Denis Sergeev: Third Skripal suspect identified as high-ranking Russian spy, say reports

Bellingcat investigators say Moscow has attempted to erase public records of suspects

A consortium of internet researchers claims to have identified a third Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer involved in the nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury last year.

According to the Bellingcat website, Denis Sergeev, 45, travelled on a 2 March Aeroflot flight into Heathrow, just hours before the arrival of “Alexander Petrov” and “Ruslan Boshirov”, men later identified as GRU agents Alexander Mishkin and Anatoly Chepiga – and suspects in the poisoning.

The Bellingcat team says they have determined key aspects of Mr Sergeev’s background despite a “government-level” attempt to erase records in relation to all three men.

Like both Chepiga and Boshirov before him, Denis Sergeev came from the Soviet backwaters – a small militarised town called Usharal in present-day Kazakhstan. He served in the army, in Novorossiysk on the Russian Black Sea coast, before being transferred to Moscow. There, he enrolled in the “Conservatory”, an elite military academy feeding into the GRU.

Later, he is tracked as a managing director of several sham companies, and linked to a highly unusual Russian bank loan of more than $1m.

Bellingcat claims travel records connect Sergeev’s cover identity, “Sergey Fedotov”, with the mysterious 2015 poisoning of a Bulgarian arms manufacturer called Emilian Gebrev. Sergeev/Fedotov’s movements in and out of Bulgaria correspond to the businessman’s initial major illness, and subsequent relapse in symptoms, the website says.

At the time of Mr Gebrev’s illness, there was much media speculation that his company’s substantial arms shipment to Ukraine might have caused the problems. His doctors, too, suspected poisoning, and sent urine samples to Verifin, a testing laboratory in Helsinki.

While the laboratory was unable to identify the substance used, it reportedly isolated traces of two organophosphates. This is consistent with the use of a nerve agent like novichok, but not exclusively so: industrial insecticides would also produce the same metabolites, for example.

On Friday, The Guardian reported that Bulgaria and the UK are jointly investigating the links between the novichok poisoning on Mr Skripal and the poisoning of Mr Gebrev.

The involvement of a “third man” in the Salisbury operation was first reported last year. In October, Russian media identified the man’s “Sergey Fedotov” cover identity. But Bellingcat’s investigation goes much further, and is the first time the man’s supposed real-life identity has been made public.

What it does not do is substantiate earlier reports that claimed Sergeev/Fedotov was responsible for reconnaissance ahead of the Salisbury attack. In Bellingcat’s estimation, the last time Sergeev was in Britain was early 2017. It would be highly unusual for that work to take place a full year ahead of the operation.

Sergeev/Fedotov's exact role remains uncertain, agrees Phillip Ingram, a former British army intelligence officer.

“Given the evidence of big money transactions, it may be that the alleged agent acted as a fixer for the Salisbury operation,” he told The Independent. “But there’s clearly another team out there apart from him. For a start, they wouldn’t have been able to do the operation without a so-called pattern of life study, which requires watching the suspect over a long time to avoid major mistakes.”

Mr Skripal, a double agent, was found unconscious on a bench together with his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March 2018. They both survived the attack, but spent weeks in hospital, and have been moved to an undisclosed location.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied any involvement in the poisoning, accusing British intelligence agencies of staging the attack to stoke anti-Russian hysteria. But those denials have sometimes pushed the realms credibility in the face of an increasing body of evidence produced by internet researchers like Bellingcat, and its founder Eliot Higgins.

Bellingcat’s most recent work has taken advantage of open source data and widely-available databases to highlight intelligence lapses and – quite unexpectedly – compromise the identities of possibly hundreds of GRU agents.

“If I was Eliot Higgins, I’d be very busy renewing my personal safety,” says Ingram. “These guys have a grudge, and like the rat in a corner, being poked with a stick, they will fight back.”