“It couldn’t do without Russia”

The former adviser to the President of the Russian Federation on the development of the Internet, the owner of the Internet company LiveInternet, German Klimenko, told RT that it has always been convenient and cheap to host servers in Germany.

“The Germans have very developed hosting, which is quite loyal. Everyone opens a VPN in Germany so that Roskomnadzor does not find them. Please pay €4 per month, raise the system administrator, raise the VPN software, and everything works for ten people. At the same time, the probability that Roskomnadzor will catch it is very small, because it is not a public VPN, you cannot find signatures of similarity. Therefore, it was just convenient in Germany,” Klimenko explained.

He believes that the liquidation of the darknet marketplace turned out to be possible only thanks to serious international cooperation.

“This is a distributed history that is on the servers of a bunch of people. It is not solved by one country… It is impossible to do something like this without the assistance of the Americans, Chinese and Russian law enforcement agencies,” Klimenko said. — If a person with an average qualification deliberately hides, it will be very difficult to find him, to put it mildly. If a group of people buys special software and there are also their own programmers who take all actions so that they don’t find it, then this is a very long and complicated process.”

In this regard, Klimenko has no doubt that Russia participated in the investigation one way or another.

“The population does not even need to be informed on these topics. This is from the point of view of the “security guards”, because maybe they just don’t say anything because of the complicated political history now,” Klimenko believes. — I assess the capabilities of our law enforcement agencies in accordance with the products that we make. We have good products, everything works. Another question is that the opposition is very skilled, so the fight goes on for a very long time.”

According to the expert, smaller analogues will come to the place of the closed site, which will be less accessible and will be masked more.

“It is impossible to eliminate any crime to zero, but it was possible to remove prostitution from the streets — and in the 1990s there were girls at every intersection on Tverskaya Street. A law—abiding person, walking through the permitted territory, should not stumble upon drug trafficking, weapons and prostitution,” Klimenko concluded.