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The Western-backed media organization Bellingcat came with a new ‘investigation’ regarding ‘Russian GRU officers’ in London in an attempt to rescue the dying mainstream narrative of the Skripal case.
A new speculation, released on June 28, claimed that there was evidence suggesting that a senior Russian military intelligence officer worked from a hotel in central London to coordinate the March 2018 ‘nerve agent attack’ against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.
The entire story with ‘Belilingcat investigation’ openly revelaed the organization as a mouthpiece of Western intelligence services that uses unverifiable data and ‘anonymous intelligence sources’ to shape the story and create speculations/investigations with conclusions playing in the hand of the mainstream narrative.
Another fun fact is that Bellingcat conducts its investigation with help from The Insider (a Lativan-based Russian-language pro-Western media) and BBC’s Newsnight.
The latest Bellingcat claims that the organization “identified a third GRU officer who travelled to London during the Salisbury poisoning operation under the cover identity of Sergey Fedotov.”
“We established that his real name is Denis Sergeev, and that his rank was at no lower than colonel, and possibly Lt. General or Major General. While Sergeev’s exact role in the operation was not known, taking into account his seniority and pattern of prior international operations, we assessed that he was in a senior position to Chepiga and Mishkin, and was likely in charge of coordinating the Salisbury operation,” the organization claimed.
According to the report, the key point of the ‘investigation’ is telephone metadata logs “from a telephone number registered in the name of the (cover) persona “Sergey Fedotov”.”
“Newly obtained telephone metadata logs from a telephone number registered in the name of the (cover) persona “Sergey Fedotov” has allowed us to analyze Denis Sergeev’s telephone usage – including calls and data connections – in the period of May 2017 – May 2019. The data – and especially the cell-ID metadata that we have been able to convert to geo-locations – allowed us to recreate Sergeev’s movements. These movements were both in Russia and abroad, as well as his pattern of communications during his overseas operations. Bellingcat obtained the telephone metadata records from a whistleblower working at a Russian mobile operator, who was convinced s/he was not breaching any data privacy laws due to the fact that the person to whom this phone number was registered (“Sergey Fedotov”) does not in fact exist,” the report said.
These data allegedly allowed the ‘investigators’ to make the following conclusions:
- Based on the analysis of Sergeev’s telephone movements within Moscow, we have established that his daily routine involves trips from his place of residence to several locations housing GRU operations. These include the GRU headquarters at Khoroshevskoe Shosse 67B, and the GRU Academy at Narodnoe Opolchenie 50
- Notably, Sergeev’s daily routine shows unchanged pattern of travel to these GRU locations from 2017 through the end of 2018, validating our hypotheses that he was in the employ of the GRU at the time of the Skripal poisoning.
- The telephone metadata produced further, unexpected evidence validating our identification of Denis Sergeev as the real person behind the “Sergey Fedotov” cover persona. This extra proof came in the form of a stray phone call from a telephone number registered in the name of Denis Sergeev’s wife, to the number registered in the name of “Sergey Fedotov” .
- Our reporting partner BBC has established via its own sourcing that Denis Sergeev has a rank of Major General. This, along with our prior assessment of his seniority to the Mishkin/Chepiga team and with the objective telephone records from his trip to London, presented below, validates our assumption that he was involved in the Skripal operation in a supervising, coordinating role; communicating back and forth to Moscow, while leaving the suspected Chepiga/Mishkin hit-team to work in an operational “Faraday cage”.
The rest of the report is designed to provide some ‘inside’ how the cooperating ‘independent media organizations’ led to the aforementioned assumptions. This ‘investigation’ raises two keystions:
- How did Bellingcat & Co reached a “whistleblower working at a Russian mobile operator” and get this “metadata”? It was not the first time when the ‘open source investigators’ used secret and anonymous sources to gather the data (often unverifiable) that then becomes the core of their ‘investigations’.
- Do they really believe that a Russian intelligence operative would really particiapte in a secret cover mission to poison a former spy carrying own phone? (especially if his wife uses this phone to call him over personal things)
MORE ON THE TOPIC:
- By ‘Skripal Investigation’ Reports Bellingcat Exposed Itself As Mouthpiece Of Western Intelligence Serivces
- Bellingcat Claims Skripal Poisoning Suspect Boshirov Is ‘Hero Of Russia’, ‘GRU Colonel’ Anatoliy Chepiga
- Deputy Russian Defense Minister Mocked By MSM After Mentioning “Metal Gear” Propaganda Operation
