Revelations that the GRU (the intelligence service of the Russian Armed Forces) was behind the explosion in an arms depot in the Czech Republic that killed two people in October 2014 has sparked a major diplomatic dispute between Prague and Moscow.
But it has also raised questions about what the GRU is capable of, whether it can be deterred and what other operations it may have carried out so far.
European intelligence services believe that the mission of the Unit 29155 unit of the GRU is execute sabotage operations , subversion and murder .
After the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian officer who was a double agent for British intelligence, and his daughter Yulia, which occurred in Salisbury ( United Kingdom) in 2018, security services across Europe have been working methodically to track his actions, he continued endo movements of the approximately 20 agents carrying out clandestine missions abroad.
This has shed new light on other events, such as the poisoning of a Bulgarian arms dealer in 1200, as well as the Czech explosion.
The unit was also linked to an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 aimed at preventing the country from aligning itself with NATO.
The alleged agents were tried and convicted (in absentia) by the courts.
The French security services established that the unit used a region of the Alps as an advanced base of operations to travel to other countries.
It has also been linked to the alleged offering of rewards to the Taliban for the attacks on US forces in Afghanistan, although last week it ran The Americans said they only had low to moderate confidence about it.
What’s behind these covert operations?
. Most of the events discovered so far date from after 2014. That year, particularly with the crisis in Ukraine, seems to be the point at which the Kremlin began to see itself as at odds with the West, in . . a conflict fought below the threshold of traditional warfare with the use of “gray zone” methods.
These ranged from new internet disinformation operations and piracy cybernetics targeting the West (including the elections of 2016 in the United States ), carried out by some units of the GRU, to the deployment of the Unit 29155 to undertake more traditional covert actions.
Some wonder if the revelations of what happened in the Czech Republic suggest an oversight do in the work of the unit. An example of this is the way two men used the same covert identities (Petrov and Boshirov) for that operation and for the Salisbury one.
The Bellingcat research group has also traced the way that GRU agents sometimes used sequential passport numbers that could easily be linked to each other.
But still it has been almost seven years for That the Czech case comes to light and the fact that a team is occasionally neglected does not mean that it is not also dangerous, with two people killed in the Czech Republic and a local resident, Dawn Sturgess, killed by the remains of the Novichok (agent nerve used in the Skripal case) discarded near Salisbury.
And there may still be more cases to discover. There are other events, including deaths and explosions, that can be reassessed in light of new evidence and linked to that Russian intelligence unit as the travel patterns of its members are analyzed. members.
What has been crucial is that since what happened in Salisbury more and more countries have been willing to work together to share information and confront Moscow, increasingly outraged by what They see them as aggressive tactics by Russia.
It has not only been the United Kingdom and the United States; Also other countries, including several in Eastern Europe such as Poland, Czech Republic and Bulgaria, have been taking recent measures against Russian spies .
But will these revelations serve to deter Russia and the GRU?
That may be difficult given the way the Kremlin views the world. Moscow has denied all the allegations, saying they are absurd and exaggerated, and does not appear to be concerned about the embarrassment this may bring.
But the hope is that the exposure of spies and their operations at least make their job difficult. For example, it is unlikely that the two men accused of being involved in Salisbury and the Czech explosion will be able to travel outside of Russia, as their identities have been made public.
However, it is possible that others are trained to take their place and few believe it is likely that Moscow will restrain its spies.
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