UK sanctions GRU officer featured in The Insider’s investigations, along with commanders of Russian units fighting in Africa and Ukraine

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On Nov. 7, British authorities added members of several Russian military formations operating in Ukraine and African countries to their sanctions list. The update also included GRU officer Denis Sergeev, who was linked to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal thanks to an investigation involving The Insider.

According to his profile on the UK government's sanctions website, “Sergeev provided support in the preparation and use of the chemical weapon Novichok in Salisbury on 4 March 2018, and provided a coordinating role in London on the weekend of the attack.”

Denis Sergeev has been the subject of multiple investigations by The Insider and Bellingcat:

The following individuals and formations were also included in the updated sanctions list:

• The volunteer neo-Nazi battalion “Espanola” and one of its commanders, Mikhail Turkanov, as well as Konstantin Mirzayants, commander of the Redut Private Military Company (PMC). Both are actively involved in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
• Members of the Wagner PMC unit operating in the Central African Republic: Yevgeny Khodotov, Yevgeny Kopot, and Alexander Kuzin.

The sanctions list also includes Andrey Vladimirovich Averyanov — a full namesake of the head of Unit 29155 of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, General Andrey Averyanov. The Czech Republic recently launched a manhunt for the Russian intelligence general, whose unit’s sabotage operations in 2014 led to explosions at arms depots in Vrbětice, resulting in the deaths of two people and the destruction of 150 tons of ammunition.

Two GRU agents, Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, who are believed to have carried out the 2014 attack, remain at large. The duo was notoriously captured by CCTV cameras while walking from the Salisbury train station in the direction of Sergei Skripal’s home on the day the Russian intelligence defector and his daughter were poisoned with Novichok.

The UK government profile for Averyanov does not mention these incidents, instead noting that he “is and has been an involved person on the basis that as commander of the formerly named Wagner Group, now re-named as the ‘Africa Corps’ or ‘Expeditionary Corps’, AVERYANOV has and continues to threaten the peace, stability and security of Libya.”