One of the two men identified as suspects in the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England last March has been outed as a Russian military intelligence officer, and villagers from his home town have been able to confirm his true identity.
“It’s true, he’s our guy,” said Alla, who described herself as a onetime family friend and, like some others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition that she not be fully identified because of the sensitivity of the matter. “For us simple residents, this is all just crazy.”
She was referring to Anatoly Chepiga, a highly decorated military officer whom investigative journalists this week identified as one of the suspects in the attempted assassination of a former Russian spy and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury in March. A Russian newspaper, Kommersant, pinpointed the village near the Chinese border where Chepiga grew up and said people there had recognized him.
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British authorities said the suspect traveled to Britain using a passport identifying him as Ruslan Boshirov. In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Boshirov and his alleged accomplice, identified by the British as Alexander Petrov, were known to be civilians. In an interview on Russian state television, the two men said they were fitness-industry entrepreneurs who had traveled to Salisbury as tourists.
Britain’s Bellingcat website and Russia’s The Insider this week published a report using government records and publicly available information to identify Boshirov as Chepiga. The two investigative outlets said Chepiga was a colonel in the GRU military intelligence agency who had served in Russia’s war-torn Chechnya region and, possibly, in Ukraine.
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Irina Ivanova, another Berezovka resident, said in a message to The Post over Russia’s VKontakte social network that Boshirov looked “very similar” to Chepiga.
“Anatoly Chepiga is our countryman. I know him and his family very well,” Ivanova said. “They’re a wonderful, friendly and respected family.”
Alexey, a 37-year-old resident of Berezovka who works in the construction industry, told The Post that the man who called himself Boshirov resembled his former schoolmate Chepiga. Chepiga, Alexey said, went on to study at the Far-Eastern Military Command Academy in the nearby city of Blagoveshchensk and was known by villagers to have received the prestigious Hero of the Russian Federation award.
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Hours after the interview, Alexey wrote to The Post to say he had changed his mind and no longer believed that Chepiga and Boshirov were the same person. “This isn’t proven by anyone or by anything,” Alexey wrote. “It’s just a resemblance of photographs.”
The Kremlin on Friday also dismissed the latest reports. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists that amid all the news reports about the Salisbury poisoning in the international media, “no one can tell which of these reports are false and which are true.” As for the resemblance between Boshirov and Chepiga, Peskov referred to the impersonators of Soviet leaders who pose for pictures with tourists in central Moscow.
“We’ve got 10 Stalins and 15 Lenins running around Red Square, and all of them look extremely similar to the originals,” Peskov said.
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Before writing to say he had changed his mind, Alexey, Chepiga’s former schoolmate, said he felt both pride and shame that his village was being linked to the poisoning.
“There’s pride in being connected to this — and there’s shame that he got caught,” Alexey said.
In Russia’s Far East, villagers recognize a Skripal poisoning suspect (WaPo)