The enemy within: How Russia's GRU agents blend in with human rights activists, journalists, and filmmakers

Russia’s most notorious assassination and sabotage squad has infiltrated a host of Russian civil society organizations, The Insider has discovered. GRU Unit 29155, responsible for poisonings and terror attacks across Europe, has also been spying on opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime, both inside Russia and abroad, by posing as human rights activists, documentarians, and trade journalists. Their targets have included venerable NGOs such as the Free Russia Forum, founded by Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov; the Sakharov Center, named after Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov; and Memorial, an organization set up during Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost to chronicle the human rights abuses and high crimes of the Stalinist period.

In the months leading up to Russia’s February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s domestic security arms began cracking down on civil society organizations like these more severely than usual. In July 2021, opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation was deemed “extremist” by a Moscow court, and many of its employees and volunteers fled Russia rather than risk being jailed for their political activities. Independent media outlets, including The Insider, were labeled as “foreign agents,” and countless journalists and editors similarly relocated to less repressive environments abroad in order to continue doing their work. In December 2021, a Moscow court “liquidated” Memorial, claiming that the human rights organization had failed to properly notify readers that its publications had been produced by a “foreign agent.” The Sakharov Center, which had survived despite earning its “foreign agent” designation in 2014, was ultimately closed by another Moscow court’s decision in August 2023.

Kasparov’s Free Russia Forum, which is headquartered in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, remained beyond the official jurisdiction of the Kremlin’s reach. Kasparov himself left Russia after his role in a series of large scale anti-Putin protests — the Bolotnaya rallies of 2011-2012 — made the former national hero a prime target for political repressions. However, the revelation that an agent from GRU Unit 29155 was nevertheless able to infiltrate the Free Russia Forum’s gatherings abroad shows just how seriously the Kremlin took the “threat” of Russians anywhere exercising their rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

The Unit 29155 operatives spying on their fellow Russian citizens represent an unprecedented tasking for a notorious assassination and terrorism outfit: they are all Russian “illegals,” operating under assumed identities and without diplomatic cover, but doing so domestically as well as abroad, where the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, traditionally plies its trade. Indeed, the GRU does not officially have a mandate to operate on Russian soil, suggesting that Putin has grown so confident of the capabilities of his notorious black ops team that he has tasked it with keeping an eye on his enemies at home, even as it continues to track its enemies abroad.

The Human Rights Activist

The first operative whose identity The Insider can reveal is Ivan Zhikharev, purportedly a professional geologist who specializes in drilling through the earth’s crust in search of water. In his spare time, Zhikharev devotes much of his energy to lofty causes: posing as a human rights activist and traveling to the meetings of at least one prominent Russian opposition movement in exile (or, at least, he did before being outed by French intelligence in 2022).

This Zhikharev bears an uncanny resemblance in name and appearance to another man: Ivan Zhigarev, who even shares Zhikharev’s birthday. This is not a coincidence. Instead, it is the logical consequence of the fact that the man posing as Zhikharev is indeed Zhigarev, a trained killer from Unit 29155.