Submarines are an extremely important element in the military-political confrontation between NATO and hostile states. They play a special role in nuclear deterrence; thanks to them, countries conduct reconnaissance, monitor ship movements, carry out various acts of sabotage, etc. In addition to all of the above, Russians also directly strike Ukrainian territory by launching non-nuclear versions of Kalibr missiles. Or record historical footage for Putin showing how American military personnel seize shadow fleet tankers. Although Kremlin submarines are somewhat technologically inferior compared to U.S. submarines, they represent one of the key security factors for Moscow.

One of the main developers of submarines and special underwater vehicles in the aggressor state is the Malakhit Design Bureau (full name – “St. Petersburg Marine Engineering Bureau ‘Malakhit’ named after Academician N. N. Isanin”). This bureau has developed more than 100 submarine projects, and its specialists are currently working on a new fifth-generation submarine called “Husky.”

At the same time, some leading specialists at Malakhit are working on implementing a fundamentally new global concept intended to ensure Russia’s dominance over other states, allow it to take leadership in Arctic resource extraction, and divide the world into spheres of influence between itself, the Americans, and the Chinese.

The editorial team of Channel 24 received more than 80,000 emails for analysis from the mailbox of the Deputy Chief Designer for Weapons at Malakhit and member of the Scientific Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Andrey Kurnosov, provided by the private intelligence company Dallas.

Read in the article how the Kremlin was preparing to seize Europe as early as 2016 and planning large-scale sabotage, how Moscow intends to create global chaos to obtain a leading role in a new world security system, and what the war ideologue Yuri Kovalchuk and Rosneft have to do with it.

To fully reveal the Kremlin’s ambitions for global dominance, it is worth diving into the world of the author of Russia’s massive project. The 64-year-old Andrey Alekseyevich Kurnosov (according to Manticore, holds passport series 4005 number 833515, issued May 25, 2006 by the police department of the Moskovsky district of St. Petersburg) works not only at the design bureau but also heads the BA1 department “Ship Armament and Marine Robotics” at the Baltic State Technical University “Voenmeh” named after Ustinov, the St. Petersburg State Marine Technical University (SPbSMTU), and the non-profit organization “Innovation Engineering Center.”

Kurnosov’s former wife, Elena Romanova, now bears the surname Anisimova and works at the St. Petersburg branch of JSC Rosenergobank. The couple divorced in 2013 and have a daughter, Natalia. They barely communicate now. What caused their separation is unclear. It is likely that Romanova could not tolerate Kurnosov’s infidelity, as he began a passionate affair with Natalia Zornina, who at that time was a lecturer at the SPbSMTU department.

Despite a 22-year age difference, Kurnosov and Zornina dated at least from 2011 to 2016, and their relationship was something of an emotional roller coaster for both of them. They called themselves OB and TM – abbreviations for “Bambi the Fawn” and “Mysterious Macavity” (the spy cat from the book by English poet Thomas Stearns Eliot “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” – Channel 24).


“Cave painting” by a candidate of technical sciences / Photo from Kurnosov’s correspondence

They exchanged intimate photos and traveled to occupied Crimea, Thailand, Mexico, and other places.


Part of the shared photos of Kurnosov and Zornina / Collage from the war criminal’s email

However, at some point Zornina cheated on Kurnosov with a man her own age, after which the couple separated for a time. The designer took the breakup so hard that for four years he sent himself hundreds of “sentimental” emails filled with memes and advice about how to build relationships with women.


It’s never too late to learn—even at 52 / Screenshot from Kurnosov’s email

Periodically the designer sent himself messages like “I wish you a peaceful night every day,” and sometimes switched modes and sent himself voice messages. One evening Kurnosov recorded reflections about his life on a voice recorder lasting more than 90 minutes in total.

Listen to part of the voice messages sent by one of the main designers of Russian submarines:

In addition, the engineer’s email inbox is literally flooded with poems he sent to himself by various poets, songs by Vysotsky, and more.


OB and TM poem (c) / Screenshot from Kurnosov’s email

Some of these messages were sent to Zornina after their breakup, and “Bambi the Fawn” even replied to some of them. Eventually the lovers reunited but limited themselves to a loosely open relationship and infrequent meetings that sometimes continue to this day.

Several thousand messages are devoted to the designer’s peculiar “outlet” — his dog named Urs. The German Spitz serves as a kind of compensation for the Putin loyalist’s romantic failures: Kurnosov gives the dog aromatic baths, takes him to competitions, and orders portraits of him. Moreover, they supposedly even “agreed” to die on the same day.


The dog is the one you feel sorry for / Screenshot from Kurnosov’s email

In addition to love stories and frankly trashy memes, the scientist keeps in his email his long-term diary entries from the Daygram app, which are characterized by confused thoughts, frequent criticism of Putin, and dreams of Russia’s greatness.

See a selection of screenshots from Andrey Kurnosov’s diaries:

Overall, all 80,000 of the engineer’s emails are sorted into folders by year, topic, and recipient and make it possible to build a psychological profile of the mailbox owner: a man obsessed with control and order, not very confident in himself, who hides his complexes in work and in reading books and poetry.

Even a conditional analysis of the designer’s psychological state is important for understanding what kinds of people in Russia have access to secret technologies, participate in the development of strategic weapons, and officially possess weapons (Kurnosov has a license and often carries both pneumatic and firearms).

He is responsible for implementing and developing cruise and ballistic missiles as well as computing and AI systems not only for submarines. However, the work described in his official duties is far from Kurnosov’s main focus. In recent years, the meaning of his life has been creating a fundamentally new strategic underwater system capable of fully replacing an entire fleet.

In his concept, which the engineer began developing back in 2015–2016, Kurnosov calls the project an actor. According to the designer’s plans, the system would be a modular-block structure capable of performing hydroacoustic, hydrological, and navigation reconnaissance, searching for cables and other infrastructure objects, and providing targeting for direct strikes.

The actor should also carry unmanned aerial and deep-sea underwater vehicles capable of covertly delivering special forces groups to sabotage sites, and have AWACS and missile defense capabilities. At the same time, it must be small enough not to leave a thermal trace and to secretly move system modules in standard maritime containers. Moreover, a small crew would reduce operating costs and increase autonomy.

The key characteristic of the actor should be its deniability. In military terminology, this means it would be impossible to prove its belonging to any particular state.


Kurnosov’s note about the underwater system that was supposed to bring Russia to a fundamentally new level, dated 2017 / Screenshot from the engineer’s email

In addition to its purely military purpose—which is the main priority for the Kremlin—the actor should also have civilian applications. The key one is resource extraction in the Arctic, as well as cleaning the ocean from waste.

Incidentally, it was precisely through the theme of solving environmental problems that Kurnosov and supporters of his concept planned to attract additional funding for the project. The money for Russians was supposed to come from… Western corporations.


The perfect combination for Moscow – building a superweapon with Western money / Screenshot from Kurnosov’s email

And if it seems to someone that such a global system invented by a single engineer goes beyond common sense and Russia’s capabilities, that is not entirely true. The point is that Kurnosov’s idea gained very high-ranking supporters.

One of them is Andrey Bezrukov, adviser to the head of Rosneft, professor at the MGIMO Department of Applied Analysis of International Problems, and member of the presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy.

Andrey Bezrukov is a well-known Soviet and Russian spy who, according to his legend, was the Canadian Donald Heathfield. Together with his colleague and wife Elena Vavilova (Tracey Lee Ann Foley), he lived outside the USSR for more than 20 years—in the Czech Republic, France, and Canada. For a long time he worked in the United States at a consulting agency and communicated with influential politicians and entrepreneurs. After being exposed, the couple was returned to Russia in a spy exchange. The children of Bezrukov and Vavilova proved in court that they were not involved in working for a hostile country, knew nothing about their parents’ activities, and had never even heard Russian spoken by them. Both sons wanted to live in the West but later allegedly moved to the aggressor state.

Kurnosov communicated with this extremely influential figure for many years.

Through him, he received not only many important contacts among leaders of defense companies and business giants, but even political support from Yuri Kovalchuk. The same person who can directly influence Putin, promote virtually any crazy idea, and obtain approval for its implementation.


Within a few years of the concept’s creation, Kurnosov had already received Kovalchuk’s support / Screenshot from the engineer’s email

In April 2018, Kurnosov wrote to Bezrukov that the actor should also serve as a basing platform for super-heavy robots intended for the development of the world’s oceans. This would involve placing platforms for building marine robotics in countries allied with Moscow in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere to create a kind of “export of security.”

The construction of “factories” for military deterrence of Western countries in 2018 was one element of Russia’s plan to establish a multipolar world / Screenshot from Kurnosov’s email

It is clear that such a massive project initiated by a Putin-aligned designer cannot be implemented in just a few years. It is especially difficult to implement under sanctions imposed on Russia after 2022. The Kremlin’s economy is also extremely unstable. However, Moscow has already implemented at least part of the concept developed by Kurnosov and his radical allies.

One of the key factors that, according to Putin and his circle, should allow Russia to play a central security role in the world would be a series of crisis situations: economic turmoil, cyberwars, technological disasters, uncontrolled migration, and wars.

Kovalchuk, Bezrukov, and other ideologues correctly predicted that the greatest demand for security arises precisely in times of threat. Representatives of the Russian authorities viewed Russia as a kind of exporter of security to other countries. However, for the Kremlin to be approached for guarantees, Moscow needed to provoke those same crises.

This concept, in which Kurnosov incorporated his vision of the actor, was formulated by Russian politicians, ideologues, and business giants as early as 2016. It was presented during a closed session of the international discussion club “Valdai.”


Security guarantors are not needed if the world lives in peace / Screenshot from the 2016 presentation of the closed Valdai Club session

In the presentation, the Russians explicitly stated that in the event of certain crises other countries would look for alternatives to the United States as suppliers of technology and security.


Russia itself was supposed to provide the alternative to the U.S. / Screenshot from the 2016 Valdai Club presentation

At the same time, the Kremlin practically did not take China into account in this redistribution of the world.


They wanted to export security but could not even spell “historical” correctly / Screenshot from the 2016 Valdai Club presentation

At the same time as developing the strategy according to which Russia should provoke a series of crises and then heroically offer ways out of them, Kurnosov and Bezrukov’s group actively studied the layouts of communication cable routes.


Internet cable routing diagrams were on Kurnosov’s desk as early as 2016 / Screenshot from the Russian designer’s email

So should the numerous acts of sabotage currently carried out by the Kremlin using the “shadow fleet” be considered situational operations intended to intimidate the West and deter support for Ukraine? Or are they the result of a carefully thought-out strategy aimed at undermining global security? The questions are probably rhetorical—especially when viewed in the context of Moscow’s further plans. They can be clearly seen in a 2020 presentation created by Andrey Bezrukov, including with the participation of Kurnosov, for a forum of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives and the Roscongress Foundation.

Although Putin’s associates did not include a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in their plan and predicted the collapse of the European Union in 2023, they quite clearly foresaw the beginning of a new Cold War, cyberwarfare, and the United States’ transition to so-called “neo-Rooseveltianism” with a foreign policy shift called the “Monroe Doctrine 2.0.”

The Monroe Doctrine is a U.S. foreign policy declaration proclaimed in 1823 by President James Monroe. The concept of the document was based on the principle “America for the Americans” and divided spheres of influence between America and Europe. The doctrine prohibited European states from interfering in the internal affairs of countries in the Western Hemisphere and guaranteed U.S. non-interference in European conflicts.


Russia’s forecast plans for the world until 2035 / Screenshot of the presentation from Kurnosov’s email

Even more interesting is the planned distribution of countries into spheres of influence, where the world would turn into conditional islands with two or three centers of power. Russia was assigned the role of a decision-making center in Eurasia and the creator of a new technological bloc. According to the plans and forecasts, half of Europe would fall under the Kremlin’s control. Only France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, and Germany would remain under equal influence from Washington and Moscow.

As well as Greenland, which interests the Kremlin in the context of capturing the Arctic and its resources. In the vision of Russian strategists, the United States by 2035 should be divided into two poles: an English-speaking north and a Spanish-speaking south.

At the same time, most of South America, almost the entire so-called Middle East, and many African countries were classified by Putin’s allies as a “hole”—places of constant conflict and instability. Before the full-scale invasion, Moscow intended the same role for Donbas.


Putin is also eyeing Greenland / Screenshot of the presentation from Kurnosov’s email

Obviously, in the fifth year of the large-scale war against Ukraine—when Russia failed to achieve its strategic goal of capturing Kyiv in three days—there can be no talk of creating a Eurasian island with a center in Moscow. However, all of the Kremlin’s actions show that neither Putin nor his ideologues have abandoned the ambitious plans formulated back in 2020.

Despite severe economic problems, the Russians are simply adapting to the situation that has developed. They are trying to act in ways that would lead the European Union to a de facto collapse and NATO to an inability to act as a unified force.

By playing along with Trump’s Monroe Doctrine 2.0, destabilizing Germany, France, Italy, and other states through their political proxies, Moscow continues its sabotage and terrorist activities at sea, launches drones into the airspace of countries neighboring Ukraine, fuels conflicts in Africa, and intensifies instability in every region where it has influence.

Ambitious projects such as creating a cross-domain “actor” to dominate the ocean have not been abandoned. This means that without decisive countermeasures, effective sanctions, and supplies of Western technologies, Russia may not fully succeed but could at least severely undermine the global security order.