The New York Times talked about the “sabotage” unit of the GRU 29155, which participated in the coup in Montenegro and the poisoning of the Skripals

published The New York Times an article about the military unit of Russian intelligence 29155, whose soldiers are suspected of involvement in the “campaign to destabilize Moldova” in, the attempted murder of a Bulgarian arms dealer, the attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the poisoning of Sergei Skripal.

A retired GRU officer familiar with the activities of unit 29155 anonymously told the publication that it specializes in training for “sabotage” missions, and fighters can work in different ways: “in groups or individually - explosions, murders, whatever.”

According to the newspaper, the unit has been operating for at least 10 years, its headquarters are located in the special purpose training center No. 161 in the eastern part of Moscow; about this previously wrote “Present Tense” . Some of the intelligence officers of unit 29155 participated in military operations in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Ukraine.

For the first time, according to the New York Times, Western intelligence agencies identified part 29155 after a failed coup in Montenegro : local authorities accused Russian intelligence officers operating on fictitious passports of trying to disrupt the country's accession to NATO and ensure the rise of pro-Russian forces to power.

In 2018, Bellingcat revealed the identities of two suspects in the poisoning of former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia - Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin. As the newspaper writes, citing British officials, a year before this incident, three employees of unit 29155 traveled to the UK, probably to practice the operation. One of them was Mishkin, the second used the pseudonym Sergei Pavlov, the third - Sergei Fedotov - supervised the mission.

After some time, it was established that in 2017, Fedotov and Pavlov allegedly participated in the operation to poison the Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev. According to the New York Times, they tried to kill him twice: in the Bulgarian capital Sofia and in his home on the Black Sea coast a month after the first attempt.