Dark star of Russia’s elite school for spies

Colonel who signed up at 18, was honoured on gaudy memorial to military ... then tried to kill Skripal

THE highly-decorated spy blamed for the Salisbury poisonings was a veteran of Russia’s elite special forces and had trained at one of the country’s top military academies, it emerged last night.

The man behind the alias of Ruslan Boshirov was unmasked by an investigative website as Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, 39, a GRU intelligence officer bestowed with Russia’s highest state award.

His military career began at the age of 18 when he enrolled in a top military school just 25 miles from his tiny home village of Nikolaevka, near the RussiaChina border.

Col Chepiga studied at the Far Eastern Military Command Academy in Blagoveschensk, an elite training ground for ‘Spetsnaz’ special forces officers.

His name features on a memorial wall at the school under the Gold Star honour list. After graduating from the school with honours in 2001, he was assigned to Russia’s 14th Spetsnaz Brigade, based in the fareastern city of Khabarovsk.

Spetsnaz units are responsible for highlysecretive missions and are equivalent to the British SAS.

Under the command of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, his bri-

played a vital role in the second Chechen war and was also spotted near the Ukrainian border in late 2014.

The information was revealed by investigative website Bellingcat, which had conducted a painstaking investigation into his background.

It said that his unit had deployed three times to Chechnya, where Russia was carrying out what it called a ‘counter-terrorist operation’.

The website of a state-run military volunteer organisation claims that Col Chepiga received more than 20 military awards and decorations in the course of his service.

And his former military school proudly boasts on its website that he was bestowed his homeland’s highest honour, Hero of the Russian Federation, in 2014. The award is often presented by Vladimir Putin himself.

While the achievements of his fellow award-winners are detailed extensively, Col Chepiga’s simply says it was awarded ‘ by decree from the Russian president’. Bellingcat speculated that he could have been given the award for operations in Eastern Ukraine – where Russia’s military was secretly operating in 2014.

Senior Russian military officials have since said that so-called ‘little green men’ – soldiers wearing uniforms with no insignia – were in fact members of Russia’s Spetsnaz deployed secretly to Ukraine. The Bellingcat website also found an undated photograph of graduates from the Far Eastern Military Command Academy on assignment in Chechnya.

It pointed out that the man on the far right looks strikingly similar to the man named as Boshirov by the Metropolitan Police – although it said it could not prove conclusively it was the same person.

They came across the photograph after sources said the school was a likely place for a Russian military officer with a specialism in Western European operations to have trained.

After further digging, they came across the mysterious Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga. Address databases link him to the Military Unit 20662 – code for the 14th Spetsnaz Brigade.

The logo of the brigade is a black bat with a yellow parachute behind it. It was formed in the 1960s and has been under the command of the GRU for much of its history. According to Yuri Shvets, a former KGB agent, GRU officers were referred to as ‘boots’ – tough but unsophisticated.

Once a member of the GRU, it is believed to be exceptionally difficult to leave. And those who do so to join foreign agencies are punished savagely.

Viktor Suvorov, a GRU officer who defected to Britain in 1978, said new recruits were shown a video of a traitor from the agency being burned alive in a furnace as a warning. The GRU has become adept at using so-called ‘non-linear warfare’, which uses a combination of covert special forces operations, spying, cyber attacks and internet trolls to destabilise enemy nations.

It started as an intelligence-gathering agency for Trotsky’s Bolshevik Red Army, and Lenin insisted it remain separate from the other intelligence organisations.

Today it still sits apart from the SVR, the external spying service, and the domestic FSB (the equivalents of Britain’s MI6 and MI5), which were created when the notorious KGB was split in 1991.

‘Cyber attacks and internet trolling’