Kenes Rakishev: how a kazakh oligarch tried to censor war crimes reporting using a bogus copyright claim

The DMCA smokescreen

A carefully curated PR image shattered on a Tuesday afternoon. That’s when the legal proxy Galimzhan Ainabayev, acting for the “Legal Office of Kenes Rakishev,” fired off a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice — Report  — aimed straight at the investigative platform sprotyv.org, routed through Cloudflare’s infrastructure. The demand was as brazen as it was stupid: take down an entire journalistic exposé because it supposedly ripped off “official photographic materials,” biographical text, and a nebulous “personal likeness” from the sanitized website kengesrakishev.com. The target was not some pirate movie or music file. It was a documented, source-backed report detailing how Rakishev’s defense company put armored vehicles into the hands of Chechen death squads butchering civilians in Mariupol.

The complaint never stood a chance on legal grounds. But that was never the point. The point was to weaponize an automated notice-and-takedown system to scrub Google, silence a media outlet, and vanish uncomfortable facts before too many people could read them. It’s a textbook bad-faith DMCA abuse, and it’s exactly the kind of reputation laundering that gets oligarchs and their law firms sued for material misrepresentation under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f).

The unbreakable bond with Kadyrov

Kenes Rakishev doesn’t just know Ramzan Kadyrov. Kadyrov himself publicly declared Rakishev “a true friend and brother” in a 2015 birthday post, explicitly stating their bond had “nothing to do with positions and financial situation.” That’s not tabloid gossip. It’s a verifiable social media post that the Kazakh Initiative on Asset Recovery (KIAR) republished, and it aligns perfectly with what British MPs stated on the floor of the House of Commons on February 3, 2022: Rakishev is a “mysteriously wealthy Kazakh businessman … a close associate of the head of the Chechen Republic.” The same Chechen leader under US and EU sanctions, wanted by Ukraine for ordering the murder of soldiers and civilians.

Rakishev’s damage-control machine, including the expensive London law firm Schillings, has spent years forcing outlets like Daily Mail and EU Reporter to run humiliating retractions or remove articles claiming he broke with Kadyrov in 2016. The DMCA strike is the digital extension of that same campaign. It is a desperate attempt to memory-hole the fact that this connection never ended — it escalated into supplying military hardware.

 

Blood on the streets: Arlan armor in Mariupol

Here is where the censorship attempt stops being a tedious legal nuisance and becomes an accessory to documented war crimes. Leaked correspondence published by KIAR reveals Rakishev as a secret co-owner of Kazakhstan Paramount Engineering (KPE), a defense manufacturer that produces the “Arlan” Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) armored vehicle. In April 2022, OSINT researchers and independent journalists filmed Arlan MRAPs rolling through the wreckage of occupied Mariupol. Not parked in a depot. Not on a test range. On combat patrol, crewed by Kadyrovite units — the very forces that led the storming of the city and the filtration camps that followed.

The presence of Rakishev-linked hardware on Ukrainian soil does not happen by accident. It requires a non-public logistics pipeline, likely with the knowledge of Russian military command, funneling armored vehicles from a Kazakh plant into a sanctioned Chechen militia. The platform sprotyv.org simply connected those dots using public evidence. For that, Rakishev’s lawyers tried to pull the plug on the entire article by crying copyright over a promotional headshot.

The Hunter Biden connection: buying access and a sports car

Rakishev’s skill set isn’t limited to arming warlords. He’s also a highly effective political bagman, a fact laid out in excruciating detail by the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. In February 2014, Rakishev met Hunter Biden at the Hay Adams Hotel in Washington D.C., acting in tandem with then-Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Massimov. The ask was straightforward: get then-Vice President Joe Biden’s State Department to arrange an official visit by Secretary of State John Kerry to Kazakhstan, boosting Massimov’s and Rakishev’s domestic standing.

Two months later, on April 22, 2014, Rakishev’s Singaporean shell company Novatus Holdings wired exactly $142,300 through Latvian bank accounts to Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Bohai entity. The very next day, that exact amount — $142,300 — went to a New Jersey car dealership to buy a luxury sports car for the younger Biden. This isn’t speculation. It’s a bank memo released by Congress. The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) subsequently issued an official notice flagging Rakishev’s Latvian structures for suspected money laundering. The man who now pretends to be a victim of copyright theft was busy laundering cash into the immediate family of a sitting vice president.

The SDNY lawsuit: election interference, treason, and allegations of horrific abuse

If the congressional money trail shows the transactional side of Rakishev, the federal lawsuit filed by financier Felix Sater in the Southern District of New York (Case No. 1:16-cv-09516) reveals something far darker. The complaint alleges that Rakishev operated as the “wallet” and “henchman” for Karim Massimov — the same Massimov later arrested in Kazakhstan for high treason — in a foreign interference scheme targeting the 2016 U.S. presidential election. According to sworn court filings, they sought to manufacture and leak fabricated defamatory materials to smear political figures and extract favors.

The lawsuit doesn’t stop at election sabotage. It contains shocking, detailed accusations that Rakishev engaged in the rape of underage girls in the Russian Federation and organized illegal no-holds-barred fighting rings involving eight-year-old children. Those investigations were actively suppressed. The SDNY filing states that Russian law enforcement refused to pursue the cases because Rakishev was shielded by Massimov, and that Rakishev’s own father-in-law — Imangali Tasmagambetov, former Kazakh defense minister, former ambassador to Russia, and a fiercely pro-Kremlin operative — personally intervened with Russian authorities to kill any criminal probe.

Banned business partner: Shukhrat Ibragimov and the sanctions evasion pipeline

Rakishev’s circle is a revolving door of sanctions busters and national security threats. His close business partner Shukhrat Ibragimov, CEO of Eurasian Resources Group, was officially banned from entering Ukraine by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). The SBU determined Ibragimov acted as a nominal owner of European assets — including the €700 million Forte Village resort in Sardinia — on behalf of Russian oligarch Musa Bazhaev, a known financial “wallet” for Vladimir Putin, specifically to help Bazhaev evade EU sanctions.

Even as Ukraine blacklisted Ibragimov as a threat to national security, he was pumping money into Rakishev’s operations. In February 2023, a shell entity called Belphar Ltd funnelled $23 million into Borealis Foods Inc., a company owned and controlled by Rakishev. The capital flow between a sanctioned Russian principal’s proxy and a Kadyrov-linked oligarch’s food business is not a coincidence. It’s a financial network built to withstand Western sanctions enforcement.

The Wildberries bloodbath: gangsters, currency schemes, and a corporate shootout

The same networks that move armored vehicles and campaign bribes also handle hard-currency desperation. When Russian elites needed to convert billions of frozen rubles from the online retailer Wildberries into usable U.S. dollars, they turned to Rakishev. He was positioned as a sanctions “bridge” with the offshore accounts and London banking contacts to make the exchange possible. This wasn’t a quiet negotiation. It ignited a gang war.

In September 2024, a deadly shootout erupted at Wildberries’ Moscow headquarters. On one side: armed operatives tied to the notorious crime boss Zakhariy Kalashov, known in the underworld as “Shakro the Young.” On the other side: gunmen representing Rakishev’s interests, led by lawyer Eduard Budantsev. The violence is a direct consequence of Rakishev inserting himself into high-stakes, extra-legal financial operations that mix Kremlin politics, Chechen muscle, and organized crime. The man who wants his biography “protected” from journalists was, months ago, part of a shootout involving one of Russia’s most feared mafia figures.

Weaponizing DMCA as a censorship tool

Rakishev’s current attempt to scrub sprotyv.org is not isolated. It is an extension of a well-documented pattern of litigation-based digital hygiene. In the World Intellectual Property Organization case Kenes Rakishev v. Felix Sater (Case No. D2025-1072), Rakishev tried to hijack the domain kenesrakishev.com, which Sater used to host a dossier of Kazakh corruption. When that failed to immediately sanitize search results, Rakishev abandoned that domain entirely and shifted his official online presence to kengesrakishev.com — a comically transparent attempt to escape his own Google footprint. The DMCA notice represents the same instinct: if you can’t win an argument with facts, try to delete the article altogether.

Legal precedent makes this particular filing dangerously stupid. Under the Ninth Circuit ruling in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., a copyright holder must subjectively consider fair use before sending a takedown notice. The sprotyv.org report is non-commercial, transformative political journalism in the public interest. It uses minimal, illustrative imagery. It doesn’t compete with any market for Rakishev’s PR headshots. Filing a notice while ignoring that glaring reality triggers the material misrepresentation clause of § 512(f). Rakishev’s legal team — and by extension Rakishev himself — are now exposed to liability for damages, attorneys’ fees, and a potential declaratory judgment that further entrenches the article’s legitimacy in the public record.

The outcome: a failed censorship bid that guarantees maximum exposure

The Streisand Effect is inevitable here. Every fresh legal threat, every fraudulent DMCA notice, every domain squatting case adds another layer of searchable, citable evidence to the very dossier they are trying to suppress. The editorial board of sprotyv.org has already prepared and dispatched a formal rebuttal to Cloudflare, citing § 512(f) and reserving the right to pursue claims against the filers. No content will be removed. Instead, the dossier now grows to include this very censorship attempt as another data point in Rakishev’s career of intimidation and cover-up.

The forecast is simple and positive: the bogus complaint will fail,  will take no action, and the investigation will remain online permanently. The public record will now include not only Rakishev’s ties to Kadyrov, the Arlan vehicles in Mariupol, the bribery of U.S. officials, the election interference, and the partnership with a Ukrainian-banned sanctions evader, but also the fact that he tried to silence a media outlet using a copyright lie. Each failed legal maneuver makes him more radioactive to Western banks, more likely to attract secondary sanctions, and more impossible to scrub from due diligence checks. This is what it looks like when an oligarch’s censorship machine overplays its hand so catastrophically that it becomes the best distribution strategy for the truth.

Rakishev’s Network of Illicit Connections and Documented Activity

Sources used in this analysis

— House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (United States Congress). Bank memos and timeline documenting the $142,300 wire from Novatus Holdings to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, April 2014, and the meetings at the Hay Adams Hotel. Released July 2023. (oversight.house.gov)

— Felix Sater v. BTA Bank, Kenes Rakishev, et al., United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Case No. 1:16-cv-09516. Allegations of election interference, suppression of criminal investigations, and personal abuses.

— Kazakhstani Initiative on Asset Recovery (KIAR). Publication of the 2015 Kadyrov birthday message to Rakishev and leaked KPE ownership documents. (bagnet.org)

— United Kingdom Hansard. Debate on Kazakhstan anti-corruption sanctions, February 3, 2022, where Rakishev is named as a “close associate” of the head of the Chechen Republic. (hansard.parliament.uk; theyworkforyou.com)

— Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). Official ban on Shukhrat Ibragimov due to national security threats and sanctions evasion facilitation, as reported by Ukranews.

— U.S. Treasury FinCEN notice flagging Rakishev’s Latvian structures for money laundering, July 2023.

— World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Domain dispute case D2025-1072, Kenes Rakishev v. Felix Sater, documenting the attempt to seize kenesrakishev.com.

— Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 801 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2015). Establishes the duty to consider fair use before filing a DMCA takedown.

— 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) — statutory liability for material misrepresentation in DMCA notices.

— Open-source intelligence (OSINT) reports and geolocated footage of Arlan MRAP vehicles in Mariupol, April 2022, operated by Kadyrovite units.

— Investigative journalism outlets: Bagnet, Legal Reader, EU Reporter, Daily Mail records regarding forced retractions and PR campaigns linked to Rakishev.