July 17, 2019
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
Today, 17 July 2019, is exactly five years since Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down by a Buk missile, fired from territory in East Ukraine controlled by Russian-directed militants. After five years it has become clear that the Buk missile launcher that downed the plane came from Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, and…
July 9, 2019
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
Last week reports appeared online that the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) arrested Ukrainian citizen Vladimir Borysovich Tsemakh (b. 4 July 1961) in connection to the 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17). Tsemakh was previously known to have been the commander of an air defense unit in Snizhne, the town nearest to the Buk…
July 6, 2019
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
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…
June 28, 2019
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
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…
June 19, 2019
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
The full report can be viewed here (mirror) The Bellingcat Investigation Team has previously published a number of reports demonstrating that the deployment of the Buk missile launcher used to shoot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over Ukraine on 17 July 2014 involved senior officers of the Russian Ministry of Defense and its military…
May 23, 2019
By Dan Kaszeta
West of Moscow is a theme park called Patriot Park. One interesting exhibit at this park is an alleged Sarin production laboratory, said to have been captured in Syria. But is this really a production rig for the nerve agent Sarin? Photographs of the “Sarin Lab” courtesy of the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) Sarin Production…
April 4, 2019
On March 23, 2019, Twitter lit up with a series of images showing two Russian aircraft at the Simón Bolívar International airport just north of Caracas, Venezuela. The images also showed a group of individuals in uniform disembarking from one aircraft, and cargo being unloaded from the other. Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian…
February 21, 2019
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
In the previous part of this report, Bellingcat and its investigative partners The Insider (Russia) and Respekt (Czechia) identified Denis Sergeev, the GRU officer who was present in the UK during the poisoning of the Skripals in March 2018, and was also in Bulgaria during the poisoning, with similar symptoms, of a Bulgarian arms dealer…
February 20, 2019
By Aric Toler
After months sitting in the Russian State Duma, a law will finally pass forbidding Russian servicemen from carrying or using internet-connected devices to share information about their military units and service. The law introduces additional restrictions on Russian servicemen from sharing information about the military, including speaking with journalists about their military service or “carrying…
February 19, 2019
By Aric Toler
Update: SearchFace is dead, long live FindClone! This guide is now mostly for historical interest, as SearchFace has been taken offline and replaced with FindClone, a far easier tool to use than SearchFace was. You need to use a mobile telephone number to create an account for FindClone, which then gives you 30 searches over a…
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