BREAKING: Bellingcat has identified a high-ranking figure whose identity was searched for by the Joint Investigation Team in connection with the downing of MH17 as Colonel General Andrey Burlaka, Operations Director of FSB’s Border Service bellingcat.com/news/2020/04/2…
Gen. Burlaka is the senior-most Russian official who remained unidentified in the criminal investigation. According to data disclosed by the JIT, he played a crucial role in supervising military operations in Eastern Ukraine and controlling the flow of arms across the border. 
A series of phone intercepts published by JIT in November 2019 included calls with a mysterious Russian high-ranking officer, whom everyone called "Vladimir Ivanovich". The calls made it clear that at the time of MH17 downing, he held the key to weapons transfer across the border
"Vladimir Ivanovich" appeared also in position to order cross-border attacks against Ukrainian forces, and was setting military tasks to Igor Girkin - the main indicted suspect in the MH17 criminal case.
The context of the intercepts made clear that "Vladimir Ivanovich" was a senior FSB officer. He communicated with militant commanders in Donbas via an encrypted, FSB-issued telephone. But who was he? That remained a mystery ... until now
Together with our partners from @the_ins_ru, we spent months chasing clues about "Vladimir Ivanovich"'s true identity. Using the two telephone numbers published by JIT, we found a third linked phone number, that showed us a potential full name: Vladimir Ivanovich Burlak.
We trawled Russian databases to find a trace of a person with this name and an FSB link, but we could find no match. Also, no other "Vladimir Ivanovich" namesakes fit the profile. For a while it seemed like our search had come to a dead-end.
Then we decided to search for references of "Vladimir Ivanovich" in dozens of old hacked emails or messenger communications leaked over the years by either side in the Russia-Ukraine war. We soon found a match in a leaked Viber chat archive belonging to a Donbas militant.
In a phone chat between two aides to the separatist leader of the so-called "Donetsk People's Republic", they discuss a top FSB officer, named Vladimir Ivanovich, who decides everything - up to who gets to take vacation when. One of the aides boasts that he knows his real name...
The aide (who had previously faked his own death to run away from his former family), writes that Vladimir Ivanovich is in fact Andrey Ivanovich. The other aide confirms, and says she knows he is a deputy chief at FSB, with prospects to become the chief.
Based on this new potential lead, we searched for all senior FSB officers whose first and middle (patronymic) names were Andrey Ivanovich. We quickly stumbled upon a last name we recognized from that phone number look-up: Andrey Ivanovich Burlaka
Colonel General Andrey Burlaka is First Deputy to the Director of FSB's Border Service, and in charge of operations for Russia's gigantic border-guarding apparatus. He is in fact just one position removed from FSB's boss.
Col. Gen. Andrey Burlaka checked all the boxes for the mysterious Vladimir Ivanovich: but could we be sure it was him? We needed to hear his voice to compare to the intercepts with Vladimir Ivanovich. We found a short TV interview Burlaka had given in 2013 and the voice matched!
We thought there was a clear match. But what would the forensic experts say? We needed a second source of voice identification that would agree with us. But for a true forensic comparison, we needed a longer piece of speech from Burlaka... at least 1 minute was needed.
We couldn't find a TV interview containing a longer speech segment. But we stumbled upon a used TV set for sale on a classified-ad site. The photo of the TV set showed Burlaka talking on camera. We had not previously found such an interview.
We could see that the TV channel was TV Zvezda: Russia's Ministry of Defense conspiracy-inclined TV channel. We could see the date on which the classified was posted. So we checked all shows on that day... and boom: we found a long documentary on Russia's border service.
We watched that intriguing documentary in tribute of the 100th anniversary of the Border Service. And at 28th minute, we struck gold: there was a long stretch of Gen. Burlaka describing the trials and tribulations of FSB border guards. it was the same shot as in the classified ad
We submitted the longer audio from this documentary, along with the JIT intercepts of "Vladimir Ivanovich", to the National Forensic Media Center at the University of Denver Colorado. Their conclusion was: a moderate support for an identity match.
The voice match was by far not the only piece of evidence we took into account to reach our conclusion that Col. General Andrey Burlaka is in fact the mysterious "Vladimir Ivanovich". We took a holistic approach to evidence analysis, including Burlaka's actual movements in 2014
These showed that he had traveled to and from Rostov (the control center for Russian military operations in Eastern Ukraine) exactly at the times when Vladimir Ivanovich was known to have been there - based on the intercepts. In particular, on the day of the MH17 downing.
You can read our complete identification process in the full story: bellingcat.com/news/2020/04/2…
Reporting in Russian from our partners at @the_ins_ru can be found here
