UKRANIAN HACKERS: Release Emails Tying Top Russian Official to Uprising

A group of Ukrainian hackers has released what it says are the emails of a senior Kremlin official that show a direct Russian role in creating and directing the rebel uprising in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

 The group claimed to have hacked the account of Vladislav Y. Surkov, for years President Vladimir V. Putin’s chief domestic political adviser and now the top official overseeing Russia’s Ukraine policy.

 The group released what it says are thousands of letters to and from Mr. Surkov’s office email account, adding a fat dossier to this year’s vast spill of emails around the world and showing high-level Kremlin meddling in Ukraine.

 While the authenticity of the documents has yet to be fully established, several of the people who corresponded with Mr. Surkov confirmed that the messages of theirs released by the hackers were the ones they sent.

In a telephone interview, Yevgeny A. Chichvarkin, a Russian entrepreneur living in exile in London, confirmed the authenticity of his emails to Mr. Surkov’s aides. “Yes, this is my original text,” he said.

 The Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, analyzed the emails and determined they were genuine, based partly on the routing information.

The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, flatly denied that emails had been leaked, saying somebody “must have had to sweat quite a lot” to forge so many messages.

 Mr. Peskov also said that Mr. Surkov does not use email. And, in fact, only aides to Mr. Surkov answered the correspondence, leaving the extent of his personal involvement unclear.

While Russia’s hand in Ukraine has hardly been a secret, the emails, if genuine, provide fine-grained detail of Mr. Surkov’s office in setting up separatist enclaves in Ukraine’s east.

 They also shed light on the workaday activity of a propaganda shop, including a rare example of a draft text apparently edited in Mr. Surkov’s office that can be compared with a final version.

The Ukrainian group, calling itself CyberHunta, a mocking reference to the Russian assessment that the Kiev government is a fascist junta, released 2,337 emails from the address prm_surkova@gov.ru, many from 2014 as the eastern Ukrainian separatists established their mini-states.

The correspondence included the spreadsheet of a budget to set up a small newspaper in Donetsk, the capital of the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic.

 One email alerted Mr. Surkov’s office to rebel casualties in June 2014 that included a paratrooper from Pskov, a town in northern Russia. At the time, there was considerable political sensitivity over the deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

In another letter, lists of candidates for separatist government positions arrived in Mr. Surkov’s inbox before their appointments.

Mr. Surkov, a former advertising executive, is widely seen as an architect of Mr. Putin’s domestic political framework and the post-Communist ideology of “sovereign democracy,” a term he coined. In 2013, he told an audience in London, “I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian political system.”

Mr. Surkov apparently received in his email inbox a letter from a Moscow magazine editor with a draft of an “open letter from residents of the Donbas,” ostensibly written by local people in Donetsk to describe the horrors of war.

 While it is unclear if Mr. Surkov edited it personally, the changes that appear in the published letter suggest a deft eye for trimming and sharpening a text.

Ukrainian soldiers and Donbas militiamen are dying,” the original read. “Few of them want to risk their lives and kill, most realize this is a fratricidal war.”

 The punchier “Ukrainian soldiers and Donbas militiamen are dying. Most realize this is a fratricidal war,” wound up in the final version.

In another edit, the original, “Our testimony in your eyes should be weightier than the assertions of specialized propagandists,”  became the subtly improved, “Our testimony in your eyes outweighs the assertions of specialized propagandists.”

The Obama administration has accused the Kremlin of hacking into the computers of the Democratic National Committee and various Democratic officials and institutions in an effort to discredit the American political system. In recent weeks, there have been reports of high-level meetings at the White House to discuss ways to punish Moscow, including sanctions and covert action against Russian targets.