meet (now Maj-Gen.) Robert Baranov and Lt. Col. Igor Bagnyuk of Main Computation Centre, Znamenka Street 19, Moscow, Russian Armed Forces General Staff

Following a six-month-long investigation, Bellingcat and its investigative partners The Insider and Der Spiegel were able to discover a hitherto secretive group of dozens of military engineers with an educational and professional background in missile programming. The group, which works from two locations – one at the Ministry of Defence headquarters in Moscow and another at the Admiralty headquarters in St. Petersburg Bellingcat approached each identified member of this clandestine GVC unit with an offer to confirm or deny our findings, and with a list of questions including who selects the targets and whether the civilian casualties are the result of computational error or intentional targeting of civilians. One senior officer, reached by phone by a reporter from our investigative partner The Insider, hung up as soon as he found out with whom he was speaking. All but two of the other military engineers either did not respond to calls and text messages or explicitly denied working for Russia’s armed forces or denied even knowing what GVC was, despite many being shown photographs in which they are seen posing in military uniform with GVC insignia. One of the engineers did not deny their affiliation to this unit but indicated they could not safely answer the questions we put to them, and thanked our team for alerting them to the upcoming publication. Another member shared with us, on condition of anonymity, certain contextual information about how the group was tasked with manually programming the sophisticated flight paths of Russia’s high-precision cruise missiles and several photographs of their commander Lt. Col. Igor Bagnyuk. This individual also provided group photos of the GVC computation group posing in front of a Ministry of Defence building in Moscow.

A rare example comes in the form of a 2018 award to a member of a military choir signed by Colonel Robert Baranov, named as the ‘director of the Main Computation Centre of the Armed Forces of Russia’. In 2021, a website focusing on Russia’s Volga Region reported that Baranov, who hails from the Republic of Chuvashia, had been promoted to Major General by presidential decree. The corresponding decree naming Baranov can be found on the Russian government’s website. One of the engineers we identified as working for GVC received a “certificate of gratitude” from President Putin in 2020, according to his resume on a freelance job posting. However, Bellingcat was unable to find this man’s name in either of the publicly available listings of Russian recipients of the award from that year. In the same posting, he describes his education as “automated systems with a special application”. An aggregated review of the educational and professional background of the people affiliated with GVC based on telephone contact lists shows that most of them graduated from either the Academy of Strategic Missile Forces (and in particular its Informatics Systems subsidiary in Serpukhov) or the Military Naval Engineering Institute. Some had prior military service as navy captains or ship engineers. Others had prior civilian work experience as corporate IT specialists or game designers. How we Linked the GVC Team to Cruise Missile Strikes Given these highly specialised technical skills, it seemed plausible that the GVC may be linked to programming the flight paths of Russia’s cruise missiles. Therefore Bellingcat obtained phone metadata records of the highest ranking individual publicly named as its director: Maj. Gen. Baranov. This method is similar to that employed by Bellingcat to track and trace the poisoners of Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny, with data purchased from brokers who commonly offer such services. While this method would be impossible in most countries, Russia’s black market for data has helped journalists and activists piece together numerous significant investigations into the country’s military and secret services in recent years.  An analysis of 126 phone calls from 24 February to the end of April 2022 showed a correlation between significant Russian cruise missile attacks in Ukraine, and incoming calls prior to the missile strikes coming from one particular number that we identified as belonging to another senior officer working at the GVC. This officer is identified via phone contact listings and leaked residential databases as Lt. Col. Igor Bagnyuk, and was registered at the same address as the other known GVC officers at Znamenka 19.  Records show the registered address of Lt. Col. Igor Bagnyuk. On the assumption that Lt. Col. Bagnyuk was the senior-most officer potentially linked to the programming of long-range missiles, due to his direct communication with the commander of the group, we then obtained his phone metadata records for the period from the start of Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. Bagnyuk’s call records showed intensive communication with more than 20 military engineers and IT specialists associated with the GVC. Dipping back into the same Russian black market data sources, we then acquired several of the most frequently interacting phone numbers attributed to GVC officers. By analysing the cumulative body of phone records, we reconstructed a team of 33 military engineers who appeared to report or communicate frequently with Lt. Col. Bagnyuk. The clandestine group of engineers that we identified appears to consist of three teams of approximately 10 engineers each, with each team dedicated to one specific high-precision missile type.  \ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2022/10/24/the-remote-control-killers-behind-russias-cruise-missile-strikes-on-ukraine/