Both the British Chief of the Defense Staff and NATO’s Secretary General issued statements regarding Russia’s dirty bomb agitprop. The responses are pitch perfect.
A statement on the Chief of the Defence Staff’s call with the Russian Chief of the General Staff, General of the Army Valery Vasilyevich Gerasimov: pic.twitter.com/0OTbnTIoLv
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) October 24, 2022
Spoke with 🇺🇸 @SecDef & 🇬🇧 @BWallaceMP about #Russia’s false claim that #Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory. #NATO Allies reject this allegation. Russia must not use it as a pretext for escalation. We remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine.
— Jens Stoltenberg (@jensstoltenberg) October 24, 2022
More on this in a bit.
Here’s President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump:
Strong people of our indomitable country!
Today is exactly 8 months of full-scale war. What has been achieved over this time?
We have defended the independence of our state – and Russia cannot change that already. We are liberating the Ukrainian land step by step. Donbas, Kharkiv region, Kherson region are now heard. But Zaporizhzhia region and Crimea will be heard as well – the time will come and all of Ukraine will be free.
Ukraine is breaking the so-called “second army of the world” – and from now on, Russia will only be a beggar. They are begging for something in Iran, they are trying to squeeze something out of Western countries making up various nonsense about Ukraine, intimidating, deceiving…
Never again will Russia be a subject that can dictate something to someone. It no longer has the potential to dictate. The world sees that. Russian potential is being wasted now on this madness – on a war against our state and the entire free world.
There was gas influence – not anymore. There was military influence – it is evaporating. There was political weight – now there is an increasing isolation. There were ideological ambitions – now there’s only disgust.
And this is a very important change in the configuration in our part of Eurasia – the more of its potential Russia loses now, the more real freedom all peoples will get both next to Russia and within its borders. Ukraine – first of all.
On February 24, the Kremlin could not even think about it, although they should have. But now, on October 24, there is no Russian official or propagandist who does not understand where all this is going for them. They started to recall 1917 long ago. The feeling of failure in Russia is getting stronger.
But, realizing all this, we have no right to relax. We still have to go the way to Ukrainian victory. This is a difficult path.
We’ll have to pass this winter, which will be the most difficult in our history. To do the necessary part of the work in autumn, winter and spring in order to get the desired results for the state. To maintain the maximum mobilization of our partners for the sake of the struggle for freedom and not allow our common enemy to split the global pro-democracy coalition.
This is what we do, all Ukrainians, Europeans, all people of the world who value freedom.
I held another meeting of the Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief today.
We help the active actions of our warriors on the frontline, provide them with everything they need, strengthen the protection of infrastructure facilities, and establish defense against missile and drone threats.
The military, intelligence, and government representatives delivered reports. Separately and in great detail, we are dealing with the system of territorial defense.
I addressed the people of Israel today in the framework of the Conference on Democracy, organized by Haaretz newspaper. This is a very important media – the oldest newspaper in Israel.
There I presented the Ukrainian point of view on the rapprochement between Russia and Iran, on why this rapprochement became possible and what threats it poses to our peoples. I called on Israel to join other democratic countries that already support Ukraine.
We are preparing for very important events tomorrow. The first is the parliamentary summit of the Crimea Platform. Dozens of partner states, hundreds of politicians and public figures. This will be another step in our preparation for the de-occupation of Crimea.
The second event is a summit in Germany dedicated to the reconstruction of Ukraine. We are doing everything to get the necessary resources for the restoration of our country right now, for the development of the social and economic sphere right now. And I sincerely thank all our partners who support Ukraine in this work.
And one more thing.
Today the world celebrates United Nations Day. It was on this day in 1945 that the UN Charter entered into force. It was not written and adopted as something ritualistic – it is not an empty formality. It is one of the basic documents that should work to maintain peace and international legal order.
It should work. And it will work. In particular, we are achieving this through our struggle against illegal and unprovoked Russian armed aggression. Everyone who tries to restore peace for Ukraine is also fighting for peace and security to be possible for all other peoples on earth.
And I want to thank Mr. António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, for our cooperation, for the fact that he truly defends the Charter of the United Nations and global peace.
We have already achieved good results together – this is the release of our prisoners who were held in Russia, this is the grain export initiative, which makes it possible to alleviate the acuteness of the food crisis in the world, this is multifaceted cooperation in UN structures. Thanks for all your help with this! And I believe that we can achieve even more.
Thank you to everyone who fights and works for Ukraine! Eternal glory to our warriors! Eternal glory to our strong people! Eternal gratitude to our friends!
Glory to Ukraine!
Here is former NAVDEVGRU Squadron Leader Chuck Pfarrer’s most recent assessments regarding the situations in Bakhmut, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia:
BAKHMUT/1215 UTC 24 OCT/ RU continues heavy bombardment along the Forward Edge of the Battle Area. Indirect fire from tanks, mortars, artillery and RU Close Air Support/Strike Missions hit the settlements of Bakhmutske, Bakhmut. pic.twitter.com/VSTSl3LCJh
— Chuck Pfarrer | Indications & Warnings | (@ChuckPfarrer) October 24, 2022
KHERSON/2015 UTC 24 OCT/ RU is reported to have released and armed the convicts residing at Kherson’s Prison No 90. UKR air defense is reported to have downed a Ka-52 attack helicopter on 23 OCT. Precision strikes continue on RU units and crossing points. pic.twitter.com/hvDunGfKRg
— Chuck Pfarrer | Indications & Warnings | (@ChuckPfarrer) October 24, 2022
NUCLEAR ROULETTE: Sources confirm that RU troops continue a campaign of intimidation against the technicians and administrators of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant. Employees have been coerced into signing open-ended employment contracts with Rosatom, the RU atomic energy agency. pic.twitter.com/LtidUODEuE
— Chuck Pfarrer | Indications & Warnings | (@ChuckPfarrer) October 24, 2022
Someone issued an open challenge to find the Russian war criminals who are doing the targeting of Ukrainian civilian residential areas and civilian infrastructure. Bellingcat took up the gauntlet and did what it does best!
Scourge of the Russian intelligence services, Christo Grozev, has spent the last several months piecing together the team responsible for programming Russian cruise missiles launched at targets in Ukraine, frequently hitting civilian infrastructure. pic.twitter.com/gKpSZbFczu
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) October 24, 2022
In the early hours of Monday, 10 October 2022, Russia pummelled Ukraine’s largest cities with missiles killing at least 20 people and wounding more than 100, according to Ukraine’s national emergency service. Russia has boasted about the surgical precision of its cruise missiles and claimed the attacks on 10 October targeted Ukraine’s military and security command centres and the national energy grid. However, open-source evidence shows that multiple missiles struck non-military targets, damaging residential buildings and hitting kindergartens and playgrounds.
The 10 October attacks marked Russia’s largest coordinated missile strikes since the beginning of the war. Yet the destruction didn’t end there. Missile strikes continued the next day with at least 28 launched on 11 October. The strikes left large numbers of civilians in Kyiv, Lviv, Vinnytsia, and Dnipro with no or sporadic access to electricity.
Cruise missile attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure continued into a second week on 17 October 2022, when Ukraine reported shooting down three cruise missiles flying towards Kyiv. On the morning of 18 October, new missile attacks were reported in at least three cities leaving some of them with no electricity. As of 18 October 2022, international prosecutors were investigating the targeting of civilian buildings and critical civilian infrastructure as potential war crimes.
Despite hundreds of open-source images and videos showing the flight and deadly impact of cruise missiles, little is known about who exactly is responsible for setting their targets and for programming their flight paths. Attribution of the programming of the flight-path of these allegedly high-precision weapons is relevant as the deliberate or indiscriminate targeting of Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure could constitute potential war crimes.
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. Phone metadata shows contacts between these individuals and their superiors spiked shortly before many of the high-precision Russian cruise missile strikes that have killed hundreds and deprived millions in Ukraine of access to electricity and heating. 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 – is buried deep within the Russian Armed Forces’ vast “Main Computation Centre of the General Staff”, often abbreviated as ГВЦ (GVC).
Most members identified by Bellingcat and partners are young men and women, including one husband-and-wife couple, many with IT and even computer-gaming backgrounds. Some also worked at Russia’s military command centre in Damascus in the period between 2016 and 2021, a timeframe during which Russia deployed cruise missiles in Syria. Others are recipients of various military awards, including from Russian President, Vladimir Putin.
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.
Method of Identification
The identification of this clandestine group within the Ministry of Defence was made by parsing through open-source data of thousands of graduates of Russia’s leading military institutes that focus on missile engineering and programming, in particular the Balashikha-based Military Academy of Strategic Missile Forces near Moscow, and the Military-Naval Engineering Institute based in the Pushkin suburb of St. Petersburg. A starting hypothesis was that these leading military institutes could be a training ground for at least some of the officers currently programming Russia’s most sophisticated long-range missiles.
Bellingcat analysed leaked employment or telephone entry data on these graduates available via Russia’s underground data markets. This allowed us to discover that some of these people were referenced in phone contact lists, obtained from various data lookup Telegram bots such as Glaz Boga and HimeraSearch, as working at GVC (Главный Вычислительный Центр) or the Main Computation Centre of the Armed Forces of Russia. Notably, all of these military missile engineering graduates with a GVC reference linked to their phone numbers in these apps were registered as living and working at Znamenka Street 19 in Moscow — the official address of Russia’s Armed Forces General Staff.
What is the GVC?
There is no public information linking the Main Computation Centre of the Armed Forces of Russia with the programming of cruise missiles. The function of the GVC has been opaquely described in military publications as “providing IT services” and “automation” to Russia’s armed forces. Despite its long history (according to Zvezda, a TV outlet affiliated with the Russian armed forces, it was established in 1963), sparse public mentions of this institute exist in present-day Russian media.
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.
Much, much, much more at the link!
I want to briefly come back to Russia’s dirty bomb agitprop. Whether it is the primary objective of Shoigu communicating this, his telling it to the US Secretary of Defense and the Defense Ministers of the UK, France, and Turkey and then having the content regarding the dirty bomb leaked is an influence operation. Not against the US government, nor the British, French, or Turkish governments. Rather it is intended to hook ultra-wealthy, hyper-online influencers like the Starlink Snowflake and his friend and sycophant David Sacks. Musk and Sacks have spent weeks parroting Kremlin disinformation and agitprop and freaking out about the imminence of nuclear war. The purpose of the dirty bomb agitprop is to get people like Musk and Sacks to bite, then have their tweets and other statements on the topic amplified by their reply guys until their responses are pushed into the mainstream discussion in the US regarding Ukraine, the US’s support for Ukraine, etc. I’ll be monitoring Sacks’ and Musk’s twitter feeds to see if they take the bait. I’d be very surprised if they don’t bite.
Someone asked for a link to my post from month’s ago about what I thought was going to happen in the midterms. I can’t find the post with a quick search and don’t have time tonight to go spelunking through my archived posts. So if someone has it bookmarked, please put the link in the comments. Thanks in advance.
Update at 8:40 PM EDT. Not sure if this is what people were thinking of when I referred to doing a front page post delineating where I think we’re at, but this post captures my thinking.
That’s enough for tonight.
Your daily Patron!
Patron’s Twitter account hasn’t put up a new post today, but Yarrow sent me this last night:
If you can believe it, I met someone more popular in Ukraine than President @ZelenskyyUa — meet the mine-sniffing canine @PatronDsnsn! He’s found 236 mines, saving thousands of lives. pic.twitter.com/Z8HMbVY4D1
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) October 23, 2022
And a new video from Patron’s official TikTok, which mirrors his tweet from last night about the money raised through the sale of the Patron stamps by UKRPOSHTA:
@patron__dsns Відвідали притулки для тваринок разом з @igorsm75 та @ukrposhta 😊❤️ #песпатрон #славаукраїні #патрондснс
The caption machine translates as:
Visited animal shelters together with @igorsm75 and @ukrposhta 😊❤️ #PatrontheDog #SlavaUkraini #PatronDSNS
Open thread!
War for Ukraine Day 243: The Maskirovka Slips – More On the Dirty BombPost + Comments (168)