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…
As Dutch prosecutors at The Hague court read out their case against four individuals — Ukrainian citizen Leonid Kharchenko and Russian citizens Oleg Pulatov, Sergey Dubinsky, and Igor Girkin — being charged with complicity in the downing of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) passenger plane, new details emerged about the amount of evidence that…
Whether you’re listening to NPR, watching MSNBC, or reading the New York Times, you will likely be barraged with stories about Russian trolls meddling in every topic imaginable. No matter how obscure, it always seems like these nebulous groups of “Russian trolls” are spreading discord about the topic du jour — Colin Kaepernick, the Parkland…
During day two of the MH17 criminal court proceedings in the Netherlands, the prosecution team disclosed that the Russian Federation had challenged the authenticity of a video recording of the BUK Telar, made on 17 July 2014, near the presumed launch site at Snizhne. This video is a crucial piece in the chain of evidence…
Ahead of the commencement of the MH17 trials in the Netherlands on March 9, 2020, various Russian government officials have made statements defending Russia against accusations that Russia provided the Buk missile launcher that shot down MH17 on July 17, 2014. Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova complained of “planted news citing some…
A single checkpoint in Northeastern Syria recently became a flashpoint — and in our latest Bellingcat collaboration with Newsy, we show you how. U.S. troops have patrolled the Turkish-Syria border since 2017. This is a means of trying to keep tensions at bay between numerous local factions. This has particularly concerned Turkey — which is,…
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 our previous investigation of the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili on August 23, 2019 in Berlin, we identified the suspected assassin — who traveled under the fake identity of Vadim Sokolov, 49 — as Vadim Krasikov, 54. We disclosed that Krasikov had a prior criminal history that involved at least two contract killings, once in…
