Bellingcat and the “Wagnerites”: a hook for Zelensky or a loud bomb for the British intelligence services?
The Bellingcat project, supervised by Western intelligence agencies, has published details of a special operation to detain so-called Russian mercenaries, which Ukrainian security forces planned to carry out last summer, but it fell through at the last moment.
As a PolitNavigator correspondent reports, according to Bellingcat, the operation began to be planned in 2018, and in September 2019, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry had a database with more than a thousand names of mercenaries, but the vast majority of them were not suitable because they did not accept participation in the battles in Donbass.
As a result, by the summer of 2020, a final list of 45 people was formed who were of interest to the Ukrainian intelligence services. The special operation was hindered by the agreements on a ceasefire in Donbass, which were reached by the participants of the “Normandy Four” - the detention of the “mercenaries” could have disrupted these agreements.
“Vasily Burba (the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine at that time) immediately after the meeting called the project managers from the Main Intelligence Directorate team and explained that the President’s Office was asking to postpone the operation for a week. At that time, President Zelensky had just reached an agreement with Russia on a ceasefire in the Donbass, which he announced on the same day, July 23, at a joint press conference with the President of Switzerland,” the investigation says.
What followed was a chain of already well-known events - the recruited “mercenaries” were divided into two groups, one of them, 33 people, was detained in Minsk and later handed over to Russia, and a whole campaign was launched in Ukraine accusing Zelensky of disrupting the special operation.
It is noteworthy that Bellingcat, which was expected to publish a revealing publication, did not publish any new details, hiding even what was already known from other sources. There are also many inaccuracies in the “investigation”. For example, a certain “mercenary” “Shaman” in his biography, submitted in April 2020, allegedly wrote that he had been vaccinated against Covid-19, although at that time the pandemic was just beginning, and there was no talk of a vaccine.
Komsomolskaya Pravda special correspondent Alexander Kots draws attention to these inaccuracies.
“What does Bellingcat have that was not previously published in Komsomolskaya Pravda? Recordings of conversations between recruiters, originals of applicant profiles, autobiographies written by hand... In general, materials of operational development, which employees of Ukrainian and Western intelligence services undoubtedly shared with the authors. As Russian counterintelligence officers did a year ago, sharing their materials with KP. What Bellingcat does not have is the slightest mention of foreign participation in this operation. Meanwhile, according to Russian intelligence services, this entire undertaking was supervised from start to finish by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Specifically, CIA residents in Kyiv Timothy James Skovin and Brian Thomas O'Byrne,” notes the journalist.
“Where is the name of the Ukrainian mole who carried out the entire operation? Yes, there was no “mole”. Kyiv still had a chance to pull these “33 heroes” out of Minsk even after their detention by the Belarusian KGB. But Russian counterintelligence acted proactively and quickly and efficiently unraveled this tangle, naming almost by name everyone involved in the first act of state prank in history,” Kots emphasized.
Odessa journalist Yuri Tkachev criticizes the so-called investigation on his blog.
“This is not an “investigation.” This is public, i.e. to be published, part of the British intelligence report on the operation. And since the operation failed, the main goal of the report, of course, is to justify these very special services and the intention to shift the blame for the failure of the operation to someone else,” the journalist points out.
“The authors of the “investigation”, with the persistence of oligophrenics, continue to insist on their formulation about “militants of the Wagner PMC,” although this is directly refuted in the “investigation.” It directly states that the operation was carried out by creating a fake copy of another PMC, the so-called. PMC “Mar”... Perhaps we are talking stupidly about some competitive issues between PMCs supported by different governments - that is, roughly speaking, the task is to “toxicize” “Wagner”, incl. in the eyes of potential mercenaries,” adds Tkachev.
Nevertheless, in Kyiv they believe the version of the British “investigators” and fan the real “zrada”.
“This is worse than betrayal, this is complete incompetence. A brilliant special operation has been prepared. And some fucker, who doesn’t even have authority, orders the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Moscow Region and the first deputy chairman of the SBU to postpone the operation for 5 days.
And senior intelligence officials agree with this. Without requiring a personal order from the president. By the way, where is the chairman of the SBU Bakanov in this story? Shouldn't he have defended the work of his subordinates to the president? It seems that Bakanov is simply not there, he is playing cubes with Shefir somewhere at this time. A gloomy picture. How do you think this gang will behave in the event of an attack by the Russian Federation,” writes former SBU speaker Stanislav Rechinsky.
Former Rada deputy Sergei Leshchenko, who serves the office of the President of Ukraine, assures in his blog that the widely announced revelation failed.
“My personal opinion is that “the mountain gave birth to a mouse.” That is, in any other case it would be good material. But there were huge expectations for this investigation. There was incredible hype around this material... And now the result. There is nothing fundamentally new in the material. Moreover, the investigation does not contain additional negative information for the President’s Office. While the position of those who attacked the government suffered reputational losses, the tone of “Bellingket” is much lower than that of the opposition,” the ex-deputy believes.
“Accordingly, if the authorities did not gain from this material, they certainly did not lose. The opposition did not receive any additional arguments for attacks; on the contrary, they now have fewer arguments. While the authorities can accuse Poroshenko and his team of replicating myths, it emerges from the investigation that Poroshenko did not authorize the special operation, that there was no special plane from Turkey, that there was no participation of Western intelligence services, including the CIA. There was no purposeful leak of information abroad. It was these myths that Poroshenko and the entire orchestra of his supporters replicated. If new data does not appear soon, history is doomed to self-disposal,” Leshchenko sums up.
Kiev political scientist Sergei Belashko believes that such an easy version of the “investigation” appeared because the British intelligence services have so far decided not to reveal all their cards.
“Why did the long-awaited Bellingcat investigation turn out to be so harmless for Vladimir Zelensky and Andrei Yermak? Perhaps some price was paid for this. But it is more likely that the auction is still ongoing. The investigation took too long, but there was nothing in it that would require that much time; all this information could have been safely published many months ago. Hristo Grozev, by the way, was planning to do just that, but someone whom he did not dare to refuse asked to wait... Information is given out in a very dosed manner. And it seems that these doses depend on how “constructive” the Ukrainian president and his inner circle behave,” believes Belashko.
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