The Treasury Department has revealed the names of Putin’s nerve-agent hit squad, called out a Russian oligarch for allegedly fronting the money for a political coup in Montenegro, and banned the hackers behind Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election from the U.S. financial system for good measure. Who’s who in the GRU sanctions and why does it matter?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole, a breaking-news analysis that helps you get smart on the one story everyone’s obsessing over—for Beast Inside members only.
Skripal’s hit squad unmasked: Remember Sergei Skripal? He’s the former Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) officer who spied for Britain and got some covertly delivered nerve agent on his doorknob in Salisbury, England as a thank-you present from Moscow. On Wednesday, the Treasury Department sanctioned Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, the two men Britain accused of delivering the top secret poison, concealed inside a fake perfume bottle, to Skripal and his daughter. But if you go beyond the press release and comb through the fine print “identifying information,” you’ll find a little Easter egg about the two men’s real identities.
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In that section, the Treasury Department lists their real names as Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, with Petrov and Boshirov as mere aliases. The filing effectively confirmed the reporting by outlets like Bellingcat and others who found the men’s true names and backgrounds as decorated GRU officers hiding in plain sight. By calling out Chepiga and Mishkin, the Treasury Department also subtweeted President Vladimir Putin, who called the men mere “civilians” unaffiliated with the Russian government.
Deripaska: It wasn’t all about more sanctions in Monday’s update from Treasury. The department also announced that it was easing some restrictions on three Russian companies where Oleg Deripaska, a U.S.-sanctioned oligarch and associate of Paul Manafort who loaned the former Trump campaign chairman millions of dollars, had an ownership stake. Treasury agreed to pull back sanctions on En+, Rusal, and JSC EuroSibEnergo because they had “committed to significantly diminish Deripaska’s ownership and sever his control.”
The bipartisan leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee responded to the announcement with a tepid statement that praised Treasury for its “great strides” in getting the companies to divest Deripaska but warned that the deal would “require constant monitoring.”
Montenegro: It hasn’t quite broken through the thicket of news about other Russian intelligence operations, but Russia’s alleged attempt to spark a coup in Montenegro is a wild one and Deripaska was allegedly up to his eyeballs in it, according to the U.S. government. The backstory is that Montenegrin authorities claim Moscow sent a few intelligence officers to the country to work with Serbian extremists and others in support of a planned attack on the Montenegrin parliament on the eve of a legislative election in October 2016. The idea was that hired muscle—one recruiter allegedly received $200,000 for the plot—holding the parliament hostage would give Moscow a pretext to roll in, sweep out the pro-NATO government, and reestablish “order” to its liking, Ukraine-style.
The plot ultimately failed and Montenegro ended up joining NATO anyway. But some of the money for an attempt to change Montengro's government may have come from Deripaska and a former GRU pal of his, Victor Boyarkin. Deripaska and Boyarkin allegedly provided “Russian financial support to a Montenegrin political party.”
Freelance covert action: So did the Montenegro money come from Deripaska’s own initiative or was he carrying out orders for the Kremlin? The current designation doesn’t say, but the last one offers a few hints. One of the authorities Treasury used to target Deripaska in April 2018 was Executive Order 13661, which targets people who act “on behalf of, directly or indirectly, a senior official” from Russia. In that designation, Treasury called out Deripaska for having a Russian diplomatic passport and claims that he’s represented Moscow to other governments and “does not separate himself from the Russian state.” The Senate Intelligence Committee’s statement today concurred and said Deripaska works “at Vladimir Putin’s behest and operate as de facto representatives of the Russian government.”
Meddling grab bag: The Deripaska allegation is interesting because it fits with other things we’ve heard about the confusing, overlapping machinery of Russian meddling elsewhere. In particular, there’s an interesting trend of oligarchs providing money for covert operations that’s nominally independent of the government.
In the Montenegro case, Deripaska, a billionaire oligarch with no known formal role in Russia’s government or intelligence services, nonetheless acted as an arm of the state by ponying up the money. That’s similar to the allegations in the Maria Butina case, where Butina admitted to requesting $125,000 in seed funding from a Russian billionaire to build a back channel to Trumpworld in hopes of pushing it towards more Kremlin-friendly policies.
Sanctions with your indictment: The Treasury Department also sanctioned nine GRU officers for breaking into the inboxes of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and leaking them through cutouts like WikiLeaks and fake personas like DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0. Those hackers from two secret arms of the GRU, Units 26165 and 74455, are well known by now thanks to an indictment from the Justice Department in July that named them and spelled out their role in the 2016 hijinks.
What’s the point? The chances of the GRU guys named in the indictment ever leaving Russia for a Western-friendly or extradition-curious country are already pretty slim, so you might as well try and stop their money from going abroad, just for good measure. The U.S. has a habit of luring Russian criminal hackers under indictment to third countries and getting the host country to hand them over and Moscow is well aware of it now. Just ask Peter Levashov, the alleged Helios botnet master extradited from Spain or Yevgeniy Nikulin, whom the Czech Republic shipped to a federal court in New York after prosecutors say he broke into big name companies like Dropbox and LinkedIn.
Your average GRU officer doesn’t have oligarch money to throw around on luxury real estate in London or hedge fund investments in New York, but this is at least one more reminder from the U.S. that Washington knows who they are and will try to limit their freedom in whatever few ways it can.
