A nuclear physicist born and educated in Ukraine who worked with CERN is now designing drones for Russia’s military, a new investigation reveals

A Luhansk-born, Kyiv-educated nuclear physicist who worked with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) is now the chief designer at an organization developing drones for the Russian military. Journalists at the news outlet iStories report that nuclear physicist Alexander Makhnev heads development at the engineering bureau “Stratim,” founded by former Rostec executive Ivan Bezhanov, who worked for the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and the management consultancy McKinsey before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Makhnev is reluctant to discuss his role in Russia’s weapons trade, but Bezhanov uses the scientist’s CERN credentials to promote Stratim’s drones, reports iStories.

In interviews with the pro-Kremlin media, Bezhanov hides his face and calls himself “Obi-Wan,” but iStories identified him using publicly available information. Bezhanov says he launched Stratim after learning from Russian Telegram bloggers (particularly Vladlen Tatarsky, who was assassinated in April 2023) that Russian troops were suffering UAV shortages in Ukraine. 

In the summer of 2022, Bezhanov created Stratim and hired Alexander Makhnev to run the design bureau’s engineering department. A few months earlier, in April 2022, The European Physical Journal published an article about particle collisions where Makhnev is listed among CERN’s affiliated coauthors. Several more articles crediting Makhnev as an affiliated coauthor have followed, the most recent of which was released in April 2024. 

Spokespeople for CERN told iStories that the organization’s work is “focused on peaceful fundamental research” and said the group is terminating its cooperation with scholars in Russia, effective November 2024. Meanwhile, at a UAV expo last year, Bezhanov bragged to an audience that his chief designer “was one of the scientists who worked on the Large Hadron Collider project at CERN.”

iStories also identified another two designers employed at Stratim, including one Kazan National Research Technical University graduate who claimed on his resume that he helped backward-engineer the ALTIUS-600 American drone, which Washington has supplied to Ukraine. Studying Stratim’s website, journalists found a drone model named “Lastochka” that resembles the ALTIUS-600 (though its exact specifications are inferior to the American original). 

Besides working at Stratim, Alexander Makhnev is also a junior researcher in the Department of Experimental Physics at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Troitsk, outside Moscow. Speaking to iStories, Makhnev refused to discuss his work at Stratim or CERN, explaining that it would “publicly link” several aspects of his life that he “tries to keep separate.”