Italian neo-fascist Franco Freda has published and promoted books by Nazis, written that “[we] only have accounts to settle with the Jewish or Judaized Europe,” was convicted of trying to resurrect Benito Mussolini’s fascist party, was judged to be partly responsible for a 1969 far-right terrorist attack, and last year said that Russian president Vladimir…
The Machiavelli Award 2019 has been granted to the investigative journalism collective Bellingcat. That has been announced today by the board of the Machiavelli Foundation. The Machiavelli Award is annually granted for a remarkable achievement in the field of public communication. Bellingcat receives the award because of “its innovative ways of investigative journalism leading to…
At one neo-Nazi metal festival in Milan, Italy in April of 2019, cell phones and cameras weren’t allowed inside. But that wasn’t the case in December 2019 in Kyiv, Ukraine, at the annual Asgardsrei event, which is the neo-Nazi black metal music festival that’s made the Ukrainian capital home since 2015. This meant that fans…
These findings were made by Benjamin Strick, Leone Hadavi and Bashar Deeb and are a result of a year-long investigation stemming from the EU Arms Project, an investigative collaboration between Bellingcat and Lighthouse Reports. Special thanks to Francesca Costantini who helped us analyse Italian Government reports. There is a direct prohibition against supplying arms to…
In the previous part of this investigation, we identified the assassin of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili as Vadim Nikolaevich Krasikov, a 54-year old Russian citizen traveling with state-issued false identity papers. Khankoshvilli, an ethnically Chechen Georgian citizen who had fought against Russia in the Second Chechen War and was linked to Georgian military intelligence, was shot and…
In its previous joint investigations with Spiegel, The Insider and Dossier Center, Bellingcat has reported that the person held by German authorities over the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin traveled from Moscow to Germany under a fake identity. We established that the suspected assassin’s passport, issued under the name Vadim Sokolov, born 20 August…
European arms have played a significant role in almost every conflict across the globe. Since 2018, a Bellingcat collaboration has documented, using open source, how European countries and companies have breached their own, and international, laws dozens of times. Through the EU Arms Project, a Bellingcat and Lighthouse Reports collaborative initiative, we have documented where…
In a previous investigation, Bellingcat and its investigative partner The Insider reported on the presence of a senior GRU officer, Denis Sergeev aka “Sergey Fedotov”, in Bulgaria at the time when a Bulgarian arms manufacturer collapsed into a coma following what was identified as poisoning by an unknown neuroparalytic substance. At that same time, the…
The open letter can be downloaded here On November 11, Ukraine’s former Minister of Veterans Affairs and current member of parliament Iryna Friz published a Facebook post that accused Bellingcat and our investigative partner, The Insider, of being “infiltrated” by the Russian security services, specifically the FSB. This information has spread to a number of…
Ukraine’s President conferred with, and the Prime Minister of Ukraine partied with, known far-right figures as leaders of the country’s veterans. Additionally, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, William Taylor, rubbed shoulders with a far-right figure embraced by Ukraine’s veterans ministry. We explain why these events happened. The heads of Ukraine’s new government, led by…
