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- Drug harm: the identities of the Hydra leaders who are hiding from the investigation have become known
Drug harm: the identities of the Hydra leaders who are hiding from the investigation have become known
Vladimir Verevkin, a former employee of the Khabarovsk City Hall, as well as entrepreneurs Alexey Kornienko and Roman Savonin are wanted in the case of the activities of the largest drug shop Hydra. Izvestia identified these three people, whose names were first mentioned by the investigation during the trial of Alexei Baykov, one of the founders of this illegal trading platform. Law enforcement officials believe that Kornienko was one of the leaders of Hydra, and Verevkin and Savonin were responsible for financial reporting and cryptocurrency operations of the illegal network. What could three Khabarovsk residents — a furniture dealer, a carpenter and an IT specialist - have to do with the creation and operation of one of the largest drug shops with a turnover of $1.3 billion a year? in the investigation of Izvestia.
One out of a hundred
At the trial of Alexei Baykov in Perm, which the investigation considers to be the organizer and one of the main administrators of the Hydra drug market place, the names of his likely key accomplices were revealed for the first time. Representatives of the prosecution named Alexey Kornienko, as well as certain Verevkin and Savonin. Izvestia, using open data analysis, managed to establish exactly who they were talking about, as well as details of their biographies.
Hydra was one of the world's largest darknet platforms for the sale of illegal substances and hacker services. It appeared in November 2015 and soon grew into a huge shadow structure that included 15 divisions, including financial, technical, advertising, personnel, as well as security and support services.
According to the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Hydra's revenue grew from $10 million in 2016 to more than $1.3 billion in 2020. In 2022, OFAC named Hydra the largest darknet store providing services, including to cybercriminals, and imposed sanctions against it.
In the same year, 2022, the law enforcement agencies of Russia and Germany conducted operations against Hydra — in Germany they arrested the servers through which the drug shop's operations were conducted, and in Russia they detained several people whom the investigation considered to be involved in the activities of the illegal marketplace. The investigation has put at least three other alleged members of the criminal community on the wanted list, but their names and roles in the criminal community have not been revealed until recently.
Izvestia's correspondents began by examining the email addresses that, according to the results of a search in open sources, were associated with people who bore the first and last name "Alexey Kornienko" — there were more than 90 of them in total. One of them was different from the others: it was registered on the NXT domain, unlike the usual Yandex, Google or Mail. Checking the account led to Alexey Valeryevich Kornienko, born in 1984, who is wanted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Kornienko was born in the Smolensk region. In the 2010s, he worked for the office furniture sales company Russophis. From 2011 to 2021, he owned half of the AFK Group construction company. At various times, he owned two companies called Whitecraft, which were engaged in the sale of products, and since 2020, the Magic Wood company, which produced wood products.
Kirill Gridnev was the CEO of Rusofis, AFK Group and both Whitecraft companies. Izvestia sent him questions about Kornienko, but received no response. According to the Kontur service.Focus", the companies were unprofitable, now they are liquidated.
It is unknown what nickname Kornienko used on the Hydra. Among the addresses he owned was an e-mail with the name "Takeshi Kitano." The administrator with that nickname was a member of the site's team, but there is no evidence to identify him with Kornienko. Kitano was responsible for working with users. According to other sources, Kornienko could have used the pseudonym Resident, but Izvestia's sources also cast doubt on this version.
There were no visible expensive assets for Kornienko himself in Russia. At the same time, an apartment with an area of about 170 square meters could have been issued to his wife. m in the Moscow residential complex "Sadovye Kvartaly" worth about 200 million rubles. At the same time, Izvestia did not find any official sources of income that would allow the Kornienko family to purchase such an apartment.
According to Izvestia's sources, Alexey Baykov, who is currently being tried in Perm, also lived in the same complex.
Kornienko did not leave Russia immediately after the shutdown of Hydra's servers and the arrests of a number of its participants in 2022. According to Izvestia's sources, he lived in the country for about two more years, and went abroad only in 2024 - it was from that year that he has been on the federal and international wanted list. He is charged with organizing or leading a criminal community, as well as aiding and abetting attempted drug crimes and completed crimes.
Former employee of Khabarovsk City Hall
According to the charges filed in the Perm court, the financial issues of the site were supervised by a certain Verevkin from 2015 to June 2018. The investigation believes that he was preparing reports on the flow of funds and cryptocurrency assets. No other data was announced during the trial. Izvestia was helped to establish the full name of the alleged "accountant" of the illegal structure by journalist Andrei Kaganskikh, who is writing a book about the Russian drug market of the 2000s. It turned out to be Vladimir Yuryevich Verevkin, born in 1984.
Until 2015, Verevkin worked in the Khabarovsk City Administration. In the resolution of the Mayor's Office for 2012, he is listed as a consultant in the information security sector. According to published biographical information, Verevkin devoted eight years to municipal service and left the administration in 2015, the year of the Hydra launch.
Even before working in the mayor's office, Verevkin's name appeared in the criminal chronicle. In 2004, Khabarovsk-based Kommersant wrote about three young men accused of bank card fraud. According to investigators, they used other people's banking details and forged documents to purchase goods and services, and then resold the purchases.
The newspaper named 19-year-old Vladimir Verevkin and Alexei Boikov, a former student at the Far Eastern State University of Railway Transport, among the defendants. Probably, in the 2004 publication, Baykov's last name was misspelled, as it was written with an "o". According to Izvestia, the defendants received suspended sentences.
In 2016, a company was registered in Krasnodar, which is now called Internettorgyug. Verevkin is listed as its founder and CEO. The main profile of the company is software development.
According to Andrei Kaganskikh's investigation, after the closure of Hydra, Verevkin left for Turkey, and could later move to Batumi. He is on the federal wanted list.
Old neighbors
At the trial in Perm, another alleged Hydra participant was also named. In the message of the newspaper "Properm" about the course of the trial, his last name was given as Sabonin. According to the prosecution, he was responsible for the exchange offices, which made it possible to conceal the participants in the operations and the origin of the funds during their subsequent conversion into cash.
Izvestia allegedly managed to establish who it could be. On the portal of the Moscow City Court, we found a case against Savonin R. A. We are talking about Roman Alexandrovich Savonin, a native of Khabarovsk, born in 1985. He is wanted for similar articles with other defendants, and in Khabarovsk he lived several houses away from Alexei Baykov. Another detail is that in Krasnogorsk, Savonin was a registered neighbor (one house, but different apartments) with Lyudmila Amelina, Baykov's common—law wife.
These circumstances suggest that the name of the second financier could have been mentioned in the media with a mistake: it could be about Roman Savonin.
According to the information available to Izvestia, before participating in Hydra, he could have worked for several years as a technician in a large electronics retail chain. Later, Savonin registered an individual entrepreneur and became the owner of two companies: Eco Location, which was engaged in trapping and shooting wild animals, and Alfa Windows, which specialized in carpentry. According to the "Contour.Focus", both companies had zero profit. Alfa Windows is currently in the process of being excluded from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities.
Millions of wallets
After the defeat of Hydra in 2022, the persecution of its participants is going on in several cases at once. Some have already ended with court verdicts, some have not yet. For example, in October 2025, the Dzerzhinsky District Court of Yaroslavl convicted Dmitry Pavlov and Boris Gubko. The investigation considered the first one to be the head of the Hydra system administrators group, who provided rental and maintenance of the marketplace infrastructure, and the second one to be a sysadmin contractor.
This process was interesting because it revealed the structure of Hydra's financial division (which presumably included the aforementioned Verevkin and Savonin). According to the verdict in the Yaroslavl case, the accountants took into account receipts and expenses, distributed cryptocurrencies, and paid for equipment, servers, domain names, and IP addresses.
In the correspondence examined by the court, Dmitry Pavlov sent the addresses of crypto wallets to the interlocutors who performed the functions of accountants. The participants discussed the purchase of equipment, payment for services and reporting. In his testimony, Pavlov estimated his income from cooperation with the platform in 2021-2022 at about 15 million rubles annually.
Calculations on the site were centralized. The buyers' cryptocurrencies were transferred to wallets controlled by Hydra, and the internal balance was displayed in the personal accounts of sellers of illegal goods and services. The seller could withdraw the payment after confirming the purchase or after 24 hours if there was no dispute. The commission was deducted automatically.
The court pointed out that at least one million cryptocurrency wallets with individual addresses were opened for the operation of the financial system.
Dmitry Pavlov entered into a pre-trial agreement, testified and received six years in prison. Boris Gubko pleaded not guilty, claiming that he did not know about the contents of the servers he served. But he was found guilty of participating in a criminal community and sentenced to 21 years in a high-security penal colony.
The most high-profile verdict so far in the investigation of the Hydra series of cases has been life imprisonment for Stanislav Moiseev, a resident of Khimki near Moscow. This decision was made by the Moscow Regional Court in December 2024. According to investigators, in 2015-2016, he created a criminal community for drug trafficking with units in almost 60 regions of Russia and Belarus. During the trial, a number of media outlets called Moiseev the creator of Hydra, but he was only the owner of one of the stores located on this marketplace.
The case of Alexei Baykov
Alexey Baykov, who is currently being tried in Perm, was arrested in 2024, two years after the closure of Hydra. He remained in Russia and lived in an apartment in Sadovye Kvartal, registered to a common-law spouse. That's where he was detained.
During the search, cash and cryptocurrency totaling over 300 million rubles were seized. According to a report on the Perm trial, the value of the arrested assets of the accused and his relatives exceeded 1 billion rubles. The property includes apartments, land plots, money, cryptocurrency, and cars, including a Maserati.
According to Izvestia, Baykov's common-law wife Lyudmila Amelina tried to get the arrest lifted from the property. The result of her appeal to the editorial board is unknown.
According to the "Contour.Focus", Baykov was associated with several LLC companies. In particular, he was the founder of the Moy Gorod company, which owns the Moy children's center in Moscow.
In addition, in Stary Oskol, Baykov has been a co-owner of the Ostek company, which produces glass, since 2019. In 2025, his company's revenue amounted to 336 million rubles, but it still ended the year with a loss of 2 million rubles.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
