Russian state operations
A distinct pattern runs through the post-Soviet era: critics and defectors poisoned with exotic agents, opposition figures shot within sight of the Kremlin, and disasters the state met first with denial. These files gather the cases in which the Russian government or its security services are the documented or credibly alleged actor, from Novichok attacks confirmed by the international chemical-weapons watchdog to killings where courts convicted the gunmen but never the people who ordered them. Attribution is anchored to the OPCW, courts, and investigative reporting, not asserted in the site's own voice.
Reference: Wikipedia, Wikipedia
Former Russian military-intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in 2018, in an operation attributed to the Russian state
On the afternoon of 4 March 2018, Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in Russia's GRU military-intelligence service who had been convicted in Russia of spying for Britain and later freed in a spy swap, was found slumped with his daughter Yulia on a bench in Salisbury, a cathedral city in southern England. Both were gravely ill; a police officer who responded also fell sick. Investigators traced the cause to a Novichok, a class of military-grade nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union, smeared on the handle of Skripal's front door. This file separates the documented event, a chemical-weapon attack on British soil confirmed by the OPCW, from the rated claim, the attribution of that attack to the Russian state. It reports what the OPCW verified, what the UK government and open-source investigators established about the two GRU officers sent to carry it out, and what the 2025 public inquiry into the resulting death of a bystander, Dawn Sturgess, concluded about who bears responsibility.
Read the case file →Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent in 2020, an attack that international labs confirmed and that investigative reporting tied to an FSB team
On 20 August 2020, the Russian anti-corruption campaigner and opposition leader Alexei Navalny fell violently ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and he was placed in a coma. Two days later he was flown to the Charité hospital in Berlin, where a German military laboratory identified a nerve agent of the Novichok group. Designated laboratories in France and Sweden, and then the OPCW, confirmed the finding. A joint investigation by Bellingcat, The Insider, CNN, and Der Spiegel identified a specialist FSB unit that had tailed Navalny for years, and Navalny published a recorded phone call in which one man described how the poison was applied. This file separates the documented core, a confirmed Novichok poisoning, from the attribution layer, reported here through the OPCW and the investigative reporting rather than asserted as a court's finding. Navalny recovered, returned to Russia in January 2021, was imprisoned, and died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024.
Read the case file →Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was assassinated on a bridge steps from the Kremlin in 2015, and while a court convicted the gunmen, whoever ordered the killing has never been identified
Late on the night of 27 February 2015, Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister who had become one of the most prominent opponents of Vladimir Putin, was shot four times in the back as he walked across the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, within sight of the Kremlin walls, in the company of his partner Anna Duritskaya. He died almost instantly, hours after publicly urging Russians to join a march against the war in Ukraine. In 2017 a Moscow military court convicted five Chechen men of the killing and identified former security officer Zaur Dadayev as the gunman. This file separates the documented facts, a planned assassination and the conviction of the shooters, from the unresolved question the trial never answered: who ordered and paid for the murder. It reports the court's findings as the anchor, and treats the theories pointing at Chechen leadership as serious but unproven allegations, not as established fact.
Read the case file →Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated in a 2006 contract killing whose gunman and organizers were convicted, while the person who ordered the murder was never identified
On 7 October 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a special correspondent for the independent Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta and one of Russia's best-known investigative reporters, was shot four times at close range in the lobby of her apartment building on Lesnaya Street in central Moscow. She had built her reputation on unflinching coverage of human-rights abuses in the second Chechen war, and the murder fell on President Vladimir Putin's birthday. Investigators treated it from the outset as a contract killing. After a jury acquitted several defendants in 2009, the Supreme Court ordered a retrial, and in 2014 a Moscow court convicted five men, including the gunman and the organizer. This file separates the two questions the case raises: the documented killing and the convictions of the people who carried it out, which the courts have established, and the identity of whoever commissioned the murder, which remains officially unknown and which the European Court of Human Rights faulted Russia for failing to pursue.
Read the case file →The Russian government misled the public and stalled foreign rescue help after the nuclear submarine Kursk sank in 2000, a real official cover-up that fed enduring but unsupported theories of a NATO collision
On 12 August 2000, during a Northern Fleet exercise in the Barents Sea, two explosions tore through the bow of the Oscar II-class nuclear submarine Kursk, and it sank in about 108 metres of water. All 118 sailors aboard died. Russia's handling of the disaster became a scandal in its own right: the navy did not acknowledge the sinking for roughly two days, insisted it was in contact with survivors, and held off Western rescue offers until it was too late. A note recovered from one officer later proved that 23 men had survived the initial blasts and lived for a time in a rear compartment. This file separates two things. The documented, substantiated part is the cover-up and the mishandled rescue. The contested part is the cause: an official Russian inquiry concluded a leaking HTP practice torpedo exploded and detonated other warheads, while a rival theory blames a collision with a NATO submarine. That collision theory is reported here as an unsupported allegation.
Read the case file →Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2014 by a Russian-supplied Buk surface-to-air missile, killing all 298 people on board
On 17 July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, a Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, broke apart in the air over eastern Ukraine and fell in fields near the village of Hrabove, in territory then held by pro-Russian separatists. All 298 people on board were killed, among them 196 Dutch nationals. A Dutch Safety Board investigation concluded the aircraft was destroyed by a Buk surface-to-air missile; a Dutch-led criminal investigation, the Joint Investigation Team, traced the launcher to a Russian army brigade and reconstructed its route into Ukraine and back; and in 2022 a court in the Netherlands convicted three men of the killing. This file separates the documented event, the destruction of a civilian airliner by a Buk missile, from the attribution layer, who supplied and operated it, and reports the official findings alongside the Russian counter-narratives that were examined and rejected.
Read the case file →The former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in London in 2006 with polonium-210, in an operation carried out by Russian agents and probably approved at the top of the Russian state
On 1 November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) who had defected to Britain and become a fierce public critic of the Kremlin, drank green tea at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair with two Russian contacts, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun. Within hours he fell violently ill. He died three weeks later, on 23 November, the first known victim of deliberate polonium-210 poisoning. In a statement dictated from his deathbed, Litvinenko accused Vladimir Putin of ordering his death. British police, following a radioactive trail left across hotels, restaurants, and aircraft, identified Lugovoi and Kovtun as the men who administered the poison. This case file separates the documented record (a fatal polonium poisoning, ruled an unlawful killing) from the rated claim (that Russian agents carried it out on behalf of the FSB, with approval reaching the Russian president), which is the conclusion of the 2016 Owen Inquiry and the 2021 European Court of Human Rights and is rated substantiated, with the genuine limits noted.
Read the case file →Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated in London in 1978 with a ricin pellet fired from a modified umbrella, on the orders of the Bulgarian secret service with KGB help
On 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov, a 49-year-old Bulgarian writer and broadcaster who had defected in 1969 and gone on to ridicule the Sofia regime on the airwaves of the BBC World Service, Radio Free Europe, and Deutsche Welle, was waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge in London when he felt a sharp sting in the back of his right thigh. He turned to see a man picking up a dropped umbrella, who murmured an apology and left by taxi. Markov fell ill with a high fever and died four days later. A postmortem recovered a pinhead-sized platinum-iridium pellet drilled with two tiny cavities that had held ricin, a poison for which there is no antidote. A coroner ruled that he had been unlawfully killed. This case file separates the documented record (a poisoning ruled an unlawful killing) from the rated claim (that the Bulgarian secret service, aided by the KGB, was responsible), which is the accepted historical account and is rated substantiated, with the genuine loose ends noted.
Read the case file →The September 1999 apartment bombings that killed nearly 300 people across Russia may have been a false-flag operation staged by the FSB, rather than Chechen terrorism, to justify the Second Chechen War and lift Vladimir Putin to power
Over ten days in September 1999, a wave of explosions tore through residential apartment buildings in the Russian towns of Buynaksk and Volgodonsk and in the heart of Moscow, killing close to 300 sleeping civilians and injuring more than a thousand. The Russian government blamed Chechen and other North Caucasus militants, and the attacks, alongside an incursion into Dagestan, propelled the country into the Second Chechen War and lifted the little-known prime minister, Vladimir Putin, toward the presidency. Then, on 22 September, residents and police in Ryazan caught men planting a device in an apartment basement; the men turned out to be FSB agents, and the agency called it a training exercise. That episode anchors a persistent theory that Russia's security services staged the bombings themselves. This file separates the documented massacre from that contested attribution, and reports the false-flag charge as a serious, unresolved allegation.
Read the case file →The 2022 Nord Stream pipeline blasts were a covert state sabotage operation whose real perpetrator is being concealed
In the early hours of 26 September 2022, underwater explosions tore open the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea near the Danish island of Bornholm. Seismographs recorded the blasts, gas boiled to the surface for days, and investigators from three countries found residue of explosives. That it was deliberate sabotage is established. Who ordered it is not. The vacuum filled quickly with rival state-actor theories: a pro-Ukrainian operation, a Russian false flag, a covert US strike. This case file keeps the settled fact (sabotage) apart from the contested claim (attribution plus an alleged cover-up), and weighs what each official investigation actually found. On the culprit, the record does not yet support a verdict beyond unproven.
Read the case file →