They stake out their target for several hours. March 3: They take public transport to Salisbury where Mr. March 2: They fly from Moscow to London’s Gatwick Airport. Security footage allowed police to track the two suspected hit men as they entered Britain and scoped out their target over two days. He and his daughter Yulia fell seriously ill from exposure to Novichok, but survived. He’s filmed here in a local shop, days before he was targeted. The target was Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy living in Britain. Two Russians have been accused of an assassination attempt using a nerve agent called Novichok. Transcript How Surveillance Cameras Tracked Two Russian Hit Men British investigators used security footage and flight records to track two Russian men who now stand accused of attempted murder in the March attack featuring the nerve agent Novichok. Chepiga, one of two officers indicted in Britain over the poisoning of a former spy, Sergei V. Averyanov, at his daughter’s wedding in a gray suit and bow tie. A photograph taken in 2017 shows the unit’s commander, Maj. The unit appears to be a tight-knit community. Its operations are so secret, according to assessments by Western intelligence services, that the unit’s existence is most likely unknown even to other G.R.U. Some are decorated veterans of Russia’s bloodiest wars, including in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Ukraine. The hacking teams mostly operate from Moscow, thousands of miles from their targets.īy contrast, officers from Unit 29155 travel to and from European countries. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, indicted more than a dozen officers from those units, though all still remain at large. Putin, is actively fighting the West with his brand of so-called hybrid warfare - a blend of propaganda, hacking attacks and disinformation - as well as open military confrontation. The purpose of Unit 29155, which has not been previously reported, underscores the degree to which the Russian president, Vladimir V. Intelligence officials in four Western countries say it is unclear how often the unit is mobilized and warn that it is impossible to know when and where its operatives will strike. The group, known as Unit 29155, has operated for at least a decade, yet Western officials only recently discovered it. Western security officials have now concluded that these operations, and potentially many others, are part of a coordinated and ongoing campaign to destabilize Europe, executed by an elite unit inside the Russian intelligence system skilled in subversion, sabotage and assassination. Though the operations bore the fingerprints of Russia’s intelligence services, the authorities initially saw them as isolated, unconnected attacks. Last year, there was an attempt to assassinate a former Russian spy in Britain using a nerve agent. First came a destabilization campaign in Moldova, followed by the poisoning of an arms dealer in Bulgaria and then a thwarted coup in Montenegro.
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