Thread by @bellingcat

It’s been great to see the response to the #Navalny documentary and @ChristoGrozev’s investigation into his poisoning, but it was just one of a series of nerve agent based assassination attempts uncovered by Bellingcat over the last 3 years.
bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00…

Christo has spent years unpicking various Russian intelligence operations. He’s used Russia’s black market for government data, enabled by endemic corruption, to expose their agents and operations:
bellingcat.com/resources/2020…

Our investigations into Russia's assassinations began with the Skripal poisoning, where we were able to acquire passport registration documents that showed a number of odd features which pointed to an intelligence link:
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

Among other things, this included a stamped phone number on the suspects’ passport registration forms that directed the viewer to a @mod_russia phone number bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

This is when we first discovered Russia's terrible spy craft, where they were registering fake passports for spies in sequential order.The Skripal suspects’ passport ID numbers were only a few numbers apart, 654341294 and 654341297.

It wasn't just the Skripal suspects with near identical passport numbers. A suspect arrested following an attempted coup in Montenegro also had a document from the same sequence, 654341323 – only 26 difference from the Skripal suspects.
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

This gave @christogrozev another clue that allowed him to ID one of the Skripal suspects, the Montenegro suspect’s fake ID shared the same date and place of birth, and first name. Christo soon discovered this was a pattern used by the GRU to fake IDs.

By this point Christo had collected a lot of leaked Russian databases. This data has been on sale in various forms for more than a decade. This Financial Times article looked at the Russian data black market back in 2009 ft.com/content/07dedd…

This use of this black data market is known as ‘probiv’ or ‘lookup’ in Russian. You might not have heard about it until our work. This 2019 @bbcrussian investigation also shows that it’s a brisk trade and well-known in Russia: bbc.com/news/world-eur…

So using that leaked data, and searching for people with the same first name, date and place of birth as the Skripal suspect Alexander Petrov, Christo soon ID'd him as the GRU's Dr. Alexander Yevgeniyevich Mishkin
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

The second suspect "Ruslan Boshirov" was a lot more work. His fake ID didn't use the same pattern, so we created a profile of what was most logical for a GRU officer involved with foreign operations, and used that to find our man: bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

This led to the photos of the Skripal suspects with their real identities being splashed across the front pages of nearly every UK newspaper, which needless to say severely limited their ability to operate abroad.

And that was only the beginning. A third suspect involved with the Skripal plot was ID'd after his passport, with all the same suspicious signs, was found in the flight manifest of a flight to London close to the time of the Skripal suspects bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

This third suspect, the GRU's Denis Sergeev, traveled across London on the day of the poisoning, with his path crossing that of the Skripal suspects. How do we know? Because we acquired his detailed phone records from the Russian data markets

Sergeev was just one link in a chain of operatives we managed to link to another poisoning of the Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev, which took place prior to the Skripal poisoning bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

Around the same time of that poisoning, one of Gebrev's arms depots in Czechia exploded mysteriously after being visited by these two guys, who you may recognise:
bellingcat.com/news/2021/04/2…

Evidence indicates that the likely reason for Gebrev’s poisoning and the destruction of the arms depot was Gebrev’s involvement in supplying munitions to Ukraine during Russia’s 2014 involvement in the conflict:
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

Using the phone records of various individuals involved with the poisonings it was possible to identify numbers of individuals called around the time of the poisonings who worked at Russia's secret nerve agent development programme bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

This programme had never been identified before, and all signs indicate it is specifically designed to provide poisons to the GRU and FSB. It was the phone records of scientists working there that allowed us to ID the FSB team that poisoned Navalny. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

Navalny’s phone call with his own poisoner is now well-known. But further confirmation came in late 2021, when Russia’s investigative committee inadvertently confirmed the poisoners’ identities during a criminal case against a data broker. bbc.com/russian/news-5…

While Navalny is the most high profile poisoning by the FSB assassination squad, we started to find more individuals who were followed by the squad and died under mysterious circumstances, including local activists and political figures bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

Even Dmitry Bykov, a Russian poet, fell mysteriously ill after being followed by the FSB poisoning team. It wasn't just political figures and activists, but even a poet, that were targeted for poisoning bellingcat.com/news/2021/06/0…

Targets also included other high profile Russian political figures, including Boris Nemtsov's close ally Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was poisoned twice in 2015 and 2017, surviving each poisoning after falling into a coma
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

Kara-Murza was recently jailed for two weeks after Russian police claimed he walked away from them, which Kara-Murza denies, and now faces up to 15 years in prison for telling the truth about the conflict in Ukraine, a crime under Russian law.
inews.co.uk/news/long-read…

Kara-Murza's work on the Magnitsky sanctions act in the US seems almost certain to be the reason he was targeted by the Russian government's assassination squad edition.cnn.com/2018/05/07/pol…

Most recently Bellingcat has identified that Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was also followed the FSB poisoning squad, who swapped targets to Kara-Murza just a week before Nemtsov was murdered outside the Kremlin bellingcat.com/news/2022/03/2…

It is clear from our investigations that assassinations using nerve agents are not mere one-offs, but part of a systematic campaign of murdering political opponents and activists in Putin's Russia.

Recently Ukraine’s negotiation team fell mysteriously ill, and Bellingcat arranged to have them examined by chemical weapon experts who told us their symptoms were consistent with poisoning

https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1508463513013997580

As yet, little has been done to address the use of nerve agents for assassinations by Russia, despite it being a clear violation of its responsibilities under the Chemical Weapons Conventions. Questions have been asked at the @OPCW, but no real action taken.

And if you’ve made it this far then you’ll probably want to listen to @ChristoGrozev talk to Navalny director @DanielRoher on today’s Twitter Space at 5pm BST and 12pm ET twitter.com/i/spaces/1OdKr…