Thread by @bellingcat

We, with assistance from @kromark and @pustota, found photographs and videos of Skripal poisoner Chepiga at a GRU commander's daughter's wedding, a year before the Salisbury events, providing further proof that "Ruslan Boshirov" is a seasoned GRU officer.
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

The wedding was for the daughter of Major General Andrey Averyanov, a high-ranking GRU commander recently unmasked by a @mschwirtz/@nytimes story. Chepiga attended this wedding in 2017 -- a year before the Salisbury poisonings -- and his daughter took part in the wedding ceremony

We found photos and videos from wedding guests, a wedding photographer, and a wedding planning company that all showed Chepiga at the wedding. Additionally, a publicly-shared table arrangement showed that his entire immediate family attended the wedding as well.

The photographs and videos of Chepiga at the wedding are very clear, and show a match to both "Ruslan Boshirov" (thank you for interviewing him in crystal clear HD video, @M_Simonyan!) and Anatoliy Chepiga from his passport photograph.

Major General Andrey Averyanov was first mentioned in the @nytimes article -- he is the commander of military unit 29155, of the GRU. He and Chepiga are quite close, as they were seated together at the wedding, and one of Chepiga's children participated in the ceremony.

Averyanov was pretty good at minimizing his digital footprint and covering his tracks, but there are still traces of him talking about his classmates at the Tashkent-based military academy he attended in the 80's. He also has a patent for a knife design, as he's an enthusiast.

But his downfall was putting on a lux wedding for his daughter, which had a small army of videographers and professional photographers who later publicly shared their visual materials to their site's portfolios.

Read @kromark + @pustota's report, with some additional details on Andrey Averyanov, here:
rferl.org/a/member-of-th… (EN) svoboda.org/a/30215996.html (RU)

Averyanov's son-in-law took down the video of his wedding (showing Chepiga) from his YouTube account. However, don't be alarmed -- we archived it on our site, and it's still on a hotel staffer's account: