Putin’s Wallets Seized Yet Another Prime Piece of Crimea’s Coast and a Former Torpedo Factory — Center for Journalistic Investigations

Circulation of stolen goods in occupied Crimea. 24 hectares of land on Cape Kyiyky-Atlama with buildings of the former torpedo plant “Hydropribor” on the outskirts of the settlement of Kaigador (formerly Ordzhonikidze) near Feodosia have passed from the structure of the bank “Rossiya” of Putin’s friends to a closed investment fund managed by a company from the circle of another dictator’s friend—Arkady Rotenberg. The lawful owner of the asset, expropriated by the occupier authorities of the Russian Federation as early as 2014, is Ukrainian businessman and Member of Parliament Serhiy Taruta.

In August 2025, the Centre for Public Integrity revealed that the structures of Putin’s friends and wallets—the Rotenberg brothers—illegally appropriated not only the Yalta Seaport but its entire structural complex from Simeizi to Sudak. Indeed, the Yalta seaport area, besides the freight and passenger terminals in the city center, includes a dozen port facilities and plots along the southeastern coast of Crimea’s Black Sea. This effectively allows control of navigation from Cape Kikieniz to Cape Meganom.

And not only that. Moving westward from the southern coast palaces acquired by Arkady Rotenberg toward Sevastopol, we encounter the construction of a luxurious palace on Cape Sarich, pass by the desecrated “eco-hotel” facility of Rotenberg’s firms guarded zone of Laspi Bay, and enter Balaklava Bay, which Rotenberg companies, ruining the historic view and archaeological monuments, fill with elite hotels instead of a classical marina. Further—development in Sevastopol itself and the Belbek airfield again handed to reconstruction by them. As it turned out, there is movement of illegal Rotenberg ownership along the southeastern coast of Crimea as well.

In November 2023, Russian media reported that the structure of the bank “Rossiya” had purchased a plot of 24 hectares in Feodosia, where the former Hydropribor plant stood. In reality, this plot and the abandoned buildings of the former torpedo plant lie 14 kilometers from the town—in the settlement to which the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine returned its historic name Kaigador—the old fortress, as there has been an Armenian fortress here since the 11th century. But on Russian maps the settlement still bears the Stalin-era Ordzhonikidze name.

The structure that “bought” this asset from the occupier’s Ministry of Property in Crimea