First, there was a campaign of destabilisation in Moldova, followed by the poisoning of an arms dealer in Bulgaria, and then a coup foiled in Montenegro. Last year, there has been an attempt to assassinate a former Russian spy in Britain with the help of a nerve agent. Although the operations were the fingerprints of intelligence services, the Russian authorities have viewed as isolated attacks and not related.

The western leaders of the security have now concluded that these operations, and perhaps many others, are part of a coordinated campaign and underway to destabilize Europe, carried out by an elite unit within the intelligence system of the Russian qualified from subversion, sabotage, and assassination.

The group, known by the name of Unity 29155, works for at least a decade, but the western leaders have discovered only recently. Intelligence officials in four western countries say the do not know to what frequency the unit is mobilized, and warn that it is impossible to know when and where its agents will strike.

The goal of the Unit 29155, which has not been previously reported, points out how the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, fight actively in the West with its brand of so-called ‘ war hybrid – a mix of propaganda, hacking attacks and misinformation — as well as a military confrontation open.

“I think we had forgotten how the Russians could be ruthless,” said Peter Zwack, a military intelligence officer retired and former defence attaché at the U.s. embassy in Moscow, who declared that he was not aware of the existence of the unit.

In a text message, Dmitri S. Peskov, the spokesman for Mr. Putin, has addressed questions on the unit at the Russian ministry of Defence. The ministry has not responded to requests for comment.

Hidden behind concrete walls at the headquarters of the 161st training Center specializing special use in the east of Moscow, the unit is located in the hierarchy of command of the intelligence agency Russian military, widely known under the name of G. R. U.

Although many on the operations of the G. R. U. is still a mystery, intelligence agencies of the west have begun to get a clearer picture of its underlying architecture. In the months preceding the presidential election of 2016, u.s. officials say that two cyberunités of the G. R. U., are known under the names 26165 and 74455, have hacked into the servers of the democratic national Committee and the campaign with Clinton, and then published information, internal embarrassing. Communications.

[Our correspondent Matt Apuzzo reported the plan of Russia for disturbances at the alien on “The Weekly”, the tv show of the Times. Watch it on FX and Hulu.]

Last year, Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who monitors the investigation on the interference in Russian in the elections of 2016, was indicted more than a dozen officers of these units, although all remain at liberty. The teams hacking operate primarily out of Moscow, thousands of kilometers from their targets.

On the other hand, the agents of the Unit 29155 made it to their destination and from european countries. Some are veterans decorated the bloodiest wars of Russia, including in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Ukraine. Its operations are so secret, according to the estimates of western intelligence services, that the existence of the unit is very likely to be unknown, even to other agents of the G. R. U.

The unit appears to be a close-knit community. A photograph taken in 2017 shows the unit’s commander, major-general Andrei V. Averyanov, at the marriage of his daughter, dressed in a gray suit and a bow tie. He poses with the colonel Anatoly V. Chepiga, one of two officers charged in Great Britain for the poisoning of a former spy, Sergei V. Skripal.

Transcription

Two Russians have been accused of an assassination attempt using a nerve agent called Novichok. The target was Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy living in Britain. It is filmed here in a local store, a few days before being taken to target. Him and his girl Yulia have fallen seriously ill from exposure to Novichok, but survived. The images of security enabled the police to follow the two hired killers suspected then that they were in Great Britain and have targeted their target during the two days. 2 march : They fly from Moscow to the airport of Gatwick in London. They check into a hotel in east London. 3 march : They take the public transport up to Salisbury where lived Mr. Skripal. They mark their target for several hours. 4 march : They will return to Salisbury by train. A few minutes later, a camera filmed passing in front of this gas station a few minutes walk from the house of Mr Skripal. It was a few moments before their attack, according to police. They carry the nerve agent in a perfume bottle. It is then sprayed on the handle of the front door of the home of Mr. Skripal. Shortly after, the men are seen returning to the station to Salisbury. We see them for the last time this evening at the Heathrow airport. At 22: 30, they leave London for Moscow. At this time, Mr. Skripal and his daughter had been found unresponsive on a park bench. They were hospitalized and eventually recovered. A few months later, both residents of Salisbury have found the bottle of perfume jetty and have also been hospitalized. Dawn Sturgess died of exposure and his partner, Charlie Rowley, fell seriously ill. The police think that the two killers have travelled under pseudonyms and have asked Russia for help to identify them.

“It is a unit of the G. R. U., which has been active over the years throughout Europe,” said a head of european security, which is expressed under the cover of anonymity to describe the issues of information classified. “It was surprising that the Russians, the G. R. U., this unity, would feel free to go ahead and carry out this activity malignant extreme in friendly countries. It was a shock.

To varying degrees, each of the four operations related to the unit attracted the attention of the public, even if it took a while for authorities to confirm that they were related. The western intelligence services will have first identified the unit after the failed coup of 2016 in Montenegro, which involved a plot by two officers of the unit to kill the Prime minister of the country and seize the Parliament building.

But officials have begun to enter the program-specific disruption of the unity that after the poisoning in march 2018, Mr. Skripal, a former officer of the G. R. U. who had betrayed Russia’s spying for the British. Mr. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, have fallen seriously ill after having been exposed to a nerve agent, highly toxic, but they survived.

(Three other people have been écœurées, including a policeman, and a man who has found a small bottle that british officials believe was used to carry the nerve agent, and gave it to his girlfriend. The girlfriend, Dawn Sturgess, died after being sprayed with the nerve agent on his skin, empriser the bottle for the fragrance.)

The poisoning led to an impasse geopolitics, with more than 20 nations, including the United States, to expel 150 Russian diplomats in a show of solidarity with Britain.

In the end, the british authorities have described the two suspects, who had traveled under pseudonyms, but were later identified by the site investigation Bellingcat as the colonel Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin. Six months after the poisoning, the uk prosecutors accused the two men have carried the nerve agent in the home of Mr Skripal at Salisbury, in England, and to have it smeared on his front door.

But the operation was more complex than officials have revealed at the time.

Exactly one year before the poisoning, the three members of the unit 29155 made in Great Britain, perhaps for a race practice, two european officials have said. One of them was Mr. Mishkin. A second man used the pseudonym Sergei Pavlov. The intelligence services believe that the third officer, who used the pseudonym DesergueÏ Fedotov, oversaw the mission.

Soon, the authorities have established that two of these officers – the men using the names Fedotov and Pavlov – had been part of a team that has tried to poison the weapons dealer Bulgarian Emilian Gebrev in 2015. (The other agents, also known only by their pseudonyms, according to the officials of the european information, were Ivan Lebedev, Nikolai Kononikhin, Alexey Nikitin and Danil Stepanov.)

The team tries twice to kill Mr. Gebrev, once in Sofia, the capital, and again a month later at his home on the Black sea.

Speaking to journalists in February at the Conference on security in Munich, Alex Younger, the head of MI6, the foreign intelligence service british, rose against the Russian threat is growing, and has hinted at coordination, without mentioning a specific unit.

“You can see that there has been a programme of activity concerted — and, yes, it often involves the same people,” said Mr. Younger, highlighting specifically the poisoning of Skripal and the coup attempt in Montenegro. He added : “We believe that there is a permanent threat on the part of the G. R. U. and of other intelligence services, Russian and very little is off limits. “

The Kremlin considers Russia as being at war against a liberal order in western that it considers as an existential threat.

At a ceremony in November to commemorate the centenary of the G. R. U., Mr. Putin was held under a bright background of the logo of the agency — one eye red and one explosive grenade — and has been described as ” legendary “. Former intelligence officer himself, Putin has drawn a direct line between the spies of the red Army which helped defeat the nazis during the Second world War, and the officers of the G. R. U., whose “unique capabilities” are now being deployed against another type of enemy.

“Unfortunately, the risk of conflict is rising in the world,” said Mr Putin, during the ceremony. “Provocations and lies pure and simple are used and attempts are made to disrupt the parity strategic. “

In 2006, Mr. Putin signed a law legalizing the targeted killings overseas, the same year that a team of assassins russians used a radioactive isotope to murder Aleksander V. Litvinenko, another former Russian spy, in London.

The unit 29155 is not the only group authorized to conduct such operations, officials said. British authorities attributed the murder of Mr. Litvinenko at the federal security Service, the intelligence agency formerly headed by Mr. Putin, who is often in competition with the G. R. U.

A directive of 2012 the Russian ministry of Defence has awarded bonuses to three units for ” special accomplishments in the military service “. One was the unit 29155. Another was the unit 74455, which has been implicated in the interference in elections of 2016. The third was the unit 99450, whose officers are suspected of having been involved in the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014.

A retired officer of the G. R. U. knowing the unit 29155 stated that he specialized in the preparation of the missions ” fun “, ” as a group or individually — bombings, killings, anything.”

“It was the serious guy who served there,” said the retired officer. “It was officers who were working under cover, and as international agents. “

Photographs of the old neighborhood general run-down of the unit, which has since been abandoned, show a myriad of door-weapons with labels for an assortment of weapons, including sniper rifles, belgian FN-30, g3A3 German, auG is where the austrian Steyr and M16 americans. There was also a form that describes a regime of training, including exercises of melee combat. The retired officer of the G. R. U. has confirmed the authenticity of the photographs, which were published by a blogger Russian.

The current commander, general Averyanov, is he is a 1988 graduate of the military Academy in Tashkent in what was then the soviet Republic of Uzbekistan. It is likely that he would have fought in the first and the second wars in chechnya, and he received a medal of the hero of Russia, the highest distinction in the country, in January 2015. The two officers accused of poisoning Skripal have also received the same price.

Although it is an elite force, the unit seems to be working with a limited budget. According to the Russian archives, the general Averyanov lives in a run-down building from the soviet era, a few blocks from the headquarters of the unit and leads a VAZ 21053 1996, a sedan manufactured in Russia. The operators often share accommodation to save on the road. The investigators brits say that the suspects in the poisoning Skripal stayed in a hotel at a low price in Bow, a neighborhood oppressed in the east of London.

But the european leaders of the security are also perplexed by the apparent negligence in the operations of the unit. Mr. Skripal has survived the assassination attempt, as Mr. Gebrev, the weapons dealer in bulgaria. The coup attempt in Montenegro has attracted a lot of attention, but ultimately failed. A year later, Montenegro has joined NATO. It is possible, say the security officials, they have not yet discovered other operations more successful.

It is difficult to know if the disorder has troubled the Kremlin. Perhaps, say intelligence experts, this is part of the point.

“This type of intelligence operation is now part of the psychological war,” said Eerik-Niiles Kross, a former head of intelligence in Estonia. “It’s not that they became much more aggressive. They want to be felt. This is part of the game.

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