Thread by @bellingcat

With this week's investigation into the poisoning of Dmitry Bykov, Bellingcat has now published about 6 individuals followed by the FSB's assassination squad, 3 of which whom fell into comas while being followed, and 3 whom died under mysterious circumstances while being followed

The first investigation looked at the August 2020 poisoning of Alexey @Navalny, who was followed dozens of times by the FSB assassination squad before he fell into a coma in August 2020 bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

This investigation included @Navalny calling up one of the team identified by Bellingcat, and posing as an assistant to one of the team member's superiors, extracting detailed information on how the operation was executed from the hapless agent bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

Our next investigation showed that it wasn't just high profile political activists being followed, and examined the mysterious deaths of 3 lesser known political activists while they were being followed by the FSB assassination squad bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

Boris Nemstov ally Vladimir Kara-Murza fell into comas twice, in 2015 and 2017, both times while being tailed by the FSB assassination squad, demonstrating that they would repeatedly attempt to kill individuals. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

The sixth target identified is Dmitry Bykov, a Russian poet, who displayed symptoms that were very similar to Navalny's before falling into a coma after being followed by the same FSB assassination squad in 2019.
bellingcat.com/news/2021/06/0…

While we generally focus on open source material the extraordinary nature of these events required us to look at more unusual sources, which we describe in this article bellingcat.com/resources/2020…

Based on our current work it is very likely many more individuals have been targeted by the same team, and demonstrate a widespread use of assassination inside Russia by the Russian government targeting individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds.

It is noteworthy that we discovered this FSB assassination squad after previously identifying Russia's secret nerve agent programme, run in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention that Russia is a member of. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

That programme was linked to more Russian assassinations, this time the GRU's Unit 29155, which targeted Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, and Emilian Gebrev in Bulgaria. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

The same GRU unit was also linked to explosions in Czechia, and other subversive activity across Europe. bellingcat.com/news/2021/04/2…

And that's not to mention the FSB assassinations taking place in Europe, such as the Berlin bicycle assassination. The suspect in the case is now on trial in Berlin. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

This assassination was also linked to even more assassinations, with another target of the same team identified in Istanbul. In total that's a lot of assassinations, and that's just the ones we know about. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

There's still a lot of data to work through, and more cases of mysterious illnesses and deaths that we discover on a disturbingly frequent basis, and over time we're building a fuller picture of the extent of these assassination programmes.

You can support this work into investigating a massive network of assassinations by donating to Bellingcat, or by spreading the word about our discoveries.
bellingcat.com/donate