Russia's military intelligence agency, also known as GRU, is behind numerous crimes worldwide, including the 2016 hack and leak operation that targeted the Democratic National Committee, the hack of French President Emmanuel Macron's email prior to his election, the attempted hack of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Hague, the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal on British soil, and the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine.
WIRED has published a fascinating profile of Roman Dobrokhotov, the Russian activist turned investigative journalist dedicated to exposing the officers responsible for these GRU operations.
An excerpt:
Dobrokhotov says he never exactly made a decision to target the GRU, which for decades has remained even more opaque than fellow Russian intelligence agencies like the FSB or SVR. "We just start to investigate one story, and it turns out to be a GRU officer. Then we investigate a totally different story, and it seems to be a GRU officer again," Dobrokhotov says in English that he has honed with hours of watching Stephen Colbert. "They're just so active, and they make so many mistakes, that they pop up in every investigation."
But while most of the international credit for that string of GRU revelations has gone to Bellingcat, Dobrokhotov and his staff have taken on higher stakes. Unlike Bellingcat's researchers, they're Russian and live in close proximity to the very spies and assassins they're exposing. That has allowed them to run down some details of their investigations that Bellingcat never could have otherwise. It also puts them at far greater risk of arrest—or worse—than their international collaborators.
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But when I met up with Dobrokhotov last November in a central Moscow bar—the closest thing the Insider's dozen-person staff has to an office—he told me he has no misgivings about taking on this particular adversary. "The choice is very simple. if you want to be a journalist in Russia, you either choose the real topics, the most important topics, or you’re not a real journalist," he said. "If you write about traffic jams, that’s fine in Switzerland or Sweden. But in Russia you have to work on these topics, because they can change society."
Full story: THE RUSSIAN SLEUTH WHO OUTS MOSCOW'S ELITE HACKERS AND ASSASSINS (WIRED)