The Lord of Arms in the sights of the elite Russian killer unit

NEW YORK – Despite being one of the world’s leading arms dealers, Emilian Gebrev looks like a grandfather who prefers football shirts and sweaters to a suit and tie, who drives his own car and insists that it is his native Bulgaria is an irrelevant character.

This week, however, the importance of Gebrev has become very clear, at least to the elite Russian brigade that responds to the military intelligence service of the Kremlin.

It’s a chilling revelation, especially since authorities say the group has attempted to kill Gebrev on two previous occasions. According to Bulgarian authorities, in 2015 officials from the Russian unit visited Bulgaria and poisoned Gebrev with a substance similar to the same nerve agent Novichok. which has already been used against former spies and staunch critics of President Vladimir Putin. After the first assassination attempt failed, they came back and poisoned him again.

Days after authorities in the Czech Republic accused the assassin team known as Unit 29155 of staging a series of explosions at weapons depots in 2014 that killed two people, Gebrev admitted that his merchandise was stored in these warehouses. And according to Czech officials, the Russians were targeting these Gebrev actions.

There were still doubts about the real motives for the Russian stubbornness against Gebrev, but new revelations from the Czech Republic prove that the Kremlin was persecuting him for his business.

In an email sent to the newspaper The New York Times, Gebrev acknowledges that in the Czech arms depot he stored weapons and later admitted what he had long denied: his company Emco sent military equipment to Ukraine after 2014, when the separatists started a war against Ukrainian forces with the support of the Russian military and intelligence services.

The involvement of Unit 29155 in the explosions in the Czech Republic adds to a growing list of attributed operations and deepens the confrontation between Russia and the West.

On Thursday, the Czech government announced that in response to the blasts it would expel around 60 Russian diplomats, in addition to the 18 already expelled from the country, which would virtually dismantle the Russian diplomatic delegation there. Russia has promised to respond accordingly, and of the Czech Embassy in Moscow.

The calculation comes just days after the United States announced the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats and would impose sanctions as punishment for the massive hacking of US government computer systems, which the White House attributes to the service of foreign intelligence from the Kremlin. It also coincided with the concentration of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border, which .

Unit 29155 operated in Europe for years without being discovered by Western intelligence agencies. In 2019, a survey of The New York Times revealed the purpose of the unit and showed that a year earlier its members had carried out the attempted assassination of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, who had been poisoned in Salisbury, England.

Since then, many examples of the operations performed by the unit are known. Last year, the New York Times revealed that the CIA concluded that the Russian unit had funded a network of criminal activists in Afghanistan to carry out attacks on US and coalition troops.

Bulgarian prosecutors charged three officers from Unit 29155 with poisoning Gebrev in January 2020 and issued arrest warrants against him. They also broadcast CCTV cameras which apparently caught one of the attackers putting poison on the door handles of the cars of Gebrev, his son and a senior manager of his company in a garage near their offices in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital.

But Gebrev is uncertain whether the unit did not act alone, and although he suggests that those responsible for its poisoning were Russian henchmen., believes that they were probably in cahoots with their enemies in Bulgaria.

In el verano y otoño boreales de 2019, me reuní con Gebrev varias veces y hasta fuimos a visitar una de sus fábricas de armamento cerca de una ciudad búlgara llamada Montana, donde pude ver morteros de varios tamaños in cajas verdesiadas to doo son the planet. Gebrev never spoke of his connections to the explosions in the Czech Republic and was also reluctant to talk about the two occasions he was poisoned..

“If they want to publish it in the newspaper like any other gossip, I’d rather not talk about it,” he said at the start of one of our meetings.

Gebrev was also reluctant to discuss his company’s relations with Ukraine. At first, he said that in 2014, when the war broke out, all arms exports to this country ceased. But on Friday he admitted that Emco signed a contract with “authorized Ukrainian companies” at the end of 2014, after the war. In an email before The New York TimesGebrev had insisted that the weapons stored in Czech warehouses were not intended for Ukraine.

Since 2014, providing military assistance to the Ukrainian government has been like playing with fire.

After pro-democracy protests in Ukraine brought down the Kremlin puppet government, Russian special forces units in unidentifiable uniforms seized and annexed the Crimean peninsula, and sparked a separatist insurgency in the east that still stands In progress. At the same time, Russian contract killers spread across the country, assassinating senior Ukrainian military and intelligence officials who were essential to the war effort., according to Ukrainian officials.

This week, at a press conference, the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Andrei babis, said the explosions represented “an unprecedented attack on Czech soil”, but clarified that the real target was not his country but “property belonging to a Bulgarian arms dealer”.

The explosions occurred in October and December 2014 and were initially attributed to a technical failure. Seven years later, it is not known how the Czech authorities concluded that the explosions were the result of Russian sabotage.

Czech security officials have identified two suspects, who they say arrived in the country just before the first explosion and visited the warehouse near the town of Vrbetice posing as buyers for the Tajik armed forces. The false names they used to enter the property, Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, were the same ones used four years later by two men who had poisoned Skripal in Salisbury.

The fact that Russian spies carried out military-style sabotage operations outside of wartime dismayed many Europeans.

“I think that for Czech public opinion and for the rest of Europe this is something scandalous,” said David Stulik, analyst at the European Value Center for Security Policy, based in Prague. “It reveals the way Russia treats our countries.”

The New York Times

Translation of Ignacio Mackinze

The New York Times