Thread by @michaeldweiss

So in 2014 the GRU blew up Czech military ammunition destined, via a Bulgarian arms dealer, for Ukraine. Then it twice tried to murder the Bulgarian with a nerve agent, first in Sofia, then on the Bulgarian coast. The puzzle pieces finally fall into place.

https://twitter.com/_jakubjanda/status/1383496316588756993

Emilian Gebrev had all sorts of other theories as to why the Russians wanted him dead—his arms dealing to Georgia and Ukraine, he believed, was too small-stakes to qualify.

An excellent thread on this breaking news.

https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1383498420346707969

And the man who unmasked the GRU unit responsible for both operations:

https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1383481218411372551

So as of today we can attribute to GRU Unit 29155 the following:
1. Czech ammo explosion
2. Gebrev pere et fils poisonings
3. Skripals poisonings
4. Montenegro coup attempt
5. Moldova destabilization campaign

And note their alleged European hideaway, at least as of late 2019: Haute-Savoie, in the French Alps. dw.com/en/russia-post…

A 21st century SMERSH, in other words, commits murder and sabotage -- state terrorism, really -- across a wide swath of NATO and/or EU countries and keeps an operational HQ in one of them. Extraordinary.

Keep in mind that it's taken *seven years* for this Czech operation to be anatomized. Now ask yourself what else Unit 29155 got up to that we don't yet know about.

Chepiga and Mishkin used the false identities of Ruslan Tabarov and Nikolaj Popa for the Vrbětice bombing. We now go live to @christogrozev poring through European flight records for those names. …2g7xr2a-www-respekt-cz.translate.goog/agenda/za-vybu…

And note that if this source is correct, then they didn't satisfy their mission as it was articulated: "The explosion was probably not to take place in the Czech Republic, but only later during the transport of weapons in another country": respekt.cz/agenda/za-vybu…

Also interesting. Sergeev was in a hotel in Paddington when Chepiga and Mishkin went to kill Skripal in Salisbury: "Alexandr Miškin visited the Czech Republic with another member of the unit, Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeyev": respekt.cz/agenda/za-vybu…

Now wrap your head around the following: But for the attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal (2018), there is almost zero chance we'd know about Unit 29155's involvement in Gebrev (2015) or this affair (2014). Both were dead investigations until 2018.

And these idiots actually used the same passports (Borisov and Petrov) to go from Moscow to Prague as they did to travel to London four years later. The other names they used once in the Czech Republic -- Tabarov and Popa -- were for entering the Vrbětice ammo depot.

As I say above, there's a fairly good chance "Tabarov" and "Popa" will yield more clues about where else these spire enthusiasts went and what they got up to between 2014 and 2018.

Using the same false identities and passports for мокрое дело years apart is such fuckwit tradecraft, I don't even know what to say... except that the fact they accomplished anything is a testament to lousy European counterintelligence.

"It is I... Sidney Feldman."