On 5 May 2020, German media reported that Germany’s Federal Prosecutor has issued an arrest warrant against Russian citizen Dmitry Badin, the main suspect in the 2015 hacking of the German Bundestag. What Was The 2015 Bundestag Hack? In April 2015, members of the German parliament as well as members of Merkel’s Bundestag office, received…
In November 2019, the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) announced the broadening of its criminal investigation into the shoot-down of MH17 to encompass the role of individuals within Russia’s military and administrative hierarchy who enabled the tragedy. The JIT made public 23 telephone intercepts from the days before the shootdown, which appeared to prove the…
Previously in this series: In previous joint investigations with Der Spiegel and The Insider, Bellingcat identified the killer of a Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian-Chechen asylum seeker shot at point blank in Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten last August, as Vadim Krasikov, a 54 year old Russian linked to at least two contract assassinations in Russia. Using metadata…
In its original series of investigations in 2018, Bellingcat identified three GRU officers: Maj. Gen. Denis Sergeev, Col. Anatoliy Chepiga and Col. Alexander Mishkin, M.D., linked to the March 2018 Novichok poisonings in Salisbury. In several follow-up reports, Bellingcat and its investigative partner The Insider disclosed the existence of a clandestine GRU team earmarked and…
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…
On 27 October 2014, a man named Igor Nikoalevich Beregovoy arrived in Simferopol, Crimea, after boarding an Aeroflot flight in Krasnodar earlier that afternoon. Igor Nikolaevich was born on 30 December 1965, from the Crimean city of Simferopol. However, there is another man named Igor Nikolaevich born on 30 December 1965, and who was born…
In a series of investigative reports in 2018 and this year, Bellingcat and its media partners disclosed the existence of an elite unit within Russian military intelligence (GRU) engaging in clandestine overseas operations. This unit consists of approximately twenty graduates of elite Russian military schools, most having received hands-on combat experience in the wars in…
Joint investigation by Bellingcat, Der Spiegel, the Insider and the Dossier Center. In the first part of this joint investigation, we disclosed that the assassin of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili detained by German police traveled on a valid Russian passport issued under the fake identity of “Vadim Sokolov”. We concluded that the usage of a validly issued…
In the first part of this “GRU Globetrotters” series, Bellingcat and its investigative partner The Insider teamed up with BBC Newsnight to trace the London movements and potential role of Russian GRU officer Denis Sergeev during the time that the Skripals were poisoned in Salisbury. The research was made possible thanks to telephone metadata which…
In a series of previous investigations, Bellingcat and the Insider identified the two key suspects in the Novichok poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal, and the subsequent poisoning death of Dawn Sturgess. We identified the two suspects, who travelled under the fake identities of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, as Russian military intelligence (GU/GRU) officers…
