Eliot Higgins у Твіттері: «Ever wonder how Russian cruise missiles find their way into Ukrainian playgrounds, power stations, and apartment buildings? Well thanks to @bellingcat’s @christogrozev wonder no more. It’s time to meet the team behind the targeting of Russian missiles on civilian infrastructure. https://t.co/HHRrmUE3jQ» / Твіттер https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1584607815968395264

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Ever wonder how Russian cruise missiles find their way into Ukrainian playgrounds, power stations, and apartment buildings? Well thanks to @bellingcat’s @christogrozev wonder no more. It’s time to meet the team behind the targeting of Russian missiles on civilian infrastructure.

Scourge of the Russian intelligence services, Christo Grozev, has spent the last several months piecing together the team responsible for programming Russian cruise missiles launched at targets in Ukraine, frequently hitting civilian infrastructure.

The missile programmers are part of the Russian Armed Forces’ vast Main Computation Centre of the General Staff (GVC), and working with @the_ins_ru and @derspiegel we’ve identified the 33 military engineers involved with cruise missile attacks in Ukraine. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

Some of the members of this unit also took part in planning cruise missile attacks on targets in Syria and/or worked at Russia's military command centre in Damascus. Some are also recipients of various military awards, including from Russian President, Vladimir Putin.

The unit within the GVC that we identified appears to consist of three teams of approximately 10 engineers each, with each team dedicated to programming flight-paths of one specific high-precision missile type, launched from the sea, land, and air.

The direct commander of the missile pre-planners sub-unit appears to be Col. Igor Bagnyuk. This was established on the basis of the analysis of telephone data of eleven members of the group of engineers obtained from data sources on the Russian black data market.

One of the team members, Maj. Andrey Ivanyutin, can be seen in the background of this photograph of a meeting between President Putin and Syrian President Assad held in a secure Russian compound in Damascus in January 2021

By examining telephone metadata from the members of the unit it has been possible to link phone activity to attacks on Ukraine, including the October 10th strikes on Kyiv.

During the investigation we discovered Lt. Col. Bagnyuk was also an active user of the auction website Avito.ru, where he actively sells coins, even taking time to do so during the attack of Kyiv.

His current offerings include a medal awarded by President Putin in 2014. Based on descriptions of other offerings of the same type of medal, it was awarded “for contribution to the organisation of the Sochi Olympics”.

Phone records of Bagnyuk and his subordinates from the weeks prior to the 10 October attacks shows a surge of communication starting on 2 October and peaking on 9 October, with a total of 11 calls to engineers made on the last day before the strikes.

Prior to 2 October there was a lull of communication for approximately two weeks, consistent also with the absence of reports of intensive cruise missile use. This suggests that the planning for the 10 October attack began approximately one week earlier.

This timing also implies that the attack on the energy infrastructure and Kyiv may not have been a direct consequence of the partial destruction of the Kerch Bridge in Crimea on 8 October 2022. 

Bellingcat and @the_ins_ru approached multiple members of the unit, who responded in a variety of ways. Capt. Sergey Ilyin, who spoke with Bagnyuk by phone more than 30 times over the last four months claimed he was a self employed plumber, despite photos of him in uniform.

Another member of the team appearing in Bagnyuk’s phone calls around the time of missile attacks was Artem Vedenov. He took our call and confirmed his name, but said he works on a farm, and offered to the reporter to explain how to butcher a pig or pluck a chicken. 

More details of the investigation, and the responses from the unit’s members can be found on the Bellingcat website: bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

The Russian language version can be found on @the_ins_ru, with added details, including DMs between one of the programmers and prostitute, can be found here theins.ru/politika/255158

We did try to buy this medal so Christo could wear it during interviews about the article, but it didn't work out as Bagnyuk had to go away for work

Bellingcat's @Michael1Sheldon also managed to geolocate the group photo to the Russian MoD building in Moscow, but we couldn't fit that into the article:

Bellingcat is a charity, so if you'd like to support our work you can donate through this link bellingcat.com/donate/

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More from @EliotHiggins

Oct 24

So to give you a sense of how full of shit the Russians are, the top left image on the first slide is from a Syrian film production of a movie about the White Helmets faking chemical attacks, stills from which Russia previously used in their propaganda.
bellingcat.com/news/mena/2018…

Back in 2018 Russia 1 used production stills from the movie as evidence of the White Helmets faking attacks on civilians. You can find the production stills on the film's own Facebook page facebook.com/99314651083244…

That's 2022 Russian propaganda using stills from a 2018 Syrian anti-White Helmets propaganda film, which Russian media in 2018 used as direct evidence of the White Helmets creating propaganda.

Read 13 tweets

Oct 21

To build on this, my personal belief is most counter-disinformation work fails to address the fundamental issues that lead to the creation of disinformation, and generally misunderstands the source of disinformation in the first place.

The focus is often on outside actors (ie Russia) influencing communities through disinformation, when the reality is its more often communities themselves who create disinformation through their own efforts to counter what they see as disinformation.

That's then amplified by state actors when it suits their needs, so to truly address disinformation we need to understand why those communities create disinformation, and look at how to address that.

Read 30 tweets

Oct 20

The latest reporting from @bellingcat and @LHreports's QAnon analysis platform examines the spread of conspiracy theories among Dutch farmers that fuelled protests that made its way all to Tucker Carlson's show.
trouw.nl/verdieping/hoe…

These ideas reached a broad US audience when Tucker Carlson aired them back in July, with Eva Vlaardingerbroek providing the details of the theory to his audience:

As day follows night, Donald Trump even began to mention Dutch farmers following Tucker Carlson's coverage of the events and the theories fuelling them. 

Read 4 tweets

Oct 4

Not that we need reminding, but Roger Waters yet again reveals he's totally infested with tankie brainworms.

His comments about the US reveal his totally reductive world view, the US is the greatest evil in the world therefore anyone he thinks is in opposition to the US must be on the right side. It's incredibly stupid, but not untypical among a certain type of person.

My belief is the root of this is what I like to call "traumatic moral injury", where an individual suffers such a severe moral injury from an event or series of events (often legitimately) they start seeing the entire world through the lens of that injury.

Read 19 tweets

Sep 27

The new United Nations Human Rights report on the situation in Ukraine from Feb 1st to July 31st 2022 is now out ohchr.org/sites/default/…

The report opens with the numbers of deaths and attacks on civilian infrastructure confirmed by the UN investigators, with at least 5,385 persons killed and 7,264 persons injured, and 252 medical facilities, 384 educational facilities and 90 places of worship damaged or destroyed

33 out of 38 civilians released from Russian captivity reported torture and ill-treatment while in detention in interviews with the OHCHR, and 34 additional complaints of torture and ill-treatment were reported to the OHCHR.

Read 4 tweets

Sep 27

Just a bit of clarity on some of the reporting about Prigozhin and him suing people over claiming he's involved with Wagner, which he's now admitted is actually true. First of all, he didn't sue Bellingcat, he sued me personally, and not even for something I had said.

He sued me for the contents of articles linked in tweets I published, including two Bellingcat articles and articles from CNN and Spiegel. He didn't sue Bellingcat, CNN, or Spiegel for what was in the articles, just me for linking to them.

Here's the tweets in question, and thanks to the UK's terrible libel laws it cost tens of thousands of pounds to respond to his case, and that was just from the initial stages. It's only thanks to his lawyers pulling out of the case it didn't cost hundreds of thousands.

#Grozev

#Bellingcat

#OOSI

#OSINT

#HumintOSINT

#SocialHacking

#OpSec

#CASBT

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