Russian spy-saboteurs from military unit 29155 of the GRU travel around the world under false names, organizing murders, explosions and chemical weapons poisonings, but before going abroad they need to create a reliable legend. Sometimes, for this purpose, they spend years infiltrating the circles of human rights activists, journalists or filmmakers. Having gained trust in these circles, the GRU killers were able to infiltrate Kasparov’s forum, join the Documentary Film League and get a job at the newspaper.
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Human rights activist. How the GRU infiltrated the Kasparov forum
Documentary director. How the GRU made a video about itself
Journalist. Millionaire
Everyone knows that spies often work as illegal immigrants. Recent investigations by The Insider have featured a GRU spy who masqueraded as a socialite to meet NATO officers, a pseudo-Brazilian who nearly infiltrated the International Criminal Court, and a pseudo-journalist who took a job as a researcher at a Norwegian university.
What was not previously known is that spy-saboteurs from the GRU (which does not have a mandate to operate within the country) are infiltrating Russian activist, human rights and professional groups in order to create a convincing cover story and gain access to various international organizations.
Human rights activist. How the GRU infiltrated the Kasparov forum
Ivan Zhikharev is a professional geologist specializing in drilling water wells, as well as an activist who devotes all his free time to human rights activities. At the Moscow Open School of Human Rights he is remembered as one of the most active volunteers; he tried not to miss a single Free Russia Forum, where he participated in the working group on sanctions, promoted initiatives to protect the environment and blood donation.
He should not be confused with Ivan Zhigarev – a man with the same date of birth, identical appearance and only one different letter in his last name. Zhigarev is a member of a highly secret unit of assassins and saboteurs who received many years of training at the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense.
Ivan Zhigarev was born in Magdeburg, Germany, into the family of Russian military man Ivan Zhigarev Sr., stationed in East Germany in the 1980s. Zhigarev followed in his father’s footsteps, served in the army special forces and entered the GRU Military Academy, as evidenced by the history of his address registration. No later than 2009, he was recruited to serve in the elite GRU task force, unit 29155.
Around the same time, his “good” double, Ivan Zhikharev, was born. The GRU got him a job at the state-owned exploration and drilling company NPO Geospetsstroy. Why a driller? Perhaps, in a creative search, the GRU simply typed this name into a search engine and found only one person on Wikipedia with that name – a famous Soviet driller (he, however, drilled for oil, and the new Zhikharev – for water).
For several years, until 2017, “Zhikharev” followed the work route of the other members of unit 29155: traveling abroad under false identification in small groups of three to five people on assignments, the purposes of which are still unknown. For example, “Zhikharev” visited the Netherlands in early March 2015, where he stayed for ten days; at the same time, three other members of the team (including the notorious Solbertsy cathedral fan Alexander “Petrov”-Mishkin) went to the Benelux countries. The following year he repeated his trip to Amsterdam twice, again rotating with other colleagues from Unit 29155. This time they included another Skripal poisoning suspect, “Ruslan Boshirov” (Anatoly Chepiga), and another GRU officer linked to poisoning of Bulgarian arms manufacturer Emelyan Gebrev.
Zhikharev also traveled to Munich and Berlin in 2016, Tbilisi in 2017, and traveled to France in January 2018, where he joined other members of Unit 29155 at their secret base near the Swiss border. Coincidentally or not, “Zhikharev” was also in Europe during the preparations for the poisoning of the Skripals, flying to Moscow from Vienna on March 3, 2018 – the first of the days that Mishkin and Chepiga visited Salisbury.
In 2017, “Zhikharev” begins a new mission: it is being introduced into the Moscow Open School of Human Rights (MOSHR) at the Sakharov Center. Employees of the MSHR, talking with The Insider, for a long time could not believe that Zhikharev was not Zhikharev at all, but a member of a group of murderers from the GRU. They said that he was “the most active volunteer”, had access to the registration data of school participants and participated in many management meetings, where funding issues were also discussed.
Among other things, he participated in campaigns to support imprisoned human rights defenders, coordinated work on Azimzhan Askarov from Kyrgyzstan, and handled the transfer of money that was collected for him. “If you asked him to do something, he never really refused, he participated in all meetings,” his colleagues fondly remember.
According to them, he told everyone that his profession was “drilling wells,” without particularly talking about his work. Colleagues don’t remember much about his trips abroad; from the IOSP he only went to Chisinau to the civil forum CampCamp , where more than 200 human rights activists and journalists from fifteen countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia gathered.
The IOSHHR did not even remember that they had given him a recommendation to participate in the Free Russia Forum organized by Garry Kasparov. Starting from 2017, “Zhikharev” will begin to attend these forums regularly. The organizers recall that for the first time he registered for the fourth Forum (December 3–4, 2017 in Vilnius), and then attended all subsequent forums up to the eighth (the ninth, due to the pandemic, was held online, and Zhikharev did not show up for subsequent ones). At the same time, Zhikharev always asked to compensate for travel and check into a hotel. These requests were denied to him, but, the organizers emphasize, even if he had settled in the same hotel with the participants, the main organizer, Garry Kasparov, would have remained inaccessible to him, since he was always accommodated separately.
Zhikharev registered in three working groups: “Putin’s List”, “Human Rights” and “Personnel Reserve”, and was in the chat of the working group on sanctions. However, he did not show any particular activity there; he pressed on environmental issues.
It is curious that Zhikharev arrived at his first event in Vilnius by car along with two other participants and returned with them. These are Ruslan Kambiev and Rasul Kataganov, human rights activists from the North Caucasus. The Insider turned to Ruslan Kambiev to inquire about the circumstances of their joint trip. Kambiev first said that he did not remember a person named Ivan Zhikharev at all, and when he was presented with a photograph of all three in an Instagram post, he replied that he met him at the Vilnius forum, where he himself had flown by plane. When The Insider drew his attention to the fact that border records show that he arrived at the forum by car and “Zhikharev” was in the same car, Kambiev remembered that they actually arrived by car, but met at the previous forum. When The Insider recalled that this forum was the first in which they participated, Kambiev replied that then they most likely met at the “Hero of the Caucasus” award ceremony at the Sakharov Center. The Insider drew Kambiev’s attention to the fact that the award ceremony was several months later than the forum. Then Kambiev took a break and the next day he remembered: they met at an IOSHR event on October 14, 2017, at the Sakharov Center.
IOSHR activists told The Insider that the last time he communicated with them—and volunteered at events—was in 2021. It is likely that “Zhikharev” was decommissioned after his cover was revealed by French authorities in 2022 as one of several names of GRU officers who visited a secret GRU base in that country (though French authorities incorrectly assumed that Ivan Zhikharev – real personality, not a cover).
Documentary director. How the GRU made a video about itself
Another member of the group of killers from military unit 29155, who had a parallel cover career, is Lieutenant Colonel Maxim Rodionov. Rodionov was born in the Kazakh city of Atbasar in 1983, served in Novokuznetsk and Samara, and then was accepted into the 3rd Guards GRU special forces brigade in Tolyatti. In 2014, he was issued a passport from the same GRU series for which the Skripal poisoners became famous. Under the new pseudonym “Smirnov” he visited Barcelona (March 2014 and July 2016), Italy (October 2016), Kyrgyzstan (May 2016), Czech Republic (July 2016), Kazakhstan (April 2017) and France (November 2017) . After The Insider and Bellingcat exposed this series of passports in 2018, he was issued a new biometric passport in 2019. But it was too late: in France, the publications of The Insider and Bellingcat were read, and due to the fact that Rodionov-Smirnov had previously used a passport from this series, his new French visa was canceled.
By that time, Maxim “Smirnov” had already been a “documentary director” and a member of the Non-Fiction Film Guild for several years. The leadership of the Guild was quite surprised that such an eminent member was among its members, and found it difficult to explain what exactly he did in the Guild.
From Smirnov’s work book, which The Insider reviewed, it follows that in 2015–2016 he worked at the Prosto Media company, but the organization explained that this record is obviously fake, since the company was registered only in September 2016 year, and began to function in 2018 (at the same time, no Smirnov was known in the organization).
He later co-founded the Tomiris video production studio, which filmed, among other things, creepy interviews about the dangers of “homosexuality, demonism, sadism and pedophilia.” The main character of this interview about how to properly maintain morality in society was the Russian neo-Nazi Nikolai Zaitsev-Birdyukin.
The GRU studio also shot a promotional video dedicated to the motorbike rally from Russia to Mongolia. As The Insider previously wrote, the GRU are directly related to these rallies and use them to develop their logistics in the region.
However, it doesn’t look like Tomiris was actually involved in real video production. Rather, it was a convenient cover for organizing all sorts of events with the participation of international delegations – such as a round table with representatives of the DPRK, a conference on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan, or a conference on Russian-Chinese cooperation.
Journalist. Millionaire
Konstantin Medvedev is a unique case in the history of secret operations of the GRU military unit 29155: unlike the others, he does not have a pseudonym. He lived the life of a secret member of Unit 21955 under his real name.
Medvedev, like Zhigarev, was born in Magdeburg (GDR) in 1976 – his father was also a military man stationed in this city. Medvedev Sr. for a long time held the position of head of the personnel department in one of the departments of the Ministry of Defense and unsuccessfully ran for the Moscow City Duma as a candidate from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. His son, Konstantin Medvedev, also chose a military career and graduated from the Novosibirsk Military Command Institute, and then from the GRU Military Academy in Moscow.
After graduating from the Academy, Medvedev acquires an alter ego: he becomes a “foreign correspondent” for the Marine Insurance magazine. As The Insider has already written , this magazine is a GRU cover – for example, Vladimir Moiseev (“Popov”), one of the organizers of the failed coup in Montenegro, was employed there. Although there is no public record of Medvedev ever publishing material in this publication, a 2008 article in a magazine associated with the Russian Ministry of Defense does describe a marine insurance agent named Konstantin Medvedev transporting some jars of oil samples to Japan on board a Russian oil tanker (why an insurance agent would carry oil samples is not explained in the article).
Then Medvedev is listed in the now closed newspaper Tribuna, where he even published materials. “Badminton is a sport of diplomacy” is one of his articles, from which it becomes clear that the Indonesian Ambassador visited the editorial office of the Tribune. It follows from the text that the journalists discussed with the ambassador mainly badminton (the article was published literally a month after the mysterious video in which Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin advertise badminton for some reason), but, based on the real profession of the author of the material, it can be assumed that this was not the only topic of conversation. From another publication, approximately equally full of depth and meaning, it follows that Medvedev published reports from abroad, including from Slovenia. The last editor-in-chief of Tribuna, Nikolai Vasiliev, told The Insider that he does not remember such an employee.
It’s difficult to say what exactly Medvedev was actually doing, but his number is in the calls of the head of military unit 29155 Andrei Averyanov, and an important member of the group who worked under the cover of diplomat Yegor Gordienko , and many others. It is also unclear why Averyanov decided not to provide Medvedev with a cover name. It is possible that Medvedev had already traveled to Europe before joining Group 29155, meaning his biometrics could have compromised the cover’s identity. At the same time, Medvedev traveled frequently: already as a member of 29155, he visited Helsinki in May 2016, Bishkek in May and August 2016, Paris in June 2016, Vienna in May 2017 and Prague in August 2016, March 2017 and February 2018.
Whatever Medvedev’s work tasks were, they were well paid. Judging by an extract from the tax office, in 2021 alone he received dividends from Sberbank and VTB no less than 45 million rubles (at that rate – more than half a million euros), and this despite the fact that the average salary of an officer in Russia is about 50 thousand rubles .