Painted crosses on roads and houses in Ukraine in the first days of the war were left by supporters of the Russian nationalist Igor Mangushev. This is stated in the investigation of the Sistema project associated with Radio Liberty.
In the first days of the invasion, Mangushev in his Telegram channel suggested that supporters “paralyze the law enforcement agencies and emergency services” of Ukraine with false messages to hotlines and “cause panic among the population” with fakes on social networks.
Mangushev’s ally Vladislav Ugolny clarified to Sistema that he used urban legends that existed in Donetsk since 2014 about “red jackets” and beacons with which those who spoke in support of Ukraine allegedly marked themselves.
Photos of spray-painted crosses on roads and buildings began to appear in Ukrainian groups and public pages, which, according to descriptions, were needed to “land enemy troops” from Russia or “correct strikes.” The cyber police of Ukraine clarified to journalists that tags were mentioned in every second of the 50 thousand messages received in their chat bot.
As Sistema’s analysis showed, some of the photos with crosses on social networks were not taken in the places that were attributed to them. “Our friends painted the first such mark on the roof of a house in Moscow, in the Altufyevo district,” said Mangushev himself. At the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian authorities issued warnings that the crosses could not be used for targeting, but were needed to “give rise to spy mania.”
“The legend of the "red tags" lived a little longer after the first panic, but beyond February — March 2022 it no longer had a big effect,” notes Sistema.
According to journalist sources in the police, those detained in the first days of the war for marking “most often turned out to be harmless outcasts”, “often homeless or unemployed”, who were released after preventive conversations.
Sistema discovered only one criminal case involving the application of crosses and marks that reached the court — against a 25-year-old resident of the front-line city of Novogrodovka, Donetsk region. According to investigators, she received two thousand hryvnia for each tag from an acquaintance who went to fight on the side of the self-proclaimed DPR. The girl was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but then the case was returned for review.
Igor Mangushev in 2014, when he was 28 years old, fought in the Donbass and created his own military company there, PMC ENOTH Corp. Later, his mercenaries became involved in criminal cases in Russia, and the nationalist left the country. Mangushev was associated with the projects of Yevgeny Prigozhin; oppositionist Lyubov Sobol called him the organizer of surveillance.
At the beginning of a full-scale war, Mangushev was in Lebanon, and then came to Donetsk. There, in August 2022, during a speech in front of a military man, he brought onto the stage the skull of, in his words, a Ukrainian killed at Azovstal. Six months later, in February 2023, he was shot.
Although Mangushev himself denied any connection with the GRU of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, in December 2023 he was mentioned in the reports of military intelligence colonel Denis Smolyaninov published by the Dossier center. Smolyaninov's agent wrote that his group of five people spread false messages in chat rooms and on emergency hotlines.