Christ with us!

About the investigator of the year according to the “New” version, which revealed the poisoning of Navalny - Christ Glorzhev from Bellingcat

With a cool May morning, a tall, thin man in a blue jacket and glasses ran from one souvenir shop to another on the embankment of the Dutch Hague in search of false mustache and hats. “My family will be delighted when he sees me on TV,” he said in pure Russian. But not in a single souvenir store on the Hague embankment that day there was what this tall thin gentleman was looking for in glasses. “What a pity,” Grosev told me when we went into the press conferences room, “I wanted to please the guys so.”

At that press conference in May 2018, my comrade Grozhev told the whole world that the Malaisi Boeing Malaysian Boeing Mah17 was shot down to the supply of the MALISK MALIS, the Russian military intelligence general Oleg Ivannikov was involved. Identify the general “Orion” with the help of an examination of the voice - the conversation between Ivannikov about Buka with other Russian military was intercepted by the Ukrainian special services, publishing the record and numbers of their phone numbers on YouTube. But then no one knew who was hiding under the call sign “Orion”. Grosev, along with his colleagues, studied the mobile databases and the history of Orion calls - and getting them in Ukraine is no more difficult than in Russia - and went on the trail of the general, who also used open -communication channels.

On that day in The Hague, he publicly acted as a representative of Bellingcat, and it was clear that he was worried. And although Grozov spoke without a mustache and hat, but under a funny, albeit a little indecent pseudonym - Moritz Rakushitsky (break your last name into two parts!).

The facts set forth in the report of Bellingcat regarding General Ivannikov have not been able to refute the Russian Ministry of Defense. They could not refute the conclusions from the investigation of “Novy”, which came out early the year - in it we identified Sergei Dubinsky, the other Russian general, who was responsible for the transportation of “Buk” - today Dubinsky is accused of attack on the MN17.

“The government [of the Russian Federation] cannot refute, in essence, not a single fact of a single loud investigation that independent sites conduct. Although we are very waiting for at least some rational comments, ”said Rakushitsky then.

Today, the whole world knows him as the leading investigator Bellingcat Khrista Grozhev.

Although, in fact, for friends he is Christo, through “K”-that is, in Russian, and not in the Bulgarian manner. This intelligent and beautiful Bulgarian has two dozen years of life with Russia. In the 1990s and 2000s, Grozev invested in Russian media and owned radio stations in different cities. But Russia paid off the Bulgarian investor with its characteristic cynicism-in 2006, Grozev forced to sell all his media projects in Russia, and in 2016 his residence permit was completely canceled by the FSB. So the Russian security forces, having exposed the successful investor Grozov through the door, received Moritsa Rakushitsky. What, probably, is very sorry today.

“Of course, I would very much like to come to Russia again,” Grozhev told me. - But I'm afraid, under the Putin regime, this will be impossible.

- Are you not afraid for yourself?

- I'm afraid of course. For me, a mystery is still, why [the authorities] need to kill your opponents. This is something very personal, it is not systemic, I suppose. As for me, I probably made my main investigation [about Navalny]. I don’t know if I will ever make it more cooler. Perhaps this is my last investigation. But I say so often to myself, and then it turns out that there is so much more that I need to reveal ... even if someone wants to interfere with me physically, this will not change anything. We [in Bellingcat] laid an example of how to work with data, and taught other guys around the world how to make investigations. There are hundreds of people like me, but there will be even more. And the governments committing crimes, like the Russian government, will not be so easy to hide their traces.

- At the same time, opening the gaps in the work of special services, after all, in fact, you help them do work on mistakes and become more effective, eliminate possible leaks.

- A state with such a level of corruption as in Russia can never eliminate all leaks. And the tougher the mode will be, the more information will flow out of it. Because people inside the system need to earn something. The system lives like this, and if you remove corruption from it, then there will be no rod inside. For the next six months, yes, perhaps there will be fewer leaks, but then - I assure you - everything will return to its circles.

In 2019, his joint with Roman Dobrokhotov, permanent partner-investigator, material (1, 2) about the poisoning of the Skripals received the European Press Prize. In the jury, the chief of the Warsaw “Vykhov’s newspaper”, the legendary Adam Mikhnik, chaired the jury. Grozhev then also said that this was his last investigation: “Again I will deal with my business tightly. My wife scolds me that I will ruin the family budget with my journalism ... Well, what to do? There are so many topics for which you can work, I already ignore most of them, because large-scale date-investigation is very expensive. But I just can’t refuse some top. Especially when the victim is declared a criminal, and a strong vnagoy calls himself a victim. Unfortunately, this applies to today's Russia to a greater extent than anyone else ... And I am bitter from this, because Russia is my second country after Bulgaria. ”