KYIV – Two suspected Russian military intelligence (GRU) officers who allegedly attempted an assassination of double Russian-British agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in March also visited Ukraine and received their country’s highest state award in the latter half of 2014 as the Donbas war was heating up.
Two members of the six-man hit squad that British authorities believe took part in deploying a Russian-made chemical nerve agent in the English town of Salisbury were identified as Dr. Alexander Mishkin and Col. Anatoliy Chepiga of the GRU, according to the U.K. internet sleuth group Bellingcat.
Russian presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin is willing to discuss the Skripal poisoning case only “with British authorities” and not investigative reports or media articles. Moscow has repeatedly tried to discredit Bellingcat’s findings, which have included pinpointing Russia as the source of the Buk missile that shot down the Malaysian airliner in Ukraine four years ago, killing nearly 300 passengers and crew.
Using a variety of open-source investigative techniques, partially leaked passport and border-crossing data, as well as on-the-ground gumshoe reporting in partnership with Russian reporters, Bellingcat since September up to October 9 released the two GRU officers’ identities and limited biographies.
Both men had visited Ukraine in 2013-2014, before the assassination attempt of their former colleague; they made nearly 20 other interim trips to Western Europe and Asia through mid-2016.
Their Ukrainian trips, Bellingcat surmised, were conducted using the same aliases – Ruslan Boshirov (Col. Chepiga) and Alexander Petrov (Dr. Mishkin) – during the failed slaying of their main target, Mr. Skripal.
Some 40 GRU officers have been to Ukraine since 2014 when the Russia-instigated Donbas war started, a Bellingcat investigator, Christo Grozev, has tweeted based on the same cache of partially leaked passport data. Most of them are women, he has added.
In December 2014, Col. Chepiga received his Hero of the Russian Federation award – an honor that is bestowed only by the president and in secret if the merited nature of the recipient’s achievement warrants it.
“In 2014, there were no military activities in Chechnya. Russia had not engaged militarily in Syria yet,” Bellingcat wrote on September 26. “The only region in which Russia was conducting active military operations in secrecy at the time was in eastern Ukraine, which is the most likely theater of his mission, as suggested by the secrecy of his award.”
The same award was given to Dr. Mishkin in autumn 2014, according to an October 9 Bellingcat report that cited residents of his remote, native hamlet of Loyga in the Archangelsk District in northern European Russia.
His last visit to Ukraine was in mid-December 2013, at the height of the Euro-Maidan revolution that saw the ouster of corrupt and authoritarian former President Viktor Yanukovych two months later.
To add credence to their reports, Bellingcat identified posh Moscow-based apartments worth around $500,000 that both GRU officers obtained in 2014 as “in-kind remuneration that accompanied the highest state award.”
The most likely reason for their country’s highest state honor is “for organizing provocations on the Maidan or in combination with being involved in the shootings of protesters,” a Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) insider told The Ukrainian Weekly.
The SBU insider, who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons, said the counter-intelligence spy agency has cooperated with Bellingcat, “as have other Ukrainian law enforcement agencies.”
Ukrainian media, citing their own anonymous sources, have speculated that the two may have been awarded for assisting Mr. Yanukovych to eventually flee Ukraine for Russia in February 2014 or for the annexation of Ukraine’s territory of Crimea a month later.
“We identified GRU personnel on the Maidan in our reports that we published in March-April 2014,” Dmytro Tymchuk, a member of Parliament who runs the intelligence website InfoResist, told the Ukrainian Weekly on October 10. “They used the Russian Embassy for cover… they fulfilled tactical assignments… and used existing local [Ukrainian] agent networks after 2014 for diversionary acts.”
Mr. Tymchuk, who also is a member of the Verkhovna Rada’s National Security and Defense Committee, said the GRU “operated relatively freely in 2014-2015 throughout Ukraine” during the outbreak of the Donbas war, but that “counter-intelligence started working more effectively after that.”
Asked to comment on Bellingcat’s assertion that most of the 40 GRU officers in Ukraine were women, the SBU source cited two stark examples.
Video footage showed a woman and a man walking together and approaching a vehicle hours before an explosive device killed Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet after it was activated in downtown Kyiv on July 20, 2016. The SBU source intimated that the woman was involved in the hit job.
The same source mentioned that a female is suspected of planting another car bomb that killed SBU counterintelligence Col. Oleksandr Kharaberiush in the Donetsk Oblast city of Mariupol on March 31, 2017.
Women GRU officers are also used in gender roles as “honey traps” to obtain sensitive information from unassuming diplomats in extortion schemes or to pose as spouses of Russian diplomats to glean intelligence at social events or meetings.
Sabotage acts have also been attributed to the GRU. Notably, since 2014, explosions took place at five military arms depots in Ukraine. The latest occurred on October 9 in Chernihiv Oblast, which the Defense Ministry said “was most likely an act of sabotage.”
By Mr. Tymchuk’s count, it was the fifth such incident since 2014. The other ammo depot explosions took place in the regions of Vinnytsia, Luhansk, Donetsk and Kharkiv.
Worldwide, the GRU has been accused of coup attempts, for example in Macedonia, when it successfully joined NATO and of interfering in elections, such as the 2016 U.S. presidential race that ascended President Donald Trump to the country’s highest office.
GRU-linked hackers have been tied to 35 cyberattacks on Ukrainian infrastructure this year, the SBU announced on October 5. They include intrusion on “automated systems and databases… in the fields of energy, transport, communication, banking, etc.”
U.K. and Dutch authorities have also uncovered this year “a large-scale cyberattack by the GRU against the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons” that was testing the nerve agent used on the Skripals.
At the start of the Donbas war in April 2014, GRU units were “directly involved” in the takeover of government buildings and the “fake idea of local [self-] defense units” to give the impression of a popular uprising, Mr. Grozev said at the October 9 Bellingcat briefing in London, reported the British newspaper The Independent.
British lawmaker Bob Seely who jointly gave the briefing with the investigative group, characterized the GRU as “firestarters” who spark wars. He said that “Russian military counts information and ‘non-military measures’ as part of contemporary warfare,” The Independent wrote.