By ANDREW E. KRAMER
OCT. 27, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/world/europe/ukraine-russia-emails.htmlMOSCOW — A group of Ukrainian hackers has released what it says are the emails of a senior Kremlin official that show a direct Russian role in creating and directing the rebel uprising in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
The group claimed to have hacked the account of Vladislav Y. Surkov, for years President Vladimir V. Putin’s chief domestic political adviser and now the top official overseeing Russia’s Ukraine policy.
The group released what it says are thousands of letters to and from Mr. Surkov’s office email account, adding a fat dossier to this year’s vast spill of emails around the world and showing high-level Kremlin meddling in Ukraine.
While the authenticity of the documents has yet to be fully established, several of the people who corresponded with Mr. Surkov confirmed that the messages of theirs released by the hackers were the ones they sent.
In a telephone interview, Yevgeny A. Chichvarkin, a Russian entrepreneur living in exile in London, confirmed the authenticity of his emails to Mr. Surkov’s aides. “Yes, this is my original text,” he said.
The Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, analyzed the emails and determined they were genuine, based partly on the routing information.
The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, flatly denied that emails had been leaked, saying somebody “must have had to sweat quite a lot” to forge so many messages.
Mr. Peskov also said that Mr. Surkov does not use email. And, in fact, only aides to Mr. Surkov answered the correspondence, leaving the extent of his personal involvement unclear.
While Russia’s hand in Ukraine has hardly been a secret, the emails, if genuine, provide fine-grained detail of Mr. Surkov’s office in setting up separatist enclaves in Ukraine’s east.
They also shed light on the workaday activity of a propaganda shop, including a rare example of a draft text apparently edited in Mr. Surkov’s office that can be compared with a final version.
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