First came a destabilization campaign in Moldova, followed by the poisoning of an arms dealer in Bulgaria and then a thwarted coup in Montenegro. Last year, there was an attempt to assassinate a former Russian spy in Britain using a nerve agent. Though the operations bore the fingerprints of Russia'
First came a destabilization campaign in Moldova, followed by the poisoning of an arms dealer in Bulgaria and then a thwarted coup in Montenegro. Last year, there was an attempt to assassinate a former Russian spy in Britain using a nerve agent. Though the operations bore the fingerprints of Russia’s intelligence services, authorities initially saw them as isolated, unconnected attacks.
“I think we had forgotten how organically ruthless the Russians could be,” said Peter Zwack, a retired military intelligence officer and former defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, who said he was not aware of the unit’s existence. Last year, Robert Mueller, 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. The hacking teams mostly operate from Moscow, thousands of miles from their targets.
To varying degrees, each of the four operations linked to the unit attracted public attention, even as it took time for authorities to confirm that they were connected. Western intelligence agencies first identified the unit after the failed 2016 coup in Montenegro, which involved a plot by two unit officers to kill the country’s prime minister and seize the parliament building.
Soon, officials established that two of these officers — the men using the names Fedotov and Pavlov — had been part of a team that attempted to poison Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev in 2015. The Kremlin sees Russia as being at war with a Western liberal order that it views as an existential threat.
Unit 29155 is not the only group authorized to carry out such operations, officials said. British authorities have attributed Litvinenko’s killing to the Federal Security Service, the intelligence agency once headed by Putin that often competes with the GRU. “They were serious guys who served there,” the retired officer said. “They were officers who worked undercover and as international agents.”
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