The men who poisoned the Skripals may have used their real names to enter the UK

Daily Ringtone
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

What happened

Global media coverage this week was focused on two individuals, known as Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov. UK police believe the two men murdered the Skripals and are paid-up agents of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, and were using pseudonyms. But details uncovered by Russian journalists suggest that either (i) the names are real, (ii) real people with these names existed or (iii) the names were taken on as assumed identities many years ago. Be it on purpose or not, the evidence left by the suspects leaves Russia exposed for further Western sanctions.

  • Passports. Both suspects had real passports, issued in the names of Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov in 2016. They received these passports at almost exactly the same time — the passport numbers differ only by one, final digit. The St. Petersburg news outlet Fontanka found the passport details in a Russian police database that has information on all airline tickets purchased in Russia. Fontanka has access to such a database. And The Bell can confirm both Boshirov and Petrov’s passports were there.
  • Social media. The agents may have received their passports in 2016 with fake names. But Ruslan Boshirov has a profile on a small Russian social media site, My World, which was created no later than July 2013. The details in the profile and the date and place of birth match those of the passport located by Fontanka. A coincidence is almost impossible: the last name Boshirov is very rare. On Russia’s most popular social network, Vkontakte, there are only 26 people with the last name Boshirov. The email address which Boshirov used for his My World account was also used for a Facebook account. The Facebook account is not very useful: it only contains a 2014 photo from Prague and the information that Boshirov worked for Moscow company Headway, which purchases medicine on behalf of the state.
  • Information state databases. Russian crime journalist Sergey Kanev is convinced that the documents Boshirov and Petrov used to fly to London belong to real people. Kanev analyzed information held in Russian state databases. A database seen by The Bell lists that a man whose personal data coincide with Petrov’s became the registered owner of a Chevrolet Tahoe in 2001. According to anoither base, in 2015, Boshirov was fined for a driving offense.

Why the world should care

If the suspects are indeed GRU officers and flew to the UK using their real names then the operation to poison the Skripals was either botched, or the goal was to leave as large a trail as possible. GRU officers have previously been involved in the case of MH17, the plane shot down over Ukraine, in the attempt to carry out a military coup in Montenegro and, of course, in the hacking of the DNC’s servers ahead of the U.S. presidential election in 2016. Special prosecutor Robert Mueller even revealed the last names of 12 hackers employed by the GRU and officially accused them of the cyberattack. “The GRU breaks into servers in a brazen, clumsy, and brutish manner… The GRU’s hackers didn’t even try to cover their tracks” is reportedly what Sergei Mikhailov, an officer in a competing intelligence unit, the FSB, said about the GRU’s methods. Mikhailov may have been a source of information for U.S. intelligence agencies about the GRU hackers. He was arrested in Russia for treason right after the U.S. election in 2016. Whether accidental or intentional, the GRU’s carelessness over the Skripals is only driving the West towards imposing more sanctions on Russia.

Peter Mironenko

This newsletter is made with the support of the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley.

Further reading:

  • Russian journalist Leonid Bershidsky attempts to explain the GRU’s bungling in a Bloomberg opinion piece.
  • The most comprehensive information about the identities of the suspected poisoners is on Fontanka’s website (in Russian).
  • Last year, The Bell was first to report the story about how GRU hackers were caught breaking into the DNC’s servers.

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