How does Russia issue fake passports to its operatives in Ukraine? We look at two examples to show how: Igor Bezler, whose fake identity is "Igor Beregovoy", and Oleg Ivannikov ("Andrey Laptev"). Their passport numbers are only 28 digits apart.
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
"Igor Nikolaevich Beregovoy", born 30/12/1965, flew to Simferopol on 27 Oct 2014. That same day, Igor Nikoalevich Bezler (born 30/12/1965) told a colleague that he has left the Donbas for good, returning home to Simferopol.
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
Igor Bezler was issued a fake passport with a fake name (Beregovoy) by the Russian security services. If you do a wildcard search in a leaked database for his "passport neighbors", we find a GRU operative named Andrei Laptev. 
Neither Igor Beregovoy nor Andrei Laptev are real people -- they have no number (INN) on Russia's taxpayer database, as every real Russian adult does.
Andrei Laptev is also known as the former Defense Minister of South Ossetia, from 2006-8. Oleg Ivannikov (his real identity) has maintained this persona for over 15 years.
The geniuses at Russia's passport office in Moscow processed the fake identities for both "Laptev" and "Beregovoy" at the same time, making their passport numbers only a couple dozen digits apart. Obviously, it's easy to search for all the passports with digits between them.
We looked at this exact thing a while back with passports that the GRU had issued to Wagner fighters. Most of these fighters received their international passports only when joining Wagner, and got them all together, making their numbers almost sequential: bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
Thanks to an absurd amount of incompetence and corruption in Russia's public sector, there are hundreds of leaked databases revealing all of this information. More on how the GRU is awful at keeping their operatives' identities secret here:
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
P.S. Here's Bezler recently, hanging out in Crimea with Sergey Dubinsky, one of the four men named by the @JITMH17 as prime suspects for the downing of MH17.
