Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga | Hacker News Reader

Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga

bellingcat.com

273 pointsabhi397 comments

Outstanding work.

Now it is interesting to go back and look at the PR campaign and all the disinformation pushed to deflect and cover it up.

The RT channel's interview with the "gay Russian tourists" was precious.

https://www.rt.com/news/438356-rt-petrov-boshirov-full-inter...

> You know, let’s not breach anyone’s privacy. We came to you for protection, but this is turning into some kind of an interrogation. You are going too far. We came to you for protection. You’re not interrogating us.

And you can almost see through the logic - "Hmm, the West sympathizes with gays so why don't we insinuate you are gay and then they'll feel sorry for you and forget about you being GRU agents assassinating people".

As I read (forget the source) the purpose of insinuating they were gay had to do with convincing Russians they weren't military officers. Because apparently in Russian society it is unthinkable that a military officer would be gay, so if they convince Russian citizens they are gay that also convinces them that they can't be GRU officers.

Interesting, yeah I can see it. I bet they thought it would work from both angles. Westerners will feel sorry for exposing the gay tourists and Russians will feel convinced they can't be GRU officers.

>Russians will feel convinced they can't be GRU officers

Russian internet has a field day(or a month already really) of jokes that the GRU officers, which all are undoubtedly, in the Russian mythos, true patriots and heterosexual macho made in the image of the Putin himself, would carry out every order for the Motherland - to kill a traitor, to die for the Motherland, and even to truly practice homosexuality, all in the name of Motherland on the orders of "the comrade General".

The guys in the interview are obviously very bad at impersonating gays, and that follows pretty much the same outrageous "signature" style (the Russian saying is "sewn together using white thread" as it is very noticeable on any garments except white) as using "Novichok" and polonium (or assassinating major opposition leader right in front of the Putin's office windows) - all that is to make sure that there are no doubts about who really did it while of course officially denying any responsibility. Just like the signature killings by Mafia (which the Russian government in its nature really is) - everybody has to clearly understand who did it without the perpetrators and their bosses explicitly claiming it.

To the "the_grue" below - sorry, man, no offense, you just don't understand what you're talking about. Most probably you're just not a Russian.

Edit: you added that you speak Russian. Being a Russian and speak Russian are 2 very different things. That ridicule you see on the Internet is real, no doubts. What you don't get is that it doesn't make Putin ridiculous [deep] in the eyes of the populace and that it wasn't a failure [deep] in the eyes of that populace - and that is the main tragedy of Russia.

I don't buy it. This whole story makes GRU and, by extension, Putin himself look ridiculous in the eyes of their own populace. Russian-speaking Internet communities are savoring this failure in every conceivable way right now, ridiculing Putin and the Russian propaganda. And that's a major failure for Putin's regime, which is built on nationalism, on a promise of greatness, on claiming that Russia is a major world power, etc.

It makes them look like they do not care about putting on a good show, because they do not feel they need to and they find it funnier to present an obvious circus.

It also might be doubling as a public punishment for the spies for being sloppy. Putting them on TV like that is directly telling them that their careers are over.

If lucky, they might be transformed into celebrities, just for the annoyance value to the UK.

Is the international politics equivalent of telling someone to stop hitting themselves, after grabbing their wrist and whacking them in the face with their own hand.

That would be way too subtle for the common folk. Whatever GRU's plan was, in reality most Russian people just take it at face value: Russian spies got exposed, Putin's lie got exposed, the spies put on a miserable show on TV, and now even their true identities have been exposed (only one so far, but I expect the other one to be exposed soon, too). That's a failure.

I'm pretty sure you're reading way too much into it because you've been told Putin (and, by extension, his subordinates) was a great tactician one step ahead of everyone else. I never believed it and I don't believe it now.

>That would be way too subtle for the common folk.

Are you channeling H. L. Menken?

I think Putin is a comedian and two things I have noticed about Russian humour are firstly, always be deadpanning, and secondly, it isn't really funny unless someone ends up nearly dead.

I also think he is a good tactician but a lousy strategist and I don't think he is in charge of as much of the CCCP as is made out. He is the front man for a conglomerate of interests, many of which operate largely autonomously, and would cause him no end of internal problems should he try and reign them in.

This explains the sharp disconnect between the relative professionalism in the seizing of Crimea, while at the same time lending out SAM systems to idiots.

I'd also say there is a very good chance that Putin did not order this operation in the first place and is playing cleanup.

---

edit - I think there could also be a lot of "Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?" going on.

It not being directly ordered is an alternative reason why someone so high up was doing this rather than a subordinate.

This could well have been showing off to curry favour, knowing that the target was in the regime's bad books already.

Being paraded on TV in the manner that they were after being uncovered, I think lends weight to this hypothesis.

> Are you channeling H. L. Menken?

I don't know who that is. But if I am channeling anyone, that would be R.J. Hanlon, who said "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

That does not work very well in politics, or indeed many other areas of life.

People are very good at acting dumb to avoid blame.

Hanlon's razor is a method of being polite, rather than a robust logical position.

Malicious compliance, being one example of this behaviour, even has it's own popular group on reddit.

Edit - for anything that consists of an established bureaucracy, you would actually do better to invert Hanlon's razor in most cases.

Edit2 - also, the entire premise is logically inconsistent, as it places idiocy and maliciousness as being mutually exclusive options, which they clearly are not.

In the first place, Robert J. Hanlon submitted the aphorism for the joke book collection "Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong". And, according to wikipedia, probably stole it from a Heinlein short story, so I suspect you might be taking it a little more seriously than Hanlon did.

> People are very good at acting dumb to avoid blame.

That clearly didn't work in that case, did it?

> Hanlon's razor is a method of being polite, rather than a robust logical position.

Hanlon's razor is related to Occam's razor: in case there are two competing theories about the world, one of which is complicated and the other simple, always prefer the simple one. Neither is a logical argument, both are abductive heuristics [1] intended to produce the most likely explanation. Can it be played? It can, but it's even more unlikely, as that would further increase the level of sophistication. You can't rely on Hanlon's razor in a game of chess between two grandmasters, but the real world has a few crucial differences from chess, for example the fact that no player can realistically contain every possible interaction of their actions with other forces' actions. Which is why nobody is willing to bet on making such stupid and dangerous mistakes on purpose as exposing your agents, exposing your leader's lies and making your country suffer retribution for assassination on foreign soil. And for what? To laugh the whole world in the face? That's insane.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

>That clearly didn't work in that case, did it?

If you don't think that they were actually putting forward a tale to be believed in the first place, but were signalling that they don't have to bother, then it just doesn't even apply.

>Neither is a logical argument, both are abductive heuristics

Occam's razor is a logical position to take in an absence of further information, although sometimes wrong, especially in biology. Hanlon setting up malice and stupidity as an exclusive or gate, is not. Nor was it ever meant to be taken as such.

>Which is why nobody is willing to bet on making such stupid and dangerous mistakes on purpose as exposing your agents, exposing your leader's lies and making your country suffer retribution for assassination on foreign soil. And for what? To laugh the whole world in the face? That's insane.

Putin has been exposing his own lies for years on TV, usually with a smile. This is the guy who goes on his third ever scuba dive on the news and brings back museum quality amphorae. Lying barefacedly, with the audience knowing it is all lies, is a large part of his public persona. It is meant to both be funny and set an example that he doesn't need to bother with little things such as truth.

>The PM put on a diving suit and dived deep into the Taman Bay where, to everyone’s utter surprise, he managed to find two ancient amphorae dating back to the 6th century AD.

>Putin also told journalists that the Taman dive was his third-ever attempt at scuba diving.

https://www.rt.com/news/putin-amphorae-dive-archeology/

> then it just doesn't even apply

Then you don't seem to have an argument against Hanlon's razor?

> Hanlon setting up malice and stupidity as an exclusive or gate, is not

In this case, clearly, the two explanations are incompatible: either Putin planned the world to discover that he was lying about the assassination, etc., etc., or he did not.

> brings back museum quality amphorae

That's a completely different class of lies. That one is a bravado that shows the level of intelligence he assumes in his fans, nothing more. He certainly didn't risk getting himself into another cold war by fishing out those amphorae!

I do speak Russian and I do know what I'm talking about. Я говорю по-русски и прекрасно знаю, о чем речь.

It's a little weird to keep talking to your edits. How come Putin is being ridiculed and it doesn't make him ridiculous in the eyes of the populace? I mean of course not all the populace is on the Internet and not all of them are reading the same stuff I'm reading, but still, many, many people are exposed to the ridicule, which means that Putin has lost this battle of hearts and minds as far as those people exposed are concerned.

Just like any other country, Russia has several distinct information silos. The older population (like the vast majority of my family) are largely still stuck to the TV and old media for their news, which is tightly controlled by the state. The younger population is on the internet and until recently, the government had been largely hands off with online censorship.

We see the loud online group that grew up after the 90s shitshow but not the rest of the population, which has far more influence and institutional power (for what it's worth). They are far more likely to support Putin for getting the country through that ordeal.

Please reply to the comment you're replying to by clicking 'reply'. It's not fair to continue the conversation from a perch at the top of the thread. How is the other person supposed to respond, or the reader to follow? Threaded comments solve this problem; please use them.

In decades past, being homosexual was considered a risk factor for intelligence agents. An adversary who knew they were gay could threaten exposure, thereby gaining a lever to potentially turn the agent. So they tried very hard to keep gays out of the intelligence services.

I don't know if the US still does this. I'd be a bit surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if Russia still did, though.

I expect the US still does do this, but only for gay people in the closet since an openly gay person is immune to that sort of blackmail. Same goes for infidelity etc.

Part of the reason they are slow-walking Trump's pronouncements on trans people in the military, is that after getting rid of 'don't ask don't tell', the military will have wanted to know about people's sexual preferences, especially in key roles, so as to guard against cases of blackmail.

I guarantee that they will have key people who have told them all their kinks, that they are really trying hard not to get rid of.

To anyone who has paid attention to any of the history of Russian/UK spy scandals, the idea that homosexuality would prevent someone from being a GRU officer, is frankly almost as hilarious as some of the Russian buzzfeed style sites posting articles about how Salisbury is the center of UK gay nightlife.

I admit ignorance in this regard - simply restating a theory that seemed to make sense to me. I suppose being a parrot is bad, but it makes more sense to me than what the GP posted.

The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive. There is then the audience that knows it is all bollocks from the start, many of whom treat it as a massive in-joke that they can take part in, rather than an actual attempt at lying, which wouldn't be the case if the lying was any good.

Very much this; in other words - the officials are trolling the world, with their electorate in on it.

pushed to deflect and cover it up.

I don't think deflection, cover-up, let alone trying to get western sympathy are at all the goals here.

> I don't think deflection, cover-up, let alone trying to get western sympathy are at all the goals here.

Ok, I'll bite. What do you think the goals are?

I really have no idea, it's far too bizarre to fit any kind of obvious explanation. State-sponsored trolling, perhaps.

There is probably no particular goal. It's just how they do things, how they exert power. Active measures [1] and all that. Fear of being poisoned keeps people loyal. Disinformation and propaganda don't let dissent spread, influence politics, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures

1. Provide just enough of an argument to allow sympathetic people in their own population to believe they are not monsters.

2. But make the argument weak enough that everyone else knows they are monsters, and can and will kill any opponents.

None of this requires the weird song and dance with the Putin interview 'suggestion', the interview on RT hours afterwards, etc. It's probably not particularly fruitful to treat and try to interpret this as some kind of deeply subtle hyperdimensional chess.

I found it surprising RT aired that interview. The suspects acted extremely evasive and had a very weak cover story. The host also seemed dubious. There was one part where she said, "you all are sweating, let me turn on the AC," and another part where she said, "people won't believe you if you don't provide more information about your background." If their goal was to convince viewers that the suspects were innocent, they failed miserably.

Man, you don't get it. That's exactly the point...

That’s the point. It’s very obviously a weak cover story. The message you are supposed to be receiving is “we are above the truth”.

Gay legend might be necessary to divert attention from Skripal poisoning or to explain why their passport numbers are close to each other.

This is impressive journalistic work. If you are a fan of such type of open-source intelligence, I highly recommend the Arms Control Wonk podcast and blog, who have done amazing investigations into North Korean missile development (https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/).

Yet, with so many obvious giveaways, I find it hard to believe Russia ever wanted to get away with the Skripal poisoning. From using a very exotic Russian-made poison to the absurd Salisbury Cathedral story, it looks like a provocation or trolling. Of course, the Russian government will officially deny any involvement, but they are doing it with an obvious wink.

I forget the word, but there is a Russian word that sums this up. It’s about saying things thst are over-the-top to accentuate reality. In the same way that Stephen Colbert pretended to be a kind of hyper-Bill O’Reilly as a way of pointing out the ridiculousness and hypocrisy of some aspects of the Republicans in the US. It also applies to someone with a record of torturing and killing pets who is accused of murder, grinning and saying, “Everyone knows I would not hurt a fly.”

A couple of Russians saying that they found the wintry weather in the UK challenging? Well...

The Russian word you are looking for might be "фарс", very similar meaning to "farce".

Probably "Эпатаж". There is no good translation, not even for the wikipedia article itself.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B0...

Sounds similar in meaning to the Yiddish word 'chutzpah', which was once defined by Leo Rosten as;

"that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan"

> Yet, with so many obvious giveaways, I find it hard to believe Russia ever wanted to get away with the Skripal poisoning.

Russian killings in the UK are nothing new, and there were plenty of evidences in many previous cases. What's new here, is that the UK decided to make this particular case public. Unlike, for instance, in 2012[1]:

> Perepilichnyy, who faced repeated threats after fleeing to Britain, was found dead outside his home in Surrey after returning from a mysterious trip to Paris in 2012. Despite an expert detecting signs of a fatal plant poison in his stomach, the British police have insisted there was no evidence of foul play, and Theresa May’s government has invoked national security powers to withhold evidence from the inquest into his cause of death – which is ongoing.

> The prime minister directed the government’s successful bid to withhold documents from Perepilichnyy’s inquest on national security grounds, and as home secretary her department oversaw the police force that concluded the whistleblower’s death was not suspicious.

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/poison-in-the-system

"Borishov" was awarded for a "peace project" in 2014.

In 2014 Scot Young died after falling/jumping from window.

He said he'd been dangled out of windows by Russian heavies previously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scot_Young

of such type of open-source intelligence

Key bits are not entirely from open sources, particularly the passport application that directly connects the apparently real identity they dug up to the new undercover one.

The basically found right person in a database leak (which can be considered open source) and then verified their hypothesis by doing probiv, which is not open source, but is available for anybody with some money for the right person.

which can be considered open source

How can it be considered open source? None of the reports (from several publications) involving the passport applications have identified the source.

The method of investigation was to use (mostly) open available sources.

There's a name collision where "open source" means something different in intelligence and reporting than it does for software and technology.

I don't see how the 'name collision' is related. It wasn't a fully open source investigation and one particular key source, which the comment I replied to called 'open' is very much not open.

The Web of Death[1] by Buzzfeed lists all the people related to Russia who died in unexpected circumstances on the UK's soil in the last 15 years, together with their personal stories and connections.

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-1...

Western media present this material as if "Russia" means the Russian government means Putin. But there is a large presence of Russian oligarchs and organized criminals in the UK, who do the things those types of people do. It doesn't make sense that all of it is being planned by the Russian state, let alone Putin personally.

I suspect that will only get worse with the torrent of "but muh Russian collusion"-type political speech which seems to come up every time people feel like blaming somebody else for their decision not to vote.

There's no meaningful distinction between Russian government, Russian oligarchs, and Russian organized crime at this point.

That's not only false, but obviously false, since it's an extreme oversimplification of a situation with many players, competing interests, and so on. You won't find any serious scholar taking that naive a view, though plenty of journalists do. The question is where this fantasy of an evil monolith with a spidery mastermind comes from.

That's a direct outcome of the "vertical of power" concept. As soon as you position yourself as a strongman father of the nation, you also invite the blame. Can't have your cake and eat it, too.

I didn't say it's a monolith, or there's a spidery mastermind. Rather, it's a sort of a swamp where ugly things move around all the time - today he is a mob leader, tomorrow he's an elected member of the parliament (real world example from my hometown) etc. The problem is that they keep their social connections as they move around, so in the end you end up with this weird network of "friends and colleagues" where, say, a high-ranked police official visits a funeral of his old and dear parliamentarian friend, back from the day when they were both mobsters.

I’d be interested in seeing one with the profiles of those Russians who died in America under suspicious circumstances.

Mikhail Lesin, Putin's press minister from 1999 to 2004, was found dead in his hotel room in Washington, DC in 2015[1]:

> The US government ruled Mikhail Lesin’s death an accident, but multiple intelligence and law enforcement officials suspect it was a Russian hit.

> Vladimir Putin’s former media czar was murdered in Washington, DC, on the eve of a planned meeting with the US Justice Department, according to two FBI agents whose assertions cast new doubts on the US government’s official explanation of his death.

> Mikhail Lesin’s battered body was discovered in his Dupont Circle hotel room on the morning of Nov. 5, 2015, with blunt-force injuries to the head, neck, and torso. After an almost yearlong "comprehensive investigation," a federal prosecutor announced last October that Lesin died alone in his room due to a series of drunken falls “after days of excessive consumption of alcohol.” His death was ruled an "accident," and prosecutors closed the case.

> “Lesin was beaten to death,” one of the FBI agents said. “I would implore you to say as much. There seems to be an effort here to cover up that fact for reasons I can't get into.”

> He continued: “What I can tell you is that there isn’t a single person inside the bureau who believes this guy got drunk, fell down, and died. Everyone thinks he was whacked and that Putin or the Kremlin were behind it.”

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/putins-med...

Also Sergei Krivov. I believe most of the other people implicated as sources in Steele’s famous dossier also died shortly after it was made public, but I believe most happened outside of the United States.

I think a bit skepticism is due here. Their "proof" that Chepiga and Boshirov are the same person rests almost solely on a supposed strong resemblance between a photo of Chepiga taken in 2003 and photos of Boshirov from 2009 and 2018. I have stared at the photos for a long time and I am not sure they are the same person. Chepiga's eyebrows and bottoms of ears look different. I am not saying that they are not the same person but neither am I convinced they are.

What specific skills/training do you have that make you more qualified than a trained government analyst to make such a determination?

I don't see any reference in the article to a trained government analyst having confirmed the resemblance. And where do I claim to be more qualified than anyone in this?

Without commenting on the likenesses of the two photos, I do note that a person's ears do change shape, becoming longer throughout their lifetime.

That's certainly true. Boshirov's photos also show a mole above his right eye. This is missing in the Chepiga photo. But that does not prove they are not the same person as a mole or mark could potentially have appeared later in life. What's your opinion on the likeness, btw?

I hear you. Healthy skepticism here is important. I want to also suggest that the longer you stare at faces, the worse you'll be at drawing any conclusions. It's really hard to say yes or no...it's just not solid enough evidence to be conclusive. Maybe it's plenty to take this hypothesis and drill really deep for more.

i would like to note, that the conclusion was drawn not only based on visual resemblance, but on the facts of bio of Chepiga - dob, places of birth, education, passport issuance

Now when you say it. I was skeptical too. They seem to be indeed not the same person. The distance of their eyes seems different. Should not be to difficult to measure this with software, maybe my mind plays a trick on me.

There is an independent confirmation now: Russian journos from a mostly-Kremlin-independent publication spoke to people from the village where Chepiga was born [1]. They say it's him.

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3753339 (in Russian, use Google Translate)

More unsubstantiated claims from Bellingcat.

Remember that video he "found on youtube" that showed a Russian BUK driving through the streets on East Ukraine ? Well, it turns out it was composited from a video of the street, overlaid with an image of the BUK carrier. [1] Higgins is a fraud and a liar.

It's amazing that HN (which I'd always considered a forum for serious, thoughtful and intelligent people) would give credence to anything this guy says.

[1] https://sputniknews.com/russia/201809171068089638-russia-boe...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/09/17/world/europe/ap-...

[3] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/malaysia-airlines-f...

Could you elaborate and provide some evidence? The sources you linked don't seem to be related to the claims you're making.

I think he's relating to infamous briefing, where Russian DoD presented quite a lot of fakes trying to shift the blame to Ukraine.

One of the fakes were exactly that claim - that the video with Russian Buk was a fake.

Key quote:

>In our source’s words, an operation of this sort would have typically required a lower-ranked, “field operative” with a military rank of “no higher than captain.” The source further surmised that to send a highly decorated colonel back to a field job would be highly extraordinary, and would imply that “the job was ordered at the highest level.”

That speaks for itself

Well, the fact that Russia arranged "we're just two guys (wink, wink) observing church spires" TV conference for them, shows that they're not just low-level thugs.

Amazing work, but I'm genuinely surprised that you can uncover top spy identities, just using publicly, and leaked, material available over the internet.

I wouldn't call "In our source’s words" or "from two separate sources with access to [passport] databases" as public material on the Internet.

In fact, it very much reads as a classical parallel construction [1], e.g. some secret service identified the suspect through their work (anything from double agents to court-ordered wiretapping to illegal wiretapping) and back-fed details to some independent organization to create a train-of-thought from it and publish it. Especially since the public group photo is marked "[we] do not claim" and the truly exposing details come from secret databases from secret "sources". That is not public or verifiable information.

We had things like that here (here being a former eastern-bloc non-USSR country, where people are extra cautious of manipulations because being spoon fed with propaganda for 40 years) exposed fairly recently trough leaked wiretapping files. It was in all combinations. A journalist begging secret operatives to give her anything saying she would publish that immediately. Operatives feeding true information to unwitting journalists. And so on...

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

It's difficult to rewrite the digital past, and every undercover officer was a civilian at some previous point.

Essentially it's a defense in depth game. You can sever links between cover identities and real identities, but you can't erase real identities with history as easily. Pierce the obsfuscated link, browse through someone's normal digital life.

Starts to make plastic surgery look downright cheap.

Or maybe it's just bellingcat constructing parallel evidence for already known fact.

Especially when they grew up in a tiny town with population 300 before attending a nearby military academy. This guy's background was very obscure.

They had to make some very unlikely connections. Look for the jumps in their analysis where they suddenly know what to Google for. Because of what? A photo from somebody in Chechnya that looks not at all like the guy they want.

Could be they knew what they had to find... Anyway, they have some great sources for an open source analysis joint! ;-)

Bellingcat has a lot of background investigating Kremlin deeds. Of course they had good assumptions to start with.

> Could be they knew what they had to find...

Or, more likely, you are simply looking at the result of extremely tedious trial & error, with the failed lines of investigation omitted from the final writeup.

The head of MI6's wife had a Facebook account and she shared pictures of their holiday at the beach. (2009)

Information leaks easily. Which is the reason you shouldn't believe the vast majority of "conspiracy" theories. Not even a little bit.

There's an article [in russian] on how easy you can get a government, mobile phone, bank database reports on anybody, you can get list of all bank accounts, history of border crossings, history of mobile phone locations, personal phone numbers, equity ownership, debts and credits online, for tens of $: https://habr.com/post/423947/

The passport data in the investigation is nothing too special. When total control goes side-by-side with corruption, thats the result.

Just yesterday there was BBC investigation of killings in Cameroon based only on what is available on the Internet and now this. Amazing!

I have never heard of bellingcat.com

The work seems impressive but I think it should be taken with caution. Who is behind this website that he can access Russian databases via "contacts"? Passport databases contain pictures? (I have no idea)

"Bellingcat has contacted confidentially a former Russian military officer of similar rank as Colonel Chepig"

How do you find such people? Soldiers should be a dime a dozen, GRU colonels should be hard to find.

"Bellingcat and the Insider have obtained “Petrov”‘s and “Boshirov”s border crossing data for a number of countries in Europe and Asia, for the period of validity of their international passports (mid-2016 through today). " Wow.

Man, if the "social network research skills" of Eliott Higgins are for real, I have a few other cases he could dig in.

EDIT: I think I was right being skeptical. As mentioned here, while looking similar, the persons shown in the pics seem not to be identical to me. Can someone confirm this with software? I would be especially interested in the normalized distance between the eyes.

Besides this, he has put a picture online that he obtained illegally and he is violating EU privacy law.

That's especially funny that real passport data of high ranked security officer is available in leaked data and you can bribe you way into FSB's database of identity forms to get up to date info as well.

It's not same kind of investigation based on open info that bellingcat have done before.

You don’t have to bribe FSB directly to buy databases. You simply search among numerous online forums in .ru for a contact in Telegram, ask for a small sample, negotiate a price (100-10000 USD depending on database), pay for it with BTC, and obtain it via Telegram.

There was nothing FSB specific in the databases obtained by bellingcat, just regular citizen data.

This is interesting as an investigative work, but what of it?

Are we to believe only Russia conducts extra-judicial assassinations of people of interest? And do we expect the governments responsible to come out and admit it?

To me this circus around this particular assassination just appears to stem from having to justify sanctions against Russia by the UK. But then again, I don't expect a country to come out and admit that they'll sanction a country just to weaken it's economy and provoke social instability until they get a more favorable government.

To me this circus around this particular assassination just appears to stem from having to justify sanctions against Russia by the UK.

I’m not going to touch the majority of the bait you’re laying out and instead merely note that the “circus” was probably more a result of the extensive and expensive decontamination required over a large area. Oh yes, and the civilian who died and her partner who was affected. That kind of thing tends to make people pretty upset, no need for sprawling conspiracies of the state required. Personally it didn’t seem like much of a circus unless... did you see the decontamination tents and get a little confused?

Are you upset about the droning of civilians with very little oversight? Are you upset about the kidnapping of civilians into cargo ships to act as prisons without jurisdiction?

This attack killed four people, let's say there have been 20 times as many, so 80 deaths overall. do you believe the CIA, Mossad, Iran secret services, China secret services, didn't kill more?

You seem very dedicated to making this a case of “everyone is bad, so no one is bad.” I’ll repeat that old saw, two wrongs don’t make a right. The injustices and acts of violence committed by America against others don’t justify, excuse, or mitigate similar acts by Russia.

Now, can we get back to the topic at hand without these diversions? You were claiming that the “circus” of the UK being outraged by the use of a chemical weapon to attempt to murder two people on their soil, and the incidental killing of a third and injury of a fourth (both civilians) was a “circus” I think. I’m still interested to your non-diversionary response to my take on why that would legitimately anger not just the government of the UK, but anger and terrify its people.

My point is not that everyone is bad. My point is that this is par for the course. We don't live in a world of law. We live in a world of civilian law separated and insulated mostly in countries, and over that, anything goes. We are not at war because our wars are financial now but it is very normal for the kidnapping and murder of people that a security threat to a country.

My point was that, if you switched and the murdered was a nuclear scientist and the assassins were Mossad agents (like it happened at least once), no one was surprised or made sanctions because of it.

You are committing a category error right there. There is a difference between "is" (as is "we don't live…") and "ought" ("I find it morally repulsive and it's wrong"), you can't argue one with another. Though it's a very popular rhetoric device to cover morally dubious deeds

So was bellingcat fed this information from a western Intelligence organization and then they parallel constructed it? Seems likely.

I'd like to know why you think it's likely, considering that it's a strong claim for you to make.

Even if they did, so what? This is not a court of law.

We need to admit the Cold War is back. Is anyone else as terrified as I am of the assault on reason from all sides right now?

No Cold War is not back. Modern Russia is very weak compared to USSR.

Putin's Russia is weak but more bold and reckless than the USSR.

In these games of high level 'politics' I always assume nobody in the public really knows anything.

Any claims produced by anyone involved are just claims and not facts that can be verified by me or any of those so called journalists.

I personally would trust neither Putin nor Trump with my lunchbox.

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