Putin’s Bodyguards Rewarded with Land and Power

Photo credit: Natalya Yamshchikova

Once responsible just for his physical security, President Putin’s bodyguards now have impressive titles — and land worth many millions in Russia’s most expensive region. The workers and pensioners who previously held the property say they were swindled out of it.

Former bodyguards for Russian President Vladimir Putin have gained immense power in exchange for their unquestioned loyalty. Many have also accumulated vast wealth, exemplifying how Russia’s newly ascendant class has exploited a system meant to protect the old.

An investigation by Novaya Gazeta, in partnership with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, shows who paid the price: more than 1,100 ordinary people who had worked for decades on a giant poultry plant outside Moscow.

Some were decorated World War II veterans whom the Soviet Union had promised lifetime employment and pensions. But in the newly independent Russian Federation, there can be no such guarantees. During the 1990s, these workers say, a small clique of powerful businessmen and criminals used manipulation, forgery, intimidation, and even beatings to seize their land.

The dozens of hectares were then divided into smaller plots and eventually doled out to a cohort newly empowered by Putin: officers in the Federal Guard Service and the Presidential Security Service.

The three most prominent members of this clique — Viktor Zolotov, Oleg Klimentiev, and Alexei Dyumin — can be seen flanking Putin on an official trip to Helsinki in a 1999 television report. For years, this trio of bodyguards protected the president at work and at rest in Russia and abroad, and on one occasion even frightened away a bear from the leader’s mountain retreat.

Though they no longer shadow his every step, in some ways these men are closer to Putin than ever. Over the past five years, they and many of their colleagues have become a powerful new political clan wholly devoted to the president. Once responsible simply for physical safety, they have become governors, ministers, top commanders in the special services, and administrators of the president’s affairs.

They’ve also become rich by acquiring hectares of land in Russia’s most expensive territory at substantial — sometimes almost total — discounts.

Though some of the ordinary workers who lost their land are still fighting to reclaim it, the vast majority have long abandoned the cause without seeing justice. Their reward for a lifetime of labor now belongs to the newest members of Russia’s ruling class.

The Changing of the Guard

The composition of Putin’s inner circle has gradually shifted during his stewardship of Russia. One by one, former confidants have lost their positions, including neighbors from the “Ozero” dacha cooperative where the president owned an estate, fellow KGB operators, and old colleagues from the St. Petersburg mayor’s office.

The idea of replacing them with more trusted lieutenants arose after mass anti-government protests shook Russia in 2011-2012, according to an officer with the Presidential Security Service. Many still think these protests were orchestrated by unknown parties, he said, describing the events as a “failed conspiracy attempt.”

Meanwhile, Putin’s trust in Russia’s law enforcement agencies had been undermined by the constant intrigue among their leaders. The men from his personal guard, however, were devoted only to the president, the officer said.

These men, after all, had carried out Putin’s most delicate assignments, showed unwavering loyalty, and put their lives at risk.

They also possessed another quality: an apparently unconditional willingness to fulfill any presidential order. This is an especially valuable trait amid Russia’s many challenges, which include growing poverty, popular opposition to a recent increase in the national retirement age, and incessant confrontation with the West.

These are the circumstances under which Putin has appointed many of his former security officers to key government posts. The president’s idea was to create a “mighty fist” by naming loyal people to all the important power structures, said an employee of the Presidential Security Service who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Putin’s three top guards on his 1999 Helsinki trip are prime examples. Zolotov now heads the National Guard, Klimentiev is first deputy director of the Federal Guard Service, and Dyumin served as deputy defense minister and was then appointed governor of the Tula region. There are many other examples as well.

Vladimir Putin announces the creation of the National Guard in 2016. Viktor Zolotov is on the right.
(Photo: The Kremlin)

On the Rublevka

The story of the farm that ultimately enriched Putin’s bodyguards begins in 1924, in the early years of the Soviet Union. That’s when Felix Dzerzhinsky, known as “Iron Felix” for his leadership of the young country’s security apparatus, founded the Gorki-2 poultry breeding facility in a village of the same name near Moscow.

Established under the jurisdiction of the NKVD, the fearsome security agency that preceded the KGB, the farm provided agents with eggs and poultry meat. It grew to envelop land in nearby villages such as Znamenskoye, Zhukovka, Barvikha, and Kalchuga.

The Odintsovsky district, which enompasses them, stretches for some 65 kilometers to the west of Moscow. In the Soviet era, this area bore no association with luxury, but that has changed. The lightly wooded region, fed by the Moscow River, now contains some of Russia’s most expensive real estate.

That’s in large part thanks to Putin. Shortly after becoming president, he settled in the district at the Novo-Ogaryovo estate. Land values soon skyrocketed in the area, which is popularly known as the Rublevka (after a local highway). Today, the villages where the state poultry farm once operated have become the playgrounds of Russia’s wealthiest and most influential people.

Among them now are Putin’s former bodyguards, their relatives, and colleagues from the Presidential Security Service and the Federal Guard Service. In the mid-2000s, many members of these agencies received valuable property from the now-private poultry breeding farm or its subsidiaries. The land was bestowed at rock-bottom prices, in some cases for as little as 2 percent of its market value. Some guards built expensive homes on their new lots; others sold them and became millionaires.

The three men who accompanied Putin in Helsinki — Zolotov, Klimentiev, and Dyumin — are among those who did very well.

Zolotov’s son Roman and his son-in-law hold 2 hectares between them that could be worth over 1.5 billion rubles ($22.7 million) today.

Klimentiev, once described by colleagues as a “modest” man, received a plot, as did his then-16-year-old daughter. His declared income shot up to 21 million rubles (about $350,000) in 2015, the year he sold the land. Klimentiev’s wife Irina obtained property too, paying just 2 percent of the market price.

Dyumin also saw his family prosper. His father received almost half an acre in the Rublevka, his brother holds a large estate that could be worth $8 million, and even his brother-in-law acquired multi-million-dollar holdings.

(For more about these three men and their new properties, see: The Three Bodyguards and Their Riches)

The Security Capital

The nearby village of Soloslovo, just 15 minutes by car from Putin’s residence, can be described as the unofficial capital of the president’s security detail, given that so many of its members have acquired property there.

The Soviet state farm owned large plots in Soloslovo. In August 2003, the private company that succeeded it — now called Agrokomplex Gorki-2 — sold 12 hectares in the village to a newly formed organization called Zarya.

Zarya soon became a mechanism for distributing this land to Putin’s former bodyguards. After gaining control of the 12 hectares, it divided the territory into 64 plots, and in 2004 started distributing them to Federal Guard Service and Presidential Security Service officers. And no wonder: Three of its four founders were high-ranking Federal Guard Service officers.

Among them was the leader, Nikolai Kondratyuk, who spent three years atop the division of the Federal Guard Service responsible for the occupied Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. As Zolotov’s de-facto farm manager, he was also a sort of gatekeeper for land issues, said one colleague who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Zolotov “always tried to take care of his own,” explains one Federal Guard Service officer, adding that security personnel were sometimes given land for their birthdays or to cover some need.

In his words, the officers either paid nothing for the Soloslovo plots or “bought them for some kind of ridiculous and symbolic amounts.”

His claims are supported by Zarya’s financial statements, which show that it sold 48 plots of land in 2004. On the open market, these sales would have brought Zarya between 315 and 733 million rubles ($10.9 million to 25.4 million), according to calculations based on prices provided by the Blackwood real estate agency. However, Zarya’s 2004 revenue was under 6 million rubles ($208,000).

Meanwhile, an intense struggle over the land was underway. Workers and pensioners from the former state farm, many of whom were elderly World War II veterans, claimed that the land had been stolen from them through threats, beatings, and forgeries.

A partial listing of Putin’s former bodyguards and their fellow officers who attained
high positions — and got land in the Rublevka. (Credit: Edin Pasovic, OCCRP).

One Against the System

Gorki-2, the village the poultry farm was named for, is home to a series of old five-story apartment buildings that stand in monotonous rows. They’re surrounded by the mansions of billionaires.

Almost every building, almost every apartment, is home to former workers from the Soviet farm. Reporters went door-to-door and talked to people on the street seeking explanations for what happened to the land in the 1990s. Many refused to speak. Some remembered being threatened while they fought for the property.

A central figure in the conflict is a pensioner named Nikolai Uvarov, who has filed numerous court appeals seeking to regain real estate he says had been promised to his father, Alexei.

Nikolai Uvarov
(Photo: Anna Artemeva, Novaya Gazeta)

Sitting in his hundred-year-old dacha in an old village near Moscow, Nikolai said his father started working at the state farm in 1933, when he was 21 years old. Using a bewildering array of Soviet abbreviations, Alexei’s work there is recorded in his employment book, a standard document maintained by all Soviet laborers: “State Farm ‘Gorki-II’ KhPZO AKhU NKVD,” it reads.

The next item added to his father’s employment record was entered on June 23, 1941, the day after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union: “Freed from work due to departure to the RKKA [Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army].”

The elder Uvarov fought to defend Moscow that year, then served on the Belarusian front, where he was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, Second Class, for coordinating the evacuation and repair of ammunition trucks under enemy fire.

Uvarov survived the war and returned to the farm in 1946: “Order of Lenin State Farm Gorki-2 NKVD USSR,” his employment record shows. He served as a driver for almost 40 years before retiring in 1984.

Signatures from Beyond the Grave

Nikolai Uvarov was born in the village of Gorki-2 in 1939, two years before his father went to war, and the farm has always been a part of his life. “I worked in the breeding plant when I was a schoolboy,” he says. “I helped in the fields, with weeding. And in high school I worked as a loader here to make some extra money.”

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Gorki-2 farm was privatized by its more than 1,100 workers and pensioners, dropped the word “state” from the name, and became simply the Gorki-2 Poultry Breeding Plant. As a retiree, Alexei Uvarov was entitled to his part. He died in 1996, bequeathing all his property to Nikolai.

Alexei Uvarov. (Photo courtesy of Nikolai Uvarov)

Like all the other farm hands, Alexei Uvarov was supposed to receive 1.74 hectares of the property. Years later, when Nikolai sought documentation of his father’s plot, he was surprised to discover that he had inherited 15 preferred shares in the farm rather than any actual real estate. It appeared that his father had received the shares in exchange for contributing his land to the company that ran Gorki-2.

But there was a big problem: The land exchange was dated 1998, two years after the elder Uvarov’s death.

That’s when Nikolai realized someone had likely forged documents to steal his inheritance. After starting his own investigation, he discovered that the same thing had happened to many other workers.

Uvarov began to fight, and soon a group of similarly deceived shareholders joined him. They struggled for years, but most gave in. Some died as the litigation dragged on. Some agreed to small amounts of compensation.

Only Uvarov is still battling, having tried for almost 20 years to prove what he calls the “fraud and theft” of his land. He has lost scores of legal cases, written dozens if not hundreds of complaints, received threats, and survived a brutal assault. He has even rejected an offer of 10 million rubles for his plot, still determined to prove the original wrongdoing.

Now almost 80 years old, he can still summon specific dates and numbers of the various rulings by heart. And he’s collected an archive of documents that show precisely what happened.

“They Betrayed Us”

The Gorki-2 land-grab wasn’t especially innovative. Similar schemes were used throughout Russia, though the resulting court decisions reached an unparalleled level of absurdity in the Moscow region, according to a lawyer who has represented workers and spoke on condition of anonymity.

In May 1998, a man named Mikhail Troshkov appeared at a workers’ meeting about the Gorki-2 farm. Though he hadn’t worked a single day there, Troshkov nevertheless steered the agenda, announcing to all those gathered that they would become shareholders in the company that owned the facility. Each person would receive 15 preferred shares in exchange for their land.

The company’s executives supported Troshkov’s proposal, and by Sept. 30, 1998, the swaps had been made in over a thousand separate cases.

“They betrayed us,” Uvarov says. “Most people’s signatures were forged. Those who worked [at the plant] in Gorki-2 were forced to sign [the documents] under threat of dismissal. What were they supposed to do?”

Uvarov’s father, the World War II veteran who had died two years earlier, was listed among those who signed the deal. So was Viktor Rumyantsev, who had died in 1997. Uvarov eventually found over 100 such cases.

Signatures of the living were also apparently forged. Many who said they were swindled participated in class-action lawsuits. Uvarov says he himself has represented the interests of 27 people in court. No matter the proof submitted, judges rejected the claims.

Take World War II veteran Ivan Chuprov, for example, who was disabled after serving as a mortarman and being wounded in 1943. In 2004, he appealed to the Moscow Region Arbitration Court seeking the return of his 1.74 hectares. He hadn’t wanted to exchange his land, he said, and the signature on the certificate was a fake.

His request that the court appoint a handwriting expert was denied, in part, the court said, because Chuprov had received dividend payments from the farm between 2000 and 2002. The payments amounted to 253 rubles (about $8).

Losing their real estate was only the first stage of the workers’ disenfranchisement. They had lost their land, but formally they remained the farm’s owners. However, no one person or company could really seize control of the property unless they either bought a majority of outstanding shares from the workers or persuaded the Gorki-2 Poultry Breeding Plant to issue additional shares. Mikhail Troshkov’s next step was to execute option two.

A Temporary Owner

In October 1998, right after the workers’ land was swapped for preferred shares, almost 400,000 additional common shares in the company were issued. The amount was five times as many as had previously existed, and massively diluted the value of the workers’ holdings. Moreover, unlike the preferred shares, the new common stock bestowed its owners with voting power at shareholder meetings.

Troshkov, the same man who initiated the controversial land swap, became one of the biggest acquirers of the newly issued shares.

He had never worked the land and shouldn’t have been eligible to participate in the secondary stock offering, which was supposed to be open only to existing shareholders. But Anatoly Cherkasov, the farm’s general director, empowered Troshkov by gifting him two shares in advance. Though their nominal value was just 2 rubles, the transaction allowed Troshkov to participate in the share sale.

He bought about 12 percent of the offering for just 50,000 rubles ($4,500).

Soon it became clear that he, and other recipients of the new shares, were just stand-ins for three long-time business associates who would become the plant’s new owners. Without explanation, Troshkov simply gifted his newly acquired shares to the trio, helping the men gain control of hectares of land in the Rublevka.

“People Were Hungry. So They Sold.”

One of the recipients was Timofei Klinovsky, today one of the biggest landowners in this prestigious and expensive area. At the end of the 1990s, he was just beginning to buy Rublevka property. The former state farm seems to have become his main target, and after receiving Troshkov’s shares, he started buying workers out of theirs.

“They sold them. Some drank. Some … well, people were hungry. So they sold,” Uvarov said. One of his legal cases unearthed documents showing that Klinovsky paid just 14 rubles per share: about $7 for each packet of 15 that workers had received.

Today Klinovsky has a palace in the village of Zhukovka, within walking distance of Zolotov’s mansion. The luxury here is impressive even by Rublevka standards. Video of the estate taken from a drone shows an area of more than 3 hectares stretching along the Moscow River. It includes a tennis court, promenades, trimmed trees, and manicured lawns. The house looks like a royal residence.

Control of the breeding plant brought Klinovsky a fortune, as well as access to valuable connections. When billionaires and public officials started moving to the Rublevka in the early 2000s, they acquired land from him and his companies. Some became his neighbors. These included the president’s bodyguards and prominent FSB generals, such as Vladimir Anisimov, the agency’s former deputy director; and Sergei Shishin, the former head of its support service.

The Entrepreneurs

In Russia, the last decade of the 20th century is popularly referred to as the “wild ‘90s,” and for good reason. Almost every business, no matter how large or small, had to deal with gangsters who wanted money or influence.

That’s why it’s hard to imagine that a little-known entrepreneur such as Troshkov would independently be able to seize thousands of hectares of land near Moscow. He would have needed influential and powerful allies.

It turns out, he had them.

Troshkov was employed by a holding company called Trinity, which eventually became one of the major co-owners of the Gorki-2 farm, along with Klinovsky. Behind Trinity were two businessmen with serious criminal connections, David Yakobashvili and Gavriil Yushvaev.

The company’s first serious business was selling used cars from the United States. One of its early operators, Vladislav Vanner, led the Bauman criminal gang, an influential crew in Moscow at the time. Vanner was shot and killed by another gangster in 1994.

“We were friends,” Yakobashvili said of his relationship with Vanner in a 2004 interview with the Russian Forbes.

“I helped him and he helped me,” he said. “If he grew up in the Bauman district, that doesn’t mean he was the head of a [criminal] group. And anyway, what is the Bauman criminal group? The press doesn’t understand a lot of things. They’ve seen too many mafia films.”

Yakobashvili’s second partner and Trinity co-owner, Yushvaev, is also known for his criminal past. Yushvaev was convicted of robbery in 1980 and served nine years in Soviet prison camps. Upon his release, he became Yakobashvili’s partner in Trinity and in the well-known Moscow casino, Metelitsa.

Today, the Russian Forbes estimates Yushvaev’s fortune at $1.4 billion. He is one of the hundred wealthiest people in the country.

Yakobashvili confirmed that, along with his partners, Yushvaev and Klinovsky, he had become a shareholder of the Gorki-2 plant in the late 1990s. The business supplied milk for the Lianozovsky dairy plant, in which both he and Yushvaev had interests, Yakobashvili said.

The businessman denied any knowledge of any deals between the farm and the president’s bodyguards.

The workers’ complaints about the land-for-shares deal and subsequent maneuvers should be treated with understanding and some skepticism, he said.

“No one seized anything. We bought shares. If someone doesn’t like the price today, what can you say? Those who sold bitcoins many years ago could argue today that they weren’t purchased at the market price.”

Reporters were unable to contact Troshkov. None of the security officers who received land responded to requests for comment.

Attacks on Activists

Nikolai Uvarov’s fight for his father’s property brought grave consequences.

In one of his court cases in 2005, a lawyer who represented the farm took him aside and allegedly threatened him. Uvarov told police that “[the lawyer] broke into obscene language, promised to rape me in a perverted way, to throw me out of a train … and [made] many other threats, including [taking my life].”

In a police interrogation on Feb. 26, 2006, the lawyer denied the charges: “The facts described in [Uvarov’s] statement are an invention,” he said.

Nine days later, on March 7, Uvarov was fiercely attacked on the street.

““They wanted to kill me. It was my birthday. I was walking home from the tax office … It was about 1:00 p.m. I noticed a car there. And somehow I don’t remember anything else.”

“They wanted to kill me. It was my birthday. I was walking home from the tax office … It was about 1:00 p.m. I noticed a car there. And somehow I don’t remember anything else. It seems that they stunned me, so that I … well, they tore me all up: knocked out my teeth, broke my collarbone, beat my hands,” he said.

Uvarov was rescued by two old women who started screaming, scared off the attackers, and took him to the hospital. He had a fractured skull, open fractures of both wrists, multiple bruises, and open wounds.

The attackers were never found, and the criminal case was soon suspended. Uvarov made many appeals, calling for the courts to force the police to undertake a serious search. In 2010, the court received a striking response: “The criminal case has been lost … measures are being taken to establish the location of the criminal case.”

On the same day that Uvarov was beaten, another Gorki-2 shareholder was also attacked.

Tamara Semenova was a leader of Peasants’ Front, an organization that united not only many of the Gorki-2 workers, but also other farmers who had lost their land. The group held demonstrations attended by thousands in the center of Moscow and even blocked the Rublevo-Uspensky highway near Putin’s residence.

A Peasants’ Front demonstration. (Photo: Provided by participants)

Eventually, this seemed to make a difference.

A lawyer who represented the workers and spoke on condition of anonymity said that after the demonstrations, the president’s administration began to act, asking the farm owners to solve the “peasant question.” Soon, the lawyer said, they started offering to buy the workers’ shares at “decent prices.”

At the very end of 2006, leaflets were distributed in Gorki-2 offering to pay workers 50,000 rubles ($1,900) for each preferred share in the company.

An owner of 15 preferred shares stood to receive 750,000 rubles ($28,500), still much lower than the market price for 1.74 hectares of Rublevka land, but many times the 210 rubles that Klinovsky had paid in the early 2000s. The new amount was 3,600 times what he had offered just a few years earlier.

Not all the workers benefited. Some had died. Uvarov, on the other hand, refused to sell the shares he had inherited from his father. He’s still writing complaints and filing court cases.

“I decided to go to the end, until I can prove this fraud and theft. If I sold, then I would betray … the other people I defended,” Uvarov said. “Until I resolve this, I’m not going to quiet down.”

So Close, and Yet So Far

The saga of the Gorki-2 land contains several episodes when justice was almost achieved, only to be denied.

One government body, the Federal Agency for State Property Management, has been trying to prove since 2007 that the transfer of land from the workers to the farm had been illegal, making the affair “an unlawful transfer of state property into private hands.”

The legal conflict continued with varying success, with the Gorki-2 farm winning the first two court decisions, only for a federal court to overturn the results. The state agency then prevailed again in the lower courts, returning the matter to the same federal bench.

This time, the court upheld the lower court rulings, deciding against the Federal Agency for State Property Management. It was July 2009, just as the brother of one of the president’s most trusted bodyguards received his plot from the farm, and not long before the wife of another security officer received hers.

In 2012, Uvarov saw a glimmer of hope that a criminal case would be launched regarding his father and war veteran Ivan Chuprov.

“I got an appointment with [Investigative Committee head Alexander] Bastrykin. It seemed like everything was decided positively. I thought everything went fine,” he recalled.

That April, the Investigative Committee of the Moscow region received documents pertaining to Uvarov and Chuprov’s claims that their signatures had been falsified and their land stolen. On examining them, an investigator suspected that a crime may have been committed by Anatoliy Cherkasov, the farm’s general director; and Alexander Gladyshev, the former head of the Odintsovsky district.

But soon the investigator was transferred, and the case stalled again.

This spring Uvarov sent another complaint to Putin, who had just been elected to his third term as president.

“I had already tried this 10 times,” he said. “They conveyed my appeal to [Investigative Committee head] Bastrykin. And then Bastrykin’s office writes [that] they sent my documents to lower departments.”

Uvarov’s failure to win back his land may suggest why its new owners would sell some of it to former members of Putin’s security detail at steep discounts: It may have been a form of insurance.

As long as portions of the property belonged to a powerful clique connected to the president, it is unlikely that any judge would rule in favor of the dispossessed workers and pensioners.

Uvarov seems to have reached this conclusion himself. On hearing that some of the real estate had long been divided among the president’s bodyguards, he wasn’t surprised.

“This was done to block our documents, if they ever get to the FSB or anywhere else,” he said. “Putin will never betray his people.”

Unmasking the Salisbury Poisoning Suspects: A Four-Part Investigation

Read The Insider Russian report on this same topic here.

In  a preceding report on the investigation into the two suspects in the Skripals poisoning case, Bellingcat and its reporting partner the Insider disclosed the identity of one of the two suspects. The person travelling under the alias of Ruslan Boshirov was identified as GRU’s Col. Anatoliy Chepiga, recipient of Russia’s highest state award.

Bellingcat can now report that it has conclusively identified the second suspect, who travelled to Salisbury under the alias Alexander Petrov. We already produced evidence that “Alexander Petrov” is not an authentic persona, but an undercover alias for an officer of a Russian security agency. In a later report, we established that “Petrov” was specifically working for Russia’s military intelligence, the GRU.

“We already produced evidence that “Alexander Petrov” is not an authentic persona, but an undercover alias for an officer of a Russian security agency.”

We have identified “Alexander Petrov” to be in fact Dr. Alexander Yevgeniyevich Mishkin, a trained military doctor in the employ of the GRU. Furthermore, multiple witnesses familiar with Alexander Mishkin and his family have confirmed to us that he, like Col. Chepiga, is a recipient of the Hero of Russia award, which is bestowed by a special decree by the Russian President.

While Alexander Mishkin’s true persona has an even smaller digital footprint than Anatoliy Chepiga’s, Bellingcat has been able to establish many key facts from his background.

Who is Alexander Mishkin?

Alexander Mishkin was born on 13 July, 1979 in the village of Loyga, in the Archangelsk District in Northern European Russia. Loyga, inhabited by just over a thousand residents, is so remote that it has no road access to the rest of Russia, and for most of the year is only reachable via a narrow-gauge railroad. Alexander Mishkin lived in his home village until at least 1995, until he was sixteen. For a large part of his school years, Mishkin lived with his grandmother, Loyga’s only medical practitioner at the time.

At some point between 1995 and 1999, Alexander Mishkin moved to St. Petersburg. We could not establish what led to the initial relocation, although some people familiar with his family reported that he enrolled at a military academy. We have established with certainty however that no later than 2001 he was a student at the “S. Kirov” Military Medical Academy, which is popularly referred to in Russian as Voyenmed. Mishkin studied at the Academy’s 4^th Faculty, which trains military doctors for Russia’s naval armed forces.  He specialised in undersea and hypobaric medicine. Mishkin graduated the Academy in 2006 or 2007 with a medical degree and rank of senior lieutenant, which is the default rank granted to all military doctors in Russia.

It is not certain at what point — before, during or after his military medical studies — Mishkin was recruited to work for the GRU. However, no earlier than 2007 and no later than 2010 he relocated to Moscow and received an undercover identity, including a second national ID and travel passport, under the alias Alexander Petrov.

Unlike the case of Anatoliy Chepiga, “Petrov”’s cover identity retained most of the biographical characteristics of the authentic Mishkin – such as the exact birth date, first and patronymic name, and first names of his parents. The family name was changed to Petrov, and the birthplace was moved to Kotlas, town approximately 100 km from his actual place of birth (reaching Kotlas from Loyga by car, ironically enough, takes 10 hours as it requires a 350-km detour). Under his cover identity, Mishkin was registered at a Moscow address occupied by a different individual who is likely unrelated to him and unaware of his existence. The real Mishkin, under his authentic identity, lived with his wife and two children at a different address in Moscow.

“Under his cover identity, Mishkin was registered at a Moscow address occupied by a different individual who is likely unrelated to him and unaware of his existence.”

Incomplete border crossing data obtained by Bellingcat shows that in the period 2010-2013 Mishkin travelled — under his undercover persona of Petrov — multiple times to Ukraine, and often crossed by car into and back from the self-declared Transnistrian Republic where he stayed for short periods of time.  His last trip to Ukraine was in mid-December 2013. Mishkin’s travel itinerary from 2016 and on was reported previously by us.

Until early September 2014, Mishkin’s registered home address in Moscow was Khoroshevskoye Shosse 76B, the address of the headquarters of the GRU. Bellingcat has confirmed that until approximately the same time, August 2014, Col. Chepiga was also registered as “residing” at this address. This address registration did not mean that the two physically lived at the GRU headquarters but that their actual place of residence was kept confidential.

Hero of Russia award: For activities in Ukraine?

In the latter part of 2014, President Putin bestowed Alexander Mishkin with the Hero of the Russian Federation Award.  People closely familiar with Mishkin’s family reported to us that they believe Russia’s highest award was given for Mishkin’s activities “either in Crimea or in relation to [former Ukrainian president] Yanukovich”

In our previous reporting on Chepiga, we identified that until 2014 he resided at an apartment complex shared by dozens of GRU-linked officers and owned by the Ministry of Defense. While we found no indication of Mishkin’s actual residence while registered at GRU headquarters address, it can be assumed he also used a GRU-issued corporate apartment. In the autumn of 2014, at the time both Mishkin and Chepiga received their Hero of Russia Awards, both moved to upscale apartments valued at between €350,000 and €500,000 at the exchange rates that existed then. Bellingcat believes that these apartments were in-kind remuneration that accompanied the highest state award.

Alexander Mishkin current military rank is unknown. However, based on the known rank as of graduation from the Military Medical Academy (Russian military doctors graduate with a rank of senior lieutenant), and the elapsed time (15 years), it can be posited that as the time of the Skripals’ poisoning incident he was either a Lt. Colonel or a full Colonel.

Identification method

The starting point for our research was a passport photograph of “Alexander Petrov,”as well as security camera photos and video footage from this person’s interview on RT. In addition, we had the passport dossier of the undercover persona “Petrov”, which contained an earlier photo and other, possibly irrelevant or fake, biographical data. In addition, UK media quoted a police source stating that the first name of the suspect was indeed believed to be “Alexander”, while the family name was believed to be different than “Petrov”.

Similar to the identification of Col. Chepiga, Bellingcat initially exhausted all reverse-image search attempts with no match. This implied that “Petrov”, like Col. Chepiga, has no social media or other photographic presence on the internet, or that such past presence, if any, has been cleansed thoroughly.

The second line of attack was to search through photo-albums or group photos and videos of graduates of the Far-Eastern Military School attended by Col. Chepiga. This approach also yielded no results. Similarly, no matches were identified in group photos of the Spetsnaz military unit to which Chepiga was assigned after graduation. Then Bellingcat searched through names of all people registered at Chepiga’s corporate-residence address. After exploring all possible name and age matches, we concluded none of the residents could be “Alexander Petrov.”

Change of search algorithm

Finally, we decided to apply a different approach to the search. While in the case of Chepiga, all personal details had been altered for his cover persona, this was not necessarily always the case.  Other GRU undercover officers we had investigated, such as Eduard Shishmakov, had retained their first name, birthdate and place of birth, and had only the last name changed, in Shishmakov’s case to “Shirokov.” The research team hypothesized that this may have been the case with “Petrov” too, given the tip that the first name had been retained unchanged.

Looking for clues as to the geographical focus for the search, we noted that in the “cover” passport file, there was a reference to a previous passport, issued in St. Petersburg in 1999.

Searching through dozens of previously leaked databases, we did not find such passport issue number, leading the team to conclude the number was fake. However, the reference to St. Petersburg was a possible clue, under the “minimum change” hypothesis.

Alexander from St. Petersburg

Focusing on St. Petersburg, we searched through various leaked databases of residents, vehicle owners and telephone subscribers, by using the following search criteria: first name and patronymic = “Alexander Yevgeniyevich” (as in the cover identity),  and birth date = “13 July, 1979” (also as in the cover identity).

This search resulted in only one exact match in St. Petersburg databases from 2003 and 2006: Alexander Yevgeniyevich Mishkin, born on 13 July, 1979. This name with the same address, Akademika Lebedeva street 12, apartment 30, are mentioned in an open source database as well.

Bellingcat then used the telephone number (which is no longer in service) listed in the database as search criteria, to find other St. Petersburg residents that were linked to it. At least eight residents were registered to have used this same phone number, in the 2003 and 2006 databases. This finding suggested that these living quarters may have been a communal apartment (komunalnaya kvartira), or living space shared by multiple unrelated residents. Communal apartments were wide-spread in the USSR, but as of 2002 would have primarily been used by students. Indeed, more than half of the people registered to this phone number, including Mishkin, were between ages of 18 and 24.

A review of the map of St. Petersburg placed the address directly across the part of the campus buildings of the St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy, or Voyenmed.

Another clue from the cover passport that supports the hypothesis that Alexander Mishkin is the true identity of Alexander Petrov, is the aforementioned reference to a previous passport issued in 1999. The reference mentions “20 отделение милиции Выборгского района город Санкт-Петербурга,” translated as the 20th police department of the Vyborg district of St. Petersburg, located at Ulitsa Smolyachkova nr.5, just 1.6 kilometers from the address where Mishkin was registered.

Using the open-source online database of residents of St. Petersburg, Bellingcat identified more than 30 persons who had inhabited different apartments in the house at “Akademika Lebedeva 12.” A search for these people’s online presence showed that many of them list VMEDA as their alma mater, and many others work in spheres linked to the medical profession.  From the 8 persons registered to the same communal apartment as Mishkin, two were identified, via social media, as VMEDA graduates.

No presence for “Alexander Yevgeniyevich Mishkin” with the birth date of 13.07.1979 was found on Russian or foreign social media sites.

At this point in the investigation, Bellingcat hypothesized that the Alexander Yevgeniyevich Mishkin who lived across the street from the VMEDA in 2002 was a student at the military medical academy. Additionally, the team hypothesized that this might indeed by the real person behind the persona Alexander Petrov, who shared the same birthdate, name and patronymic.

Linking St. Petersburg to Moscow

On the assumption that the real person behind “Alexander Petrov” lives and works in Moscow (as suggested by the Moscow registration of the cover passport file), Bellingcat then searched for presence of a person with the name Alexander Yevgenyevich Mishkin in Moscow. The first open-source result was from a Moscow online phone database.

Using this phone number and name, we searched in various leaked Moscow databases and found a match in a car insurance database from 2013.

However, at this point it was not unequivocal that this Moscow-based person having the same full name and driving a Volvo XC90 was the same person as the St. Petersburg namesake. To verify this, Bellingcat acquired the registration history of this vehicle from an official Russian database.  The car history showed that it had been imported, and initially registered in St. Petersburg in 2012, and on 11 September 2013 had been transferred to an individual residing in the Khoroshevsky District in Moscow.

As the GRU headquarters is located at Khoroshevskoye Shosse 76B, in this same district, this finding increased the probability that Alexander Mishkin from St. Petersburg is indeed “Alexander Petrov.” However, the evidence was still inconclusive, primarily as there was no confirmation that “Khoroshevsky Region” Alexander Mishkin shares (a) same birth date as the St. Petersburg namesake and (b) if his address in Khoroshevsky Region is not a pure coincidence.

To eliminate these uncertainties, we obtained a more recent auto insurance database from 2014, available for purchase from a Russian website. A search for the registered owner of the Volvo XC90 eliminated any doubt that Alexander Mishkin is linked to the GRU, as the address listed for the owner was GRU’s headquarters, at Khoroshevskoye Shosse 76B.  Additionally, due the full overlap of birth date and name, we concluded that with high confidence that he is the same Alexander Mishkin who resided next to  Russia’s military academy in St. Petersburg in 2002.

At this point in the investigation, Bellingcat and its investigative partner, The Insider, shared the conviction that Alexander Mishkin was in fact the person behind the alias “Petrov,” as all evidence was internally consistent, and also consistent with data from the previous case study of Shishmakov/Shirokov. The team also had relatively high confidence that Alexander Mishkin had studied at, and possibly graduated, the St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy, VMEDA, or Voyenmed.

Do not divulge

Via Russian social networks, Bellingcat mass-contacted hundreds of VMEDA graduates from the 2001-2007 class range. We did not inform the persons contacted about the context of the query, nor did we mention Petrov. Many of the contacted persons responded by saying they are not familiar with an Alexander Mishkin as having been in their class. Most others did not respond to our queries.

One person, who requested complete anonymity, confirmed to Bellingcat that Alexander Mishkin indeed graduated the academy, having been in a different class. They also said that they had recognized Mishkin as “Alexander Petrov” from the RT interview. This same person informed us that many of the graduates from Mishkin’s class and department had been contacted by Russian security services over the last few weeks, and instructed not to divulge Mishkin’s identity to anyone.

A photo worth a thousand words

Having established Petrov’s true identity in late September, we focused all efforts on obtaining a photograph of Alexander Mishkin. As reported by Russian media, following Bellingcat’s initial reports on the Skripal suspects, the Russian domestic security agency FSB clamped down on sources that they perceived might be leaking data from Russia’s passport dossier databases. As a result, requesting any source to provide the investigating team with access to Mishkin’s passport file was not an option, as it would place this source in danger.

Instead, we were able to obtain a copy of Alexander Mishkin’s scanned passport pages, from a source with access to a scanned copy of the passport. The source requested complete anonymity due to safety concerns, and thus Bellingcat cannot share the position or history the source has that has enabled them to have access to this document. However, we have validated the data visible in the passport in at least three other leaked databases that match the passport number, date of issue, name and issuing authority.  The photo on the passport scan does not appear in any other open sources, further minimizing the risk of а forged document. We have also confirmed the source’s profession and that his or her position (which is not linked to the government) provides access to this document.

The source also provided Bellingcat with a second document in the name of Alexander Mishkin containing a (different) photograph of an individual bearing a strong facial resemblance of “Petrov.”

Bellingcat requested a forensic facial similarity analysis between the passport photo from Mishkin’s passport (dated 2001) and “Petrov”’s international passport (dated 2006), from Prof. Ugail, professor of visual computing at the University of Bradford and an expert in simulated age progression. Prof. Ugail confirmed unequivocally that the two photographs belong to the same person, accounting for the 15-year difference between the two.

On the road to Loyga, the village with no roads

For final validation of our amassed findings, Bellingcat’s Russian investigative partner, The Insider, sent a reporter to the village of Loyga.  The reporter was able to meet and talk to many residents, who all recognized “Alexander Petrov”, the person shown on photographs released by the British police and seen in the RT interview, as “our local boy” Alexander Mishkin. One person told our reporter that Alexander Mishkin had been her son’s play friend.

In addition, at least five different residents told our reporter that Alexander Mishkin, who they knew worked in Murmansk or in Moscow “as a military doctor”, had received the Hero of Russia award several years ago. One source close to Mishkin’s grandmother (who is now in her 90s, and as a former doctor is still revered in the village) told us that the reason for the award is top secret, but that the understanding in the village was that it was “for Crimea or [for former Ukrainian president Viktor] Yanukovych,” the implication being that the award had either something to do with the Crimean annexation or with helping Yanokovych flee Ukraine.

The same source told us that Alexander Mishkin’s grandmother possesses a photograph on which President Putin is shown bestowing the Gold Star medal (which goes with the award) to Alexander, and shaking his hand. The source said the grandmother treasures this photo and does not show it to everyone, and never lets anyone else hold it. Our reporter was not able to talk directly to Petrov’s grandmother or see the photograph.

A Doctor and a Hero

Bellingcat could not find any publicly accessible document confirming that Alexander Mishkin received the Hero of Russia award. However, this is not unusual, as only a part of the awards are made public, while recipients who earn the recognition through services that are subject to state secrecy are not announced. In the Col. Chepiga case, we were only able to discover his award due to public statements by officers of his military school, and the gold-emblazoned name on the “Gold Star” wall of a school-ground monument. No such public honors were identified in open sources for Dr. Mishkin.

However, at least one document discovered by Bellingcat corroborates the statements by Alexander Mishkin’s proud townspeople. In September 2014, at about the same time that Mishkin would have received his award, per the Loyga residents, Mishkin moved to a new apartment in а freshly build skyscraper in Moscow. The two-bedroom apartment, which was registered in the name of his wife and two daughters, had a tax value of approximately €350,000, significantly above the price range tenable for a Russian military officer. More tellingly, according to an extract from Russia’s central real estate registry, ownership of the apartment was obtained by the new owners based on a “Contract of Transfer.” A Contract a Transfer is not a standard form of real estate acquisition; a more standard reference would be a “Sale and Purchase Contract.”

At approximately the same time, Col. Anatoliy Chepiga also moved from an apartment in a corporate “dormitory” building to an upscale apartment not far from Mishkin’s. Chepiga’s apartment was larger and more expensive: at 100 sq. m, its tax value was reported at approx. half a million euro at the then exchange rate. This 12^th floor apartment was also passed on to the four members of the Chepiga family on the basis of a “Contract of Transfer of Ownership”, although in this document also the term “Privatization” was added.

The most plausible explanation for these two contemporaneous “transfers”, none of which was associated with a mortgage or a traditional sale-purchase contract, is that they were granted to Chepiga and Mishkin by the Russian state as an in-kind bonus alongside the Hero of Russia award. This would be consistent with information reported to the BBC and other media by residents of Chepiga’s home village who spoke of a Moscow apartment being given to Anatoliy Chepiga as a present when he received the Hero of Russia Award.

Relevance of new findings

The findings of this investigation by Bellingcat add possibly material context to the mission of the two GRU officers to Salisbury. The inclusion of a trained military doctor on the team implies that the purpose of the mission has been different than information gathering or other routine espionage activities. Bellingcat contacted various sources with knowledge of practices of Russian military intelligence who provided a range of opinions on what the relevance of the presence of a doctor in a foreign-operations team means. While some stated that GRU was known to form multi-functional and multi-skilled teams as part of operational “best practices”, others suggested that a doctor would be a mandatory addition to a team tasked with poisoning a target — either for ensuring effective application of the chemical, or to protect team members from accidental self-poisoning.

The new findings also require a renewed analysis of the travel itinerary of Mishkin across Western Europe in the period 2016-2018, previously disclosed by Bellingcat.