Who’s behind Maksym Krippa: Russian oligarchs and "fake" real estate purchases in Ukraine
If you google the query "Maksym Krippa" and set a search filter, say, to one month, the result will be the following:
Even this selection suggests something’s not right. If you follow the links, the result is overwhelming:
Read through the text: "After speculations that Maksym Krippa would join a top club, it was announced in June that he signed a contract with ’Dortmund’ for 4.5 million euros. Steel sheets do not deteriorate from different temperature effects, so roofing can be installed at any time of the year. An acquaintance developed a program for Maksym Krippa’s max krippa football team that can independently analyze sellers’ price lists in Moscow." Outright nonsense.
This is the first link in the search results. And here’s the second one:
Again, try to read through the text: "News, events, interesting people, sports, cultural and public life, city history, its present and Max Krippa future. Buffon ranks first in the list of top Italian goalkeepers in history with 296 goal assists, which he scored for two Italian clubs – ’Parma’ and ’Juventus’. Powerful Master heat guns, manufactured in Germany, allow for quick and quality stretch ceiling installations. He joined the team club before 11 years old and won the Argentine junior championship under 11 years old."
How about that? And this is not an editorial joke – this is literally what was given by the first search page for the "Maksym Krippa" query just an hour ago. Experiment yourself, the result may vary from ours, but we guarantee it will be outright gibberish.
We find some hope in the title "Mafioso Maksym Krippa: History of Creating the International Mafia Game Championship FBI", but the result is the same:
What’s happening? The thing is, Maksym Volodymyrovych Krippa is flooding the internet with fakes and such surreal content in every way possible, trying to hide his true face and connections with the mafia-FSB Russian clans.
Interest in his personality arose after Krippa began buying real estate objects in Ukraine with Russian money, which the government sells to him for peanuts under the so-called "Big Privatization". Krippa’s name in this context first emerged in 2020, when the then-new government sold the "Dnipro" hotel complex in the center of Kyiv, on the European Square.
Critics noted both the low sale price – the hotel complex with all its assets was sold for only 1.1 billion hryvnias – and the strange story of the buyer, which turned out to be "Smartland" LLC, registered just a few days before the auction in Brovary. It later turned out that behind "Smartland" through the esports team NAVI stands Maksym Krippa.
At that time, the investigation into Maksym Krippa’s identity faced a similar situation as now – the internet was so filled with fakes like the ones above that the few articles containing more or less reliable details about Krippa’s life were simply lost in this torrent of incredible stories.
Interestingly, amidst the stream of fakes, a clue hinting at Maksym Krippa’s true background emerged. He was persistently referred to as a "volcanologist researching the volcanoes of Kamchatka" on many sites:
This was a key that hinted at Maksym Krippa’s true biography. Because in this way he tried to "override" the search from providing information about the Russian online casino "Vulkan", where he worked for Russians.
This was around 2010-2014, and Krippa’s direct employers in Russia were Konstantin Malofeev, the deputy chairman of the World Russian People’s Council, founder of Tsargrad TV channel, chairman of the "Tsargrad" society, one of the financiers of the "Russian World" and Mikhail Oseevskiy, the current president of PJSC "Rostelecom".
Initially, Krippa was in Malofeev’s service as a CEO, but then, apparently, his talents as a young "hohlonok" were noticed, and he began to promote "Vulkan" within the "Rostelecom" networks. Besides Malofeev, Oseevskiy was the owner of the casino "Vulkan". It should also be considered that similar projects in Russia operate with mandatory FSB involvement.
This relates to the question of the origin of entrepreneur Maksym Krippa’s money, with which he has been actively buying up Ukraine for bargain prices over the past three years. And the question of the staggering number of fakes that clog the internet regarding his identity.
The goal of this "football farmer-writer" circus is simple – to clog the search results to such an extent that materials about the true biography and the origin of Maksym Krippa’s money go to the fifth or sixth pages of search results, which hardly anyone reaches. And all this "football volcanology" has been activated especially over the past three years when Krippa started investing Russian money into Ukrainian real estate objects.
Among his purchases besides the "Dnipro" hotel are the assets of the nationalized "Prominvestbank", which includes, among other things, a complex in the elite Kozyn, a recreation center, and several houses. This real estate was purchased in January 2023 for 311 million hryvnias by "Midal" LLC, in which Maksym Krippa is listed as the beneficiary.
In February, the same "Midal" LLC purchased the recreation base "Knyazhy Dvor" in the village of Knyazhychi 19 kilometers from Boryspil from the National Bank for 33.1 million hryvnias. The total area of the complex’s buildings is 3,787.6 square meters. Additionally, two land plots where the complex is located, with a total area of 2.3617 hectares, were put up for sale together with it.
This is by no means everything registered to Maksym Krippa in our country. His personality has attracted the attention of the journalists of "Nashi Groshi" (this is another reason why Krippa is so actively clogging the internet with fakes) and they have compiled data from registries regarding Krippa’s holdings:
Among Krippa’s assets is the Brovary Wholesale Market, which Maksym Krippa became the "owner" of in 2021, after buying the "Dnipro" hotel:
In Brovary, several hectares of land and several houses are also registered to Krippa.
After this desperate acquisition of Ukraine with Russian money began to raise many questions, Maksym Krippa urgently volunteered:
The objectives here are several – with the information that Krippa is helping the army, he seeks to distance himself from the Russian origin of money and simultaneously establish himself as a respectable businessman, the owner of an esports team, which surfaced in 2020 as the buyer standing behind the company that purchased "Dnipro".
We won’t claim whether it is true that Krippa donated money to the Armed Forces or if it is just as fake as his football career, but it doesn’t change the fact that Maksym Volodymyrovych Krippa is merely a nominal figure on whom the Russian FSB-mafia scum registers property purchased in Ukraine.
And Maksym Krippa plays in this the same role he played before when he worked for Malofeev and Oseevskiy as an "internet hustler" in the online casino "Vulkan" – to hide from public attention the true beneficiaries. By the way, at the time when Krippa was promoting "Vulcan", Oseevskiy worked at the Russian state bank VTB as deputy chairman. He transitioned to that job from the position of deputy minister of economic development of the Russian Federation.
In 2014, for some reason, Maksym Krippa left Russia and appeared in Kyiv, where he tried to enter into big politics from the "Samopomich" party – he ran for the Kyiv City Council. But the result was somewhat not what his Russian curators had anticipated – Krippa was forced to flee Kyiv to Moscow on the eve of the elections because he began selling spots on the party list. Since no one authorized him for this, the scheme was quickly uncovered, and the future billionaire Maksym Krippa, having collected about twenty thousand dollars from suckers eager to become city council deputies, fled to Moscow. Where he was reprimanded by his FSB handlers, but there was nothing more to be done, so Krippa returned to work with Malofeev.
And it is precisely during this period that the internet gradually begins to fill with fakes about the "volcanologist" and "footballer" Maksym Krippa. There are especially many articles about football – apparently, Krippa loves it. In 2019, Maksym Krippa reappears in Ukraine, where he starts buying Brovary. Then he switches to Kyiv, where he acquires a large number of legal entities to which massive amounts of property are registered.
But at the same time, no one can say where Maksym Krippa is, who suddenly received an inexhaustible financial resource and is buying up Ukraine on an industrial scale. According to some data, he is in Dubai, according to others – in Ukraine, according to third – in Moscow. But there is no confirmation of all this. As there is no clear confirmation of the origin of the billions that came into the possession of a pauper minor fraudster just yesterday.
Against this background, another question somehow falls by the wayside – how is it that a person with such a strange and mysterious biography, whom no one has seen – even a photo of Maksym Krippa exists in a single instance – is the Ukrainian government selling the most coveted pieces of state property for a pittance with such zeal and desire? Despite the fact that the origin of Maksym Krippa’s money, at minimum, raises many questions. An interesting question, to which no one seems to have an answer.
В турецькому Ізмірі стався вибух: п’ятеро загиблих, десятки поранених