Thread by @christogrozev

FBI indicated Sergey Cherkasov, the Russian illegal whom we had earlier identified as a GRU spy. However, the indictment contains one new proof of that affiliation that FBI seem to have missed. The clue is contained in the passport number Cherkasov used to enter Brazil in 2011.

That passport number is not random. It's part of a series of passport numbers reserved for GRU spies. In fact, it is part of the very first such batch of numbers, issued to many GRU spies in 2009. Every two years, the GRU issues its spies new passports from a new series...

Notable users of passports from this same batch - whose numbers differ only in the last two or three digits, include the infamous Salisbury duo Boshirov and Petrov (*96 and *92 vs Cherkasov's *56), and their boss Averyanov (*21 vs *56).

This GRU idiocy has allowed us to identify hundreds of GRU spies - including poisoners, saboteurs and sleeper illegals such as "Maria Adela", or Olga Kolobova. bellingcat.com/news/2022/08/2…

Feels rewarding to be cited as evidence in ab FBI indictment.

Btw, the timing of the US indictment is likely to put pressure on Brazil to *not* hand over Cherkasov to Russia based on its plainly fraudulent "extradition request". Based on this indictment the US is likely to have issued a competing extradition request to Brazil.

The indictment points out that in August 2021, Cherkasov traveled via Armenia to Russia for medical tests. We disclosed this trip earlier. But the email now disclosed allowed me to discover a SECOND cover identity assigned to Cherkasov. This time as "Viktor Yurievich Bokov".

Thanks to Russia's leaky data market, a simple search for this email shows a person bearing the name of "Viktor Bobov" - and a birthday equal to that of "Victor Ferreira" - had medical tests on 29 August 2021 at a Gemotest lab. (This is a different test than the one FBI found)

Feels somehow rewarding to be cited in FBI indictments :)