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12 Nov, 13 tweets, 5 min read
In our newest investigation Bellingcat exposes the relationship between the Russian foreign intelligence services and the MH17 focused "independent investigative platform" Bonanza Media (@bonanzamedia2)
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
Phone records and leaked emails obtained by Bellingcat show that since its founding by former RT journalist Yana Yerlashova there has been multiple communications between Yerlashova and two GRU officers.
Col. Sergey Chebanov – a graduate of Russia’s Military Intelligence Academy - received multiple updates about Bonanza's activities and plans, including draft press releases and articles.
In one example, Yerlashova sent Col. Chebanov a draft article by @beek38 ahead of its publication, with the published version changed to include more criticism of Bellingcat (left - the published text, right - the draft with changes highlighted in red)
Yerlashova also sent Col. Chebanov copies of her passport and the passport of her cameraman as part of coordination of a Bonanza Media trip to Eastern Ukraine, supported by phone records obtained by Bellingcat.
Col. Chebanov forwarded the passports by email to Maj. General Andrey Ilchenko, a trusted associate of GRU’s current chief Igor Kostyukov. Ilchenko himself sent a copy of Bonanza Media's @MaxvanderWerff's passport to his contacts in Ukraine as part of the travel arrangements.
Part one of our report shows multiple communications between Yana Yerlashova and GRU officers, not only in relation to travel plans to Eastern Ukraine, but around the time Bonanza Media published leaked documents from the JIT. More on that in part two. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
Coverage from RTL Nieuws in Dutch rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/buitenl…
Coverage from De Groene Amsterdammer in Dutch
groene.nl/artikel/nederl…
Our partner in Russia @the_ins_ru has published their own version of this investigation in Russian theins.ru/politika/236808
Max van der Werff responds to our article linking Bonanza Media to the GRU (and falsely states we claim that Yana Yerlashova "always consulted someone from the GRU before publishing articles.")
Max van der Werff also responds to the fact a copy of his passport was photographed by a GRU officer and sent to another GRU officer.
Questions asked in the Dutch Parliament about Bellingcat's Bonanza Media investigation into their GRU links tweedekamer.nl/kamerstukken/k…

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More from @bellingcat

Bellingcat Profile picture
11 Nov
A new online influence operation that seeks to counter West Papua’s independence movement appears to have emerged on prominent social media sites, as @BenDoBrown reports. bellingcat.com/news/2020/11/1…
@BenDoBrown The discovery comes roughly one year after a similar network of fake accounts was uncovered by Bellingcat.
@BenDoBrown Although the new web of between 100 and 200 accounts has made little impact thus far, it appears to stretch across Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Instagram.
Read 8 tweets
Bellingcat Profile picture
10 Nov
The Shatt al-Arab river is the lifeline of southern #Iraq. Yet, wars, poor governance and oil spills have exacerbated pollution and public health concerns, fuelling protest and ecological activism. Here's what @wammez and @MahaalGhareeb found: bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020…
@wammez @MahaalGhareeb Agricultural areas around #Basra have suffered immensely from decades of conflict, which has destroyed date palms and damaged marshlands. Furthermore, #climatecrisis induced salinisation impacts fertility and soil quality in the region, destroying farmers' livelihoods.
@wammez @MahaalGhareeb After southern Iraq's 2018 health crisis, promises were made to improve the situation and provide clean water. Yet little has changed. Sewage and oil spills into the upstream #Euphrates and #Tigris rivers continue. The country's water infrastructure remains in a poor state.
Read 6 tweets
Bellingcat Profile picture
29 Oct
Together with @ForensicArchi, we have verified and mapped over 1,000 incidents of police violence against protesters in the United States. We found widespread and systematic violence against unarmed civilians. bellingcat.com/news/americas/…
@ForensicArchi In June, we visualized 150 instances of violence against journalists at the protests. Since then, the protests, and the backlash from law enforcement, have continued, with little to no accountability for the officers involved. bellingcat.com/news/americas/…
@ForensicArchi With the help of other researchers (such as @greg_doucette) we collected data from social media, verifying each incident down to the exact coordinates. We are making the dataset that informed this platform publicly available, and you can view it here:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
Read 5 tweets
Bellingcat Profile picture
26 Oct
@ClarkeMicah of the Mail On Sunday (@mailonline) did not reply to requests for comment, despite the DG's letter having been mentioned by Whelan in one of @clarkemicah's blogs.
And, rather unsurprisingly, @wikileaks did not reply to requests for comment either.
It was always apparent from the evidence presented that the idea of a "Douma coverup" was fundamentally flawed and relied on questionable claims.
Read 5 tweets
Bellingcat Profile picture
26 Oct
Last year documents were leaked from the OPCW accompanied by claims from a former OPCW employee “Alex”, that the OPCWs Douma report was “doctored”.

We've obtained correspondence which proves Alex’s claims are wrong and that no such "doctoring" took place.
bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020…
This correspondence is from the OPCW Director General, Fernando Arias, to Brendan Whelan (a.k.a Alex) who had raised concerns about the report.

It lays out the reasoning behind the report’s conclusions, including scientific methods that were developed after Whelan left the OPCW.
The correspondence makes clear that the conclusions of the OPCW report are entirely consistent with the evidence, and that the environmental samples collected from Douma provided information consistent with the use of chlorine gas as a chemical weapon.
Read 12 tweets
Bellingcat Profile picture
23 Oct
We've published a new, major investigation (along with @the_ins_ru, @derspiegel, and @SvobodaRadio) into the cooperation between the GRU's military unit 29155 and two research centers to develop and deploy chemical weapons -- including Novichok.
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
We've acquired the phone logs for a number of officers with the GRU's unit 29155, including Andrei Averyanov. A number that kept popping up on these logs was that of Sergey Chepur -- a 50-year old military doctor and expert in extreme toxicology.
Sergey Chepur is the director of the St. Petersburg State Institute for Experimental Military Medicine of the Min. of Defense. Phone logs show that he would make a number of calls to GRU officers right before a number of key operations, including the poisoning of Sergey Skripal.
Read 9 tweets

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