Russia denies claim poisoning suspect is Russian intelligence

The Russian government and media are casting doubt on a new report claiming to reveal the true identity of a Russian man Britain accuses of the nerve-agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in southern England.

The Sept. 26, 2018 report by the investigative website Bellingcat and its Russian partner, The Insider, claims to have conclusively demonstrated that the poisoning suspect known publicly as "Ruslan Boshirov" is, in fact, a decorated colonel in the Russian military whose real name is Anatoly Chepiga.

Russia has repeatedly denied and mocked British allegations that it is responsible for the March poisoning of Skripal and his daughter with the Soviet-developed toxin Novichok in the city of Salisbury.

Earlier September 2018, Britain announced charges against the man known as Boshirov and his associate, known as "Aleksandr Petrov."

Both men publicly acknowledged being in Salisbury at the time of the poisoning but said they had arrived as tourists — a claim that British Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesman called "an insult to the public's intelligence."

British officials have not publicly confirmed the details in the Sept. 26, 2018 report by Bellingcat and The Insider, though Reuters cited two unidentified "European security sources" familiar with the investigation into the Skripal poisoning as saying that they were accurate.

A CCTV image issued by London's Metropolitan police showing Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov at Salisbury train station.

British Defense Minister Gavin Williamson, meanwhile, said on Twitter following the report that the "true identity of one of the Salisbury suspects has been revealed to be a Russian colonel" but subsequently deleted the tweet without explanation.

Here's a look at how Moscow has dismissed the alleged revelation of the poisoning suspect's true identity — and how Russian media outlets have cast doubt on the new report.

'Diverting attention'

Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, suggested in a Facebook post late on Sept. 26, 2018, that the release of the report was deliberately timed to coincide with May's address at the UN Security Council "during which she again aired accusations against Russia."

During the address, May said Russia "recklessly deployed a nerve agent on our streets" and accused Moscow of seeking "to obfuscate through desperate fabrication" in connection with the poisoning.

"There is no proof, so an information campaign is continuing with the primary goal of diverting attention to the main question: WHAT HAPPENED IN SALISBURY?" Zakharova wrote.

She did not provide any substantive rebuttal of details reported by Bellingcat and The Insider.

'Typical conspiracy theory'

A senior Russian lawmaker laughed off the report with a reference to Major Pronin, a fictional Soviet-era secret agent who successfully battled spies and generated scores of popular jokes revolving around the character's incredible counterespionage abilities.

A handout picture taken in Salisbury of Aleksandr Petrov (right) and Ruslan Boshirov.

"It's a typical conspiracy theory," Frants Klintsevich of the defense committee in Russia's upper house of parliament, told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency. "You could just as easily say Ruslan Boshirov is named Major Pronin, if one recalls such a character from Soviet-era jokes."

Klintsevich added: "What we warned about is continuing."

"More and more details will accumulate so that the plot doesn't get dull," he was quoted as saying. "Interestingly, one gets the impression that the British media are working hand in glove with authorities. And that's completely depressing."

'Complete nonsense'

A Russian news outlet owned by Klintsevich's fellow lawmaker, Vitaly Bogdanov, published interviews with a retired major-general in Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) who claimed documents used in the investigation by Bellingcat and The Insider could not have made their way into the public domain.

"It's complete nonsense. How could secret documents become publicly available?" the retired officer, Aleksandr Mikhailov, told National Sluzhba Novostei (NSN).

Mikhailov said the British media "together with turncoats" will "spin tall tales" and suggested that the key piece of evidence in the report — a 15-year-old passport photo of Chepiga showing a man resembling Boshirov — could have been doctored.

'Completely unprofessional'

NSN also published an interview with Andrei Vedyayev, a writer focusing on Russia's security services, who said the poisoning suspects are unlikely to be officers for Russian military intelligence, known as the GRU, as British authorities alleged.

The Bellingcat/Insider report said it had confirmed that Chepiga is actually a GRU colonel who was previously awarded Russia's highest state medal: Hero of the Russian Federation.

"First of all, they don't admit this," Vedyayev said, referring to the interview with the two suspects on Russia's state-funded network RT that May's spokesman said was full of "lies and blatant fabrications."

"Secondly, they don't resemble [GRU officers] at all," Vedyayev added. "From the perspective of security-service officers, if they carried out this task as has been told and described, then they acted completely unprofessionally: roaming around the city, being filmed by video cameras."

Interpol

Other Russian media outlets published reports focusing on the fact that searching for the name "Chepiga" yields no results on the publicly available portion of Interpol's database of "red notices."

That appears to have first been reported by the Russian news agency Interfax and subsequently picked up by RIA Novosti and Kremlin-friendly outlets Life.ru and Ren-TV.

This is, in fact, no surprise. Interpol itself notes that most red notices — which alert police worldwide of at-large suspected criminals wanted by a particular government — "are restricted to law enforcement use only."

"Some member countries choose to make an extract publicly available," Interpol says on its website.

This article originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Follow @RFERL on Twitter.