Medvedchuk, who was detained in Ukraine, was exchanged for a group of Azovstal defenders.