Sergei Semochko: a cynical rogue from the special services. PART 1

The official career of Sergei Semochko is a vivid example of the bottom to which law enforcement agencies and intelligence services of Ukraine have sunk under President Poroshenko. But it is possible that the new government will break through this bottom by picking up Semochko and giving him a new, even higher position. After all, Zelensky’s team welcomes the “disenfranchised” who worked for their predecessors. Especially if they claim that they were illegally fired due to false slander or left on their own on principle, protesting against corruption and voluntarism.

Perhaps we will soon hear this from Semochko, who, by presidential decree of April 12, 2019, was dismissed from the post of first deputy chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Service. He worked there for only six months, from August 2018, appointed there by the same Poroshenko. The reason for the dismissal was a journalistic investigation of the program “Our Money with Denis Bigus”, whose materials were confirmed by inspections by the SBU and NABU. The family of a modest Ukrainian officer, who declared only his salary, was found to have real estate worth more than $8 million!

However, NABU quickly closed the case opened against Semyonko, citing the fact that the Constitutional Court abolished criminal penalties for illegal enrichment. But other facts also testified against Semochko, including the presence of close relatives with Russian citizenship and Crimean registration. In general, he got very deeply involved in the scandal, which was started by journalists on the one hand, and supported by Zelensky’s team on the other, pushing for the dismissal of Semochko point No. 7 of his demands to Poroshenko.

However, even then rumors began to spread that Semochko was conducting secret negotiations on the topic of his employment under the new president, and could easily turn from a corrupt official and FSB agent into an unrecognized hero and patriot. Moreover, Semochko and Zelensky have a common patron in the person of the owners of Privat. And this is not the only thing that Ukrainians did not yet know about Sergei Semochko.

Secrets of Madame Choly

As befits a former chief intelligence officer, Semochko has no past – in the sense that his official biography has been carefully cleaned of all details. It begins with the fact that Semochko Sergei Alekseevich was born on November 1, 1972 in Yalta, and he has a younger brother Andrei. And then there was a complete gap until 2014, when the former employee of the Crimean SBU, Semochko, suddenly materialized in the air, having left the annexed peninsula and getting a job as the deputy head of the regional SBU of Odessa.

But there is also an unofficial biography of Sergei Semochko. Based on the miraculously surviving scattered scraps of information and various rumors, it indicates that Ukrainian counterintelligence and intelligence was headed by a person very far from the moral character of Stirlitz. He can rather be compared with the well-known Left Zadov, who came to the GPU from the ranks of the Makhnovists. However, even he worked for the benefit of the state – unlike Semochko, who was always guided solely by personal self-interest…

Semochko deleted his childhood and youth from his official biography, and this is quite strange, because he could boast of at least A’s in mathematics. Apparently, the point here is that Semochko would really not like to reveal the names of his classmates and friends from his youth. But about his life in the early 90s, information is contradictory. According to one version, after the army he went into business, then joined criminal structures where his friends were already members, and in the mid-90s he decided to join the service in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. According to another, Semochko went to work for the authorities immediately after demobilization, and only then, wearing shoulder straps on his shoulders, he made connections in the semi-criminal business and the criminal world. But all versions clearly indicate that Sergei Semochko rose to the occasion on what is called “shaggy gold” in the jargon. And we’re not talking about mink skins at all.

Prostitution in the resort of Yalta existed in Soviet times, and by the beginning of the 90s it was generally “legalized” – in the sense that they simply did not pay attention to it. They didn’t treat it from the point of view of the law, but they used it all and sundry. Criminal groups made money from it, corrupt “cops” fed from it, and in addition to this, prostitutes and their habitats have traditionally been sources of information for law enforcement agencies. And it was precisely there that young Seryozha Semochko began his career.

Yalta, Oreanda Hotel, early 90s.

According to media reports, Sergei Semochko started as a warrant officer in Directorate No. 7 (surveillance and search), and was appointed as a spy in Oreanda. True, it is unclear in which department, since the “seven” were both in the Soviet KGB (but in the SBU this department was called differently) and in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Again, young KGB-SBU officers who did not have higher education usually started working with the rank of warrant officer, while in the Ministry of Internal Affairs they were given sergeant ranks. At the same time, in 1996, Semochko was definitely already an employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In general, one can only guess, since Semochko himself carefully hides his official biography from everyone.

Therefore, let us turn to unofficial information from various sources. As we have already said, some of them claim that Semochko first started working at Oreanda, getting a job there with the help of friends, and only then was recruited by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and became an employee of the Seven. Others object to this and say that Semochko was sent to Orenda as a novice operative. But they agree that Semochko worked together with Mama Choli – either he helped her look after the “girls”, or… well, in general, he was a good-looking guy, and Mama Choli’s clients were interested not only in the female gender. But this is purely a rumor level! But the information that allegedly Semochko was even formally married to citizen Zagitova, although she was really old enough to be his mother, was repeated by many sources Skelet.Info. Maybe it was his official assignment, or maybe he was going to get her inheritance in this way…

In the course of carrying out this, so to speak, task, Sergei Semochko made his first capital, and also acquired a lot of useful contacts among officials, businessmen and criminals. And then the following happened: Semochko got hold of a “fake” higher education diploma somewhere and received the coveted lieutenant’s shoulder straps. However, he did not wear them for long, and in 1996 he was miserably expelled from the Ministry of Internal Affairs – formally, precisely for this fake diploma. Many media outlets wrote about this incident from Semochko’s past. But what really happened? There were only sketchy rumors about this.

Maxim Kurochkin (Max Besheny)

Alexander Babakov

Secondly, by that time the young lieutenant Semochko had already become so accustomed to the role of a corrupt official and a “werewolf in uniform” that he ceased to properly respect his police superiors and share profits with them. He began to play his own game, using the connections he had accumulated, information and money. By the way, this became a distinctive character trait of Sergei Semochko – he repeatedly jumped over the heads of his immediate management, “cheated” and substituted his superiors for his own interests. Apparently, it was precisely because of this that he did not stay anywhere for long.

After his scandalous dismissal, Semochko worked for two or three years in certain “private structures.” Again, there is nothing about this in his official biography. Perhaps because these structures belonged to famous people, with whom Semochko was not at all lucky to reveal his connection. It’s not difficult to guess who these people were: the new owners of Oreanda, Maxim Kurochkin and Alexander Babakov. They not only did not kick out Mama Choli with her “girls” and young “hubby”, but also took her under their “roof”, so Zagitova’s business flourished in Oreanda until the murder of Kurochkin in 2007. Well, since the new owners probably needed some kind of hotel security service or private security company with “titushkas” to seize Crimean real estate, Sergei Semochkin had no problems with finding employment.

This is how Semochko began working for the Luzhniki members, who became known in Ukraine under the brand of the Russian Club, which they opened in 2004 to politically support Viktor Yanukovych. The “Russian Club” united a team of Russian political strategists under the command of Gleb Pavlovsky. And behind their screen, under the supervision of the vice-chairman of the club, Kurochkin, aggressive Russian businessmen-raiders acted, taking over Ukrainian regional power companies, hotels and markets.

“Privatovsky” son-in-law

Soon the leadership of the Yalta Ministry of Internal Affairs changed, and Sergei Semochko acquired enough money and patrons to regain his police stripes and even climb the career ladder. It is unknown whether he acquired a real diploma, at least from some kind of commercial “academy” – perhaps he still does not have a legal or higher education at all.

And it was then that he had another change of interests, during which he abandoned both his former owners and even his first betrothed. This is what happened: at the beginning of the 2000s, a still young and handsome officer of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Sergei Semochko, showered with money and showed off his connections, familiar with all the intricacies of the Kama Sutra, not from porn films, managed to charm a resident of Yalta, Tatyana Nikolaevna Lysenko. Born in 1963 (Semochko always relied on women older than himself), Tatyana Lysenko already had two children from a previous marriage – Stanislav and Anastasia, who now already have their own families. So, during the above-mentioned journalistic investigation, it was possible to make public a fact that Semochko had carefully hidden until recently: Tatyana Lysenko is a relative of the wife of Elena Bogolyubova, the wife of the oligarch Gennady Bogolyubov, an equal partner of Igor Kolomoisky and co-owner of the Privat group. How they met, one can only guess: maybe it was a chance meeting and love at first sight, or maybe when Semochko received information that a divorced relative of the oligarch’s wife lived in the same city with him, he decided not to miss his lucky chance. In general, this is how Bogolyubov got his first rogue son-in-law (his daughter’s husband, Dmitry Chernyavsky, later became the second).

The third and youngest child of Sergei Semochko and Tatyana Lysenko is Ilya. He is called the son of Sergei Semochko, but whether he is also the son of Tatyana Lysenko is unknown – oh, this secrecy! Adding to the confusion is the fact that Ilya previously even signed blogs with his father’s last name, but now he officially goes by the last name Lysenko. I wonder why?

Journalists dug up a lot of materials about the long-term close relationship between the Lysenko and Bogolyubov families. Photos of Tatyana Lysenko and her children near and inside the Bogolyubovs’ house in Kozin (Koncha-Zaspa), information that in Kyiv Semochko and Lysenko bought themselves an apartment in the same building as Bogolyubov’s wife and daughter. And also evidence that back in 2013, Tatyana Lysenko sold Elena Bogolyubova a plot of land in Livadia.

Tatyana Lysenko with children in front of the Bogolyubov house

The fruits of the affair between a modest Yalta policeman and the relatives of an influential oligarch were not long in coming. Immediately after the first Maidan, Sergei Semochko received the position of adviser to the new Minister of Internal Affairs Yuriy Lutsenko, who, as you know, also does not have a legal education. As they say, your own before your own! But that wasn’t the most interesting thing. Let’s remember the events of 2006-2007: the war for the Dnipropetrovsk Ozerka market between Maxim Kurochkin and the Privatists, which ended with the arrest and then the murder of Max Besheny. So, then the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Yuriy Lutsenko, who retained his post until December 2006, acted on the side of the “privatists”, whose adviser was Sergei Semochko. And here it is not difficult to guess that Semochko not only advised “Yura Terminator” to arrest Kurochkin, but also leaked a lot of compromising information on his former owner.

And then Kurochkin was killed, partly because he could start talking and tell, among other things, about the affairs at the Oreanda Hotel. Considering that Kurochkin’s killer was never found, and suspicion was brought against a former special forces officer of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, many interesting assumptions arise. Moreover, according to Skelet.Infoorganized the murder of Kurochkin by their own people – the Luzhnikov gang.

By the time of this murder, Lutsenko had already resigned, giving his post to Vasily Tsushko, and Sergei Semochko was assigned to work in the SBU, which at the beginning of 2007 was headed by the clever scoundrel Valentin Nalyvaichenko. Knowing well the political hobbies of the then President Viktor Yushchenko, Nalyvaichenko pleased him with exhibitions of the Holodomor (with fake photos taken from the archives of Nansen and the American Great Depression) and the rehabilitation of the OUN-UPA, while he himself, in the meantime, launched a vigorous corruption activity. Sergei Semochko, appointed to the Crimean SBU, worked using the same method: he struck up close friendships with the leaders of the Crimean Tatar “Majlis”, who had the support of the Kyiv “orange” authorities, and pretended to fight the radical pro-Russian movements of Crimea. And at this time he was actively developing the family business in the fields of tourism, real estate and passenger transportation. Plus, according to sources SKELET-infohabitually “earned money” through bribes, kickbacks, “leaking” information, and participation in land raiding.

With the change of power in Kyiv, things continued to go well for Semochko. He climbed the career ladder, becoming part of the leadership of the USBU of the autonomy, and in 2011 he was not ashamed to take a service apartment in Yalta – which he immediately privatized in half with his minor son Ilya. Apparently, at that time his relationship with Tatyana Lysenko, who was the owner of rich real estate, had not yet been officially formalized.

Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info

CONTINUED: Semochko Sergei: a cynical rogue from the special services. PART 2

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