I love Bellingcat. I love the organization’s use of open-source information to make assessments that are complex and well-supported.
It was Bellingcat that late last year worked with Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny to prompt a member of the FSB squad tasked with murdering him to inadvertently confess to the mission. It was also Bellingcat that examined open-source data to connect Russia-linked Ukrainian operative, Leonid Kharchenko, and others to the downing of the MH17 commercial airliner over Ukraine.
And now, as more and more attention is focused on Russia’s Wagner organization—you know, the one that doesn’t really exist, that has done nothing illegal, and which is in no way connected to the Kremlin (sarcasm fully intended)—Bellingcat, along with its partner in Russia, the Insider, has done a year-long investigation into what has turned out to be a Ukrainian sting operation to expose Russian mercenaries who had committed serious crimes while fighting for Russia-supported military entities eastern Ukraine.
Many, but not all of the targeted mercenaries, had fought in Ukraine’s Donbas region as part of the infamous Wagner private military contractor (PMC). Others fought as part of Russia-sponsored “volunteer corps” while others had been working directly for Russia’s military or security services. Most of the targeted men had at some point served as mercenaries for the Wagner group, whether in Ukraine or subsequently in Syria, Libya or the Central African Republic (CAR).
The sting op was pretty impressive, and the article goes into detail about how the Ukrainians staged a fake recruitment campaign for the nonexistent private military contractor (PMC), created a fake, dangerous paramilitary mission, and used Rosneft—Russia’s energy company—as a fake client. Also, by requesting certain verifying documents about the applicants’ experience for this fake mission, Ukrainian security services obtained direct admissions in resumes about Russia’s activities in eastern Ukraine.
Some militants described their arrival to Donbas in 2014 as “under the cover of rebels”, while others described their presence there as direct deployments by their regular Russian army units. Crucially, the GUR MOU team started noticing names among the applicants that they knew were already wanted by their colleagues at the SBU for what they believed were serious crimes committed in 2014 and 2015 in Eastern Ukraine.
Bellingcat, meanwhile, connects Wagner to paramilitary activities, including references to the “Musicians”—a coded reference for Wagner, corroborated by Russians interviewed by Bellingcat—which were apparently competing for personnel with the sting op, and conversations which revealed Wagner’s participation in eastern Ukraine, Syria, and the Central African Republic, with a number of the recruits for the fake operation providing insider data on how the Russian government had provided support to and steered the operations of the ostensibly private Wagner PMC.
Oops!
The reading is fascinating and includes scans of original documents and handwritten admissions about combat experience by Russian applicants.
Good times.