Thread by @michaeldweiss

Exclusive: Inside Ukraine's bold, months-long plot to get a trio of Russian pilots to defect with their aircraft. news.yahoo.com/this-is-like-a…

This story is based on weeks of reporting, including an interview with "Bohdan," one of the lead Ukrainian volunteers who was part of this project. Bohdan's team partnered with the SBU, Ukraine's domestic security service, and the SSO, Ukraine's Special Operation Forces, to run… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

I obtained hundreds of hours of encrypted chat messages between Bohdan's team and the three pilots. The pilots were Igor Tveritin, 48, Roman Nosenko, 36, and Andrei Maslov, 33. @YahooNews was able to confirm the identities of all three.

Bohdan's team spent months, from around March-June 2022, convincing these Russian pilots to defect in exchange for $1 million each, as per Ukrainian legislation passed last year authorizing bounties for captured, in-tact Russian military equipment.

At first, all three pilots were keen. The key issues were: obtaining foreign passports for themselves and their families. The Ukrainians said they could arrange this. Also ensuring the pilots wouldn't be shot down either by Ukrainian or Russian air defenses. Logistics, as you can… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

One pilot offered to drug his navigator with a prescription sedative. Another said he could confuse his flight crew by complaining of technical malfunctions and flying at low-altitude to a Ukrainian airfield, under Ukrainian interceptor escort, as a last resort.

In the end, none of the schemes came to fruition. And there is ample evidence to suggest some, if not all, of the pilots were unmasked by the FSB, Russia's domestic security service.

Pilot one, Igor Tveritin, had been a well-trained to fly the "Valery Chkalov" Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bomber, a vast, supersonic aircraft capable of launching nuclear missiles, akin to the American B1 Lancer. Here's a photo of him from a Russian media segment in 2013.

At some point, Tveritin was reassigned to fly the Tu-22M3 strike bomber, which he did on missions after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

The Ukrainians paid Tveritin a few thousand dollars to demonstrate their seriousness, in exchange for which Tveritin took videos and photos of his plane, establishing his bona fides. He was very worried about getting his wife and three kids out of Russia in advance of defecting.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Tveritin's plan come a cropper because Ukraine finally abandoned the Azovstal metalworks in Mariupol in May. This meant he would no longer being flying missions in the southeastern port city and so could not take a well-established route toward defection.

Tveritin thus admitted he had been bombing Mariupol, a confession of likely war crimes, given the well-document Russian atrocities there including, most notoriously, the attack on the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre.

The second pilot was Andrei Maslov, who flew sorties in a Su-24 tactical bomber. Maslov said he would defect but not with his wife; with "another woman." The problem? The Ukrainians identified this woman as a fitness instructor in Lipetsk. But hang on...

All her friends, the Ukrainians confirmed using confiscated call data, were prostitutes frequently employed by the FSB. The Ukrainians deduced she was one, too. Maslov's girlfriend, in fact, lied about not having a foreign passport: the Ukrainians were able to she had one in a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

They even placed her in Spain during the Catalan referendum in 2017. "One wonders what, or who, she was doing there," Bohdan said. This led to serious suspicion that Maslov was compromised. He, too, ended communication not long after the Ukrainians outed the girlfriend.

Finally, pilot number three was Roman Nosenko, who flew missions in both Su-34 and Su-24s. "Fuck, this is like a movie," Nosenko told Bohdan and his team when first approached with the enticing offer. Nosenko was the most interesting.

And he seemed the most serious about defecting. He also gave up some operational details. E.g. "We carry the payload to a point. After that it does its own thing. They don’t give us the details.” Thus, Nosenko suggested, his airstrikes on Ukraine were done using standoff systems,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Nosenko wanted to drug his navigator on the way to Ukrainian territory -- a risky plan, to be sure, not least because his drug of choice was prescription-only and not easily obtainable. Also, Nosenko's wife was a military psychologist attached to his unit in Morozovsk, in the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

So getting her out of Russia amounted to two military defections. Here, the Ukrainians grew more suspicious and uncovered evidence that the wife had been in touch with Russian military counterintelligence since Nosenko started talking to them. A dilemma: Was she informing on her… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Nosenko's wife actually traveled to Minsk to collect a new passport and documents for a life abroad, all of which the Ukrainians offered to provide. Except they now sniffed a trap and never showed up. She spent days waiting for her contact in Minsk.

It is at this point the story gets even more intriguing.

Whether Nosenko was a controlled FSB asset from the start, or compromised at some in the midst of his sincere attempt to commit treason, we cannot know. But the FSB took the no-show in Minsk as an opportunity to claim victory and present the entire Ukrainian plot as a clever… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

RT even ran a segment alleging as much and presenting people they claimed were the relevant pilots (we can't be sure any were; their faces were obscured). The segment even produced text and audio of the communication with the Ukrainians. Though this might have been obtained after… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

They claimed, for instance, the Ukrainians gave up the coordinates of Ukrainian airfields to the pilots, airfields previously known to the Russians. Except Russia had been bombing them already.

Furthermore, the Ukrainians were able to confirm that Tveritin, the oldest and most experienced pilot, has been grounded ever since their chatter with him -- a sign he clearly isn't trusted by his own government to fly warplanes anymore.

The fates of Maslov and Nosenko remain unknown. Attempts to reach all three pilots were unsuccessful. /END