While civilians in Russia can generally own more than one passport, no civilian – or even an intelligence service officer on a personal trip – can cross the state border under a fake identity. Near a photograph of Academy graduates deployed in Chechnya, the text referred to “seven school graduates [who] were bestowed with the Hero of Russia Award”.While testing the hypothesis that the unnamed person at right-most end of the photo Online searches in both Google and via two Russian search engines found no images, or social media presence, related to a Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, or to anyone by that name with a military connection. It also listed his place of birth as “village of Nikolaevka”, further linking this person to the Hero of the Russian Federation with the same name. A number of leaked residential and/or telephone databases of various Russian cities and regions are freely available as torrents on the internet; data in such databases varies in recency between 2000 and 2014. He is reported to have served in the Second Chechen War and the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Given his current rank of Colonel and function as a clandestine GRU officer, it is plausible that during this period he graduated from the Military Diplomatic In December 2014, Colonel Chepiga was awarded Russia’s highest state “as recognition of services to the state and the people of Russia involving a heroic deed”. The suspect using the cover identity of “Ruslan Boshirov” is in fact , a highly decorated GRU officer bestowed with Russia’s highest state award, Following Bellingcat’s own identification, multiple sources familiar with the person and/or the investigation have confirmed the suspect’s identity.This finding eliminates any remaining doubt that the two suspects in the Novichok poisonings were in fact Russian officers operating on a clandestine government mission. At age 18, he enrolled at a military school just 40 kilometers from his home, the Far-Eastern Military Command Academy in Blagoveschensk, one of Russia’s elite training grounds for marine commandos and in Russia’s farthest-eastern city of Khabarovsk, one of the elite Spetsnaz units under GRU command. What have you got to say, Putin? President Putin publicly vouched that “Boshirov” and “Petrov” are civilians. The graduation years for the two were estimated between 2001 and 2003.
This appeared to be highly unusual, given the fact he had been awarded the highest state honor. Middle: “Ruslan Boshirov”‘s passport photo from 2009. Unlike most of other recipients, few details are available on why he was honoured.Bellingcat suggested the award may have been given for the service in Ukraine, where Mr Putin's troops are accused of backing pro-Moscow rebels fighting government forces.The Home Office said it could neither confirm nor deny the reporting about the suspect's real identity.Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed the claims, saying they are part of an "information campaign".Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson appeared to confirm the story in a now-deleted tweet.He said: "The true identity of one of the Salisbury suspects has been revealed to be a Russian Colonel. After Bellingcat disclosed the identity of one of the two Skripal poisoning suspects as Anatoliy Chepiga, a highly decorated colonel working for Russia’s military intelligence, Russian authorities responded with a string of vehement denials. This is the case with the award to Colonel Chepiga. The passport application form identified also Anatoliy Chepiga’s marital status and listed his military ID number.Based on the array of information sources consulted – all of which were independent from each other and came from different time periods – Bellingcat was able to conclude with certainty that the person identified by UK authorities as “Ruslan Boshirov,” is in fact Colonel Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga, a highly decorated senior officer from Russian military intelligence who was awarded the highest state honor in late 2014.This finding starkly contradicts both this man’s statements, as made in a TV interview to Russia’s state-run RT network, and President Vladimir Putin’s assertions that the person in question is merely a civilian named Ruslan Boshirov. On the assumption that the two suspects were GRU officers with a focus on West European covert operations (see our second about the Skripal poisoning suspects), and knowing their approximate age, we contacted former Russian military officers to inquire what specialized schools would have provided appropriate training.