UK imposes sanctions on Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency and hackers identified in The Insider’s investigations

The UK government announced an expansion of its sanctions list on Dec. 4, adding Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, as well as several individuals featured in The Insider’s investigations into the Russian entity’s operations in Europe.

In its statement, the UK government linked the new sanctions to the investigation of the 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the city of Salisbury.

The measures also target Dmitriy Goloshubov and Denis Denisenko, both members of a GRU hacker group from military Unit 29155. The Insider has detailed their activities in an investigation titled “Hidden Bear: The GRU hackers of Russia’s most notorious kill squad.” Most of the cyber and information-sabotage operations carried out by Unit 29155 failed.

A day earlier, the investigative outlet Sistema reported that Denisenko and Goloshubov were among the candidates under consideration for EU sanctions. Brussels links them to the cyber group Cadet Blizzard, which runs cyber-espionage and sabotage operations and began targeting Ukrainian government resources in January 2022.

The Insider’s earlier reporting has shown that military unit 29155 was involved in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury (2018), the explosions at ammunition depots in the Czech Republic (2014), and numerous other acts of sabotage across Europe.

The updated UK sanctions list also includes Boris Antonov, Pavel Yershov and Nikolay Kozachek — all GRU officers from military unit 26165. Ershov and Kozachek, in particular, worked on the development of X-Agent malware. Their names appeared in a 2018 U.S. Justice Department indictment of 12 GRU officers accused of hacking the Democratic Party’s servers. Members of this unit were also involved in cyberattacks on the email account of French President Emmanuel Macron.