meet Denis V. Sergeev of Moscow's GRU

   At 10:51 of 3-1-2018 Sergeev, using a phone issued in the name of his cover identity, made a call to a number registered in the name of another non-existing person, a fictional Timur Agofonov.  Whatever he had to say was short, as he hung up after 9 seconds.  The rest of the day Sergeev stayed at home, browsing the internet and waiting.

  Just after 6 pm

Denis Sergeev got the confirmation that he was expecting: he had to fly to London for the weekend.  Not with his wife, and not under his real name, but as “Sergey Fedotov” – a department manager at a GRU front company offering courier services.  Operational security protocol required that he himself book his ticket, lest traces to his employer – the GRU – remain in any of the booking systems.  On the morning of Thursday, March 1st 2018, Denis Sergeev was working from his new home, a 7-minute walk from the GRU Academy where he had worked – and lived in a dormitory-style apartment with his family – for almost 10 years. ….

  While Sergeev did not show interest in seeing the sights of London he spent a significant volume of time on the phone and online.  Based on the data traffic of his phone, it appears that he did not trust local WiFi connections and instead used his 3G/4G telephone connection.  The total data consumption for his 48-hour trip exceeded 1 GB.  https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/06/28/the-gru-globetrotters-mission-london/

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  Russian authorities have taken the unusual measure of erasing any public records of the existence of Denis Sergeev, as well as of Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, the main two suspects in the Skripal poisoning.  These unprecedented actions cannot plausibly be taken without direct involvement of the Russian state and add further credibility to the UK government’s assertion that the Skripal poisoning operation and the subsequent cover-up were coordinated at a state level.  Additional details on these concerted efforts to purge public records of Chepiga, Mishkin and Sergeev’s identities will be detailed in the next part of our investigation, scheduled to come out next week….

  Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev was born in Usharal, a small militarized town in what was at the time Soviet Kazakhstan, near the Soviet-China border.  Both Denis Sergeev and his cover identity “Sergey Fedotov” were born on 17 September 1973.  He served in the army in the southern Russian city of Novorossiisk in the Krasnodar Region.

  At some point between 2000 and 2002 he was transferred to Moscow and enrolled at the elite Military Diplomatic Academy, popularly known in Russia as the “GRU Conservatory”.  The Military Diplomatic Academy churns out 100 elite intelligence officers each year, ranging from spies in diplomatic and military attache covers to illegals….

  During 2004-2012, which possibly overlapped with his last years at the Military Diplomatic Academy, Denis Sergeev, under his real identity, served as shareholder and/or managing director of eight Russian companies.  These companies, all of which were liquidated between 2007 and 2012, were sham corporations with names mimicking names of other large companies registered in Russia.  In most of the companies Sergeev was the sole shareholder, while in two he was co-shareholder with other people, some of whom we also identified as GRU officers.

  We established that during 2009, Denis Sergeev obtained a personal loan from a Russian bank in the amount of just over one million USD.  The allocation of such a large loan to a person who – as seen from his credit record (obtained from a leaked Russian credit history collection) – had no real estate and no personal vehicle – is extraordinary.  The loan appears to have been extended on the strength of Denis Sergeev’s personal income in his declared role as “specialist” working for a company called Loreven Style Ltd specializing in consulting services.

  In a 2010 census, Sergeev listed Loreven Style Ltd as his employer and indicated a Riga-based company address. There are no records of a company with such name ever existing, either in Riga or anywhere.  Two phone numbers listed as contacts are not in service.

  It is not certain what the function of the many sham companies incorporated by Sergeev was, and whether it was linked to the loan amount of $1 million apparently obtained from a Russian bank.  A review of some of the other shareholders in these companies  – some of which also with GRU links – shows that they too incorporated dozens of companies with similar profiles, all of which have since been liquidated.  It is plausible that these companies may have been used for money laundering purposes or as cover corporations providing “respectable employment” to other GRU undercover officers, for instance in the context of visa applications.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/02/14/third-suspect-in-skripal-poisoning-identified-as-denis-sergeev-high-ranking-gru-officer/