According to the
Federation of American Scientists: "Though sometimes compared to the US
Defense Intelligence Agency, [the GRU's] activities encompass those performed by nearly all joint US military intelligence agencies as well as other national US organizations. The GRU gathers
human intelligence through military attaches and foreign agents. It also maintains significant signals intelligence (
SIGINT) and imagery reconnaissance (
IMINT) and satellite imagery capabilities." Soviet GRU Space Intelligence Directorate had put more than 130 SIGINT satellites into orbit. GRU and KGB SIGINT network employed about 350,000 specialists.
Austria On 9 November 2018 Austrian Chancellor
Sebastian Kurz said that a 70-year-old retired army colonel, identified only as "Martin M." was believed to have spied for Russia for years. The officer in question, whose name was not disclosed and who might have been approached under a
false flag, was reported to have been engaged in selling official secrets to his GRU handlers from 1992 until September 2018. In July 2019, Austria's
Ministry of the Interior confirmed that the colonel's handler was a Moscow-born GRU officer Igor Egorovich Zaytsev, a Russian national, for whom an international arrest warrant had been issued.
Bulgaria An investigation by
Bellingcat and
Capital identified GRU officer
Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev (using the alias Sergey Vyacheslavovich Fedotov) as a suspect in the 2015 poisoning of Bulgarian arms dealer Emiliyan Gebrev (
Емилиян Гебрев) in
Sofia, following an attack that mirrored the techniques used in the
poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. That attack has been specifically tied to
Unit 29155. Three individuals were charged in absentia by the Bulgarians in January 2020. In March 2021, six Bulgarian nationals alleged to be members of a GRU spy ring operating in Bulgaria were arrested in
Sofia.
Canada The GRU received intelligence from
Jeffrey Delisle of the
Royal Canadian Navy, leading to the expulsion of several Russian Embassy staffers, including the defence attaché to
Ottawa.
Colombia In December 2020,
Migración Colombia confirmed the expulsion of two Russian diplomats accused of espionage. One of the assailants was identified as Aleksandr Nikolayevich Belousov who, according to the
National Intelligence Directorate of Colombia, is a GRU officer that had been credited by the Russian Embassy in Bogotá as a secretary. Nikolayevich, along with an
SVR officer, had reportedly tried to gather intelligence on the country's electricity infrastructure on behalf of Venezuela's
Maduro government.
Czech Republic On 17 April 2021, the Czech Republic announced its intelligence agencies had concluded that GRU officers, namely members of Russian military intelligence GRU's
unit 29155, were involved in two massive ammunition depot explosions in
Vrbetice (part of
Vlachovice), near the Czech-Slovak border, in October 2014. The explosions killed two persons and "inflicted immense material damage, seriously endangered and disrupted the lives of many local residents", according to the Czech prime minister. In May 2017, Russian citizen Artem Zinchenko was convicted of spying on Estonia for the GRU. In 2018, Zinchenko was
traded back to Russia in exchange for Raivo Susi, an Estonian imprisoned for espionage. In 2022, Zinchenko fled Russia to seek
asylum in Estonia, citing personal opposition to the
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. On 5 September 2018, Major Deniss Metsavas and Pjotr Volin were charged with giving classified information to the GRU The two were convicted in February 2019.
France Viktor Ilyushin, a GRU operative working as an Air Force deputy attaché, was expelled from France in 2014 for attempted espionage of the staff of
François Hollande. Georgy Petrovich Roshka, a member of the GRU's Unit 26165 was involved in the theft of Macron's emails, and subsequent distribution via
WikiLeaks. In December 2019,
Le Monde reported that the joint effort by British, Swiss, French and U.S. intelligence agencies had discovered an apparent "rear base" of GRU in southeastern France, which was presumably used by GRU for the clandestine operations carried out throughout Europe. Investigators had identified 15 agents – all of them members of GRU's
Unit 29155 – who visited
Haute-Savoie in the
Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes,
region of France from 2014 to 2018, including
Alexander Petrov and
Ruslan Boshirov, who are believed to be behind
the poisoning of the former GRU colonel and British double agent
Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018.
Georgia During the
2006 Georgian–Russian espionage controversy, four officers working for the GRU Alexander Savva, Dmitry Kazantsev, Aleksey Zavgorodny and Alexander Baranov were arrested by the Counter-Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia and were accused of
espionage and
sabotage. This spy network was managed from Armenia by GRU Colonel Anatoly Sinitsin. A few days later the arrested officers were handed over to Russia through the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
Spetsnaz GRU unit No. 48427, an airborne unit, participated in the
Russo-Georgian War.
Germany The 2015
Bundestag hack was attributed by German intelligence to the GRU. In 2020, Germany issued an arrest warrant for Dmitry Badin, a GRU officer and Unit 26165/
Fancy Bear member also accused of involvement in the
2015–2016 DNC hacks in the United States, alleging he played a leading role in the Bundestag hack. In 2018, German officials reported a key data network used by the
Chancellery, ministries, and Parliament had been breached. German media attributed the attack to a Russian Government-sponsored hacking group, either Snake/Ouroborus or Fancy Bear. In February 2021, Germany charged German citizen Jens F., a worker whose company maintained Bundestag electrical equipment, with espionage, accusing him of providing the building's floor plans to GRU operatives in the
Russian embassy in 2017. The suspect was a former army officer allegedly linked to the
Stasi in the 1980s. In September 2021, the German
foreign ministry warned Russia against the continuation of a pre-election
cyberattack campaign targeting German legislators, claiming it had "reliable information" linking the
Ghostwriter group behind the attacks to the GRU. The
prosecutor general later opened an investigation into the affair. 1st Lt. Eiichi Kashii and Warrant Officer Tsunetoshi Oshima were also arrested for passing secrets to Miyanaga. In September 2000, Japan expelled Captain Viktor Bogatenkov, a military attaché at the Russian Embassy in Tokyo, on allegations of espionage. Bogatenkov was a GRU agent who received classified information from
Shigehiro Hagisaki (萩嵜 繁博), a researcher at the National Institute for Defense Studies.
Latvia In early 2018, an investigation by Russian opposition site
Mbk.media alleged then-
first secretary of the Russian Embassy in Latvia Roman Tatarka was a GRU operative and former classmate of
Anatoly Chepiga. In October 2018, Latvia's Constitution Protection Bureau accused Russia of conducting a years-long
phishing campaign targeting "state institutions, including the foreign and defense sectors."
Lithuania In 2012, GRU officer Sergey Moiseyenko recruited
Lithuanian Air Force officer Sergej Pusin to conduct espionage on Lithuanian and
NATO military operations. Pusin additionally passed personal files on various military officers. Moiseyenko was arrested in 2014 and sentenced to 10.5 years in prison, but was
pardoned and returned to Russia by President
Nausėda as part of a trilateral
prisoner exchange with
Norway and Russia in 2019.
Mexico In March 2022, General
Glen VanHerck of
United States Northern Command testified that "the largest portion of the GRU members is in Mexico right now" seeking "opportunities to...influence [and access the] U.S." Mexican President
López Obrador downplayed the allegation, emphasizing Mexican sovereignty and stating his country "[did not] get involved in [espionage]."
Moldova In June 2017,
Moldova expelled five Russian GRU operatives with
diplomatic cover from the Russian Embassy in
Chișinău, as they were believed to be attempting to recruit fighters from
Gagauzia to fight in the ongoing
conflict with Ukraine. Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs
Grigory Karasin rejected the allegations.
Montenegro The two Russian nationals indicted by Montenegrin prosecution as the organisers of the
attempted coup d'état in Montenegro in October 2016 are believed to be GRU officers. One of them, Eduard Vadimovich Shishmakov ("Shirokov") had been officially identified as GRU in October 2014, when Shishmakov, who then held the position of a deputy military attaché at the Russian embassy in Poland, was declared
persona non grata by the
Polish government.
The Netherlands and Switzerland In mid-September 2018 the Swiss press reported that two men allegedly working for the GRU had been arrested in
The Hague, the Netherlands in the spring that year, after the
Salisbury poisoning incident, for planning to hack the computer systems of the
Spiez Laboratory, a Swiss institute analyzing chemical weapon attacks for the
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). In early October 2018, the government of the Netherlands announced they had arrested four GRU operatives on 13 April: Aleksei Morenets, Evgenii Serebriakov, Oleg Sotnikov, and Aleksey Minin. The Russians allegedly attempted to launch a major "close access" cyberattack against the headquarters of the OPCW in the Hague and also intended to travel onwards to the Spiez laboratory in Switzerland, which was testing
Novichok samples from Salisbury at the time. Investigation conducted by
open-source intelligence outlets in the aftermath of the Dutch government's revelations that used Russian road police databases led to identification of further 305 GRU officers whose private cars were registered at GRU headquarters in Moscow. GRU officer Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev has also been documented as operating in
Geneva and
Lausanne.
Alleged attempt to infiltrate International Criminal Court In June 2022, the Dutch
AIVD stated that GRU intelligence officer Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, under the alias of Viktor Muller Ferreira, was denied entry to the Netherlands after arriving for an internship with the
International Criminal Court. The AIVD described Cherkasov as a deep-cover
illegal, publishing a document he is alleged to have written in 2010 reminding himself of his cover identity. As Ferreira, Cherkasov is alleged to have attended university in the United States and
Republic of Ireland, building a cover identity for years as a Brazilian national with an interest in international affairs. AIVD head described the attempted infiltration as a "long-term, multi-year GRU operation that cost a lot of time, energy and money," calling it a "high-level threat."
Norway In December 2020, the
Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) stated that hackers linked to
Fancy Bear and the GRU's 85th Special Services Center (GTsSS) were likely responsible for a breach of the
Storting's email system earlier in the year. The Russian Embassy in Norway denied the claims. In October 2022, the PST arrested and charged Russian citizen Mikhail Valerievich Mikushin with "illegal espionage against state secrets." Mikushin had posed as a Brazilian academic named Jose Assis Giammaria and was, at the time of his arrest, researching
Norwegian Arctic policy and hybrid threats at the
University of Tromsø.
Bellingcat investigator
Christo Grozev identified Mikushin as a GRU colonel while the Russian embassy in Norway denied any knowledge of Mikushin, calling his arrest a part of "spy mania."
Poland In June 2014, Poland
expelled Russian deputy
military attaché Eduard Shishmakov (alias Eduard Shirokov) and three other Russian citizens accused of spying over a
2014 wiretap scandal involving the publication of wiretapped conversations between senior Polish officials. Shishmakov, an accused GRU operative, later became a key suspect in the
2016 Montenegrin coup allegations. In October 2014, Poland arrested two alleged GRU spies. Polish Lt. Col. Zbigniew J. worked for the GRU for "several years" feeding information on unit morale and troop movements while lawyer-lobbyist Stanisław Szypowski influenced governmental circles and sought a job in the
Economy Ministry while providing information on the
energy sector. Both met with GRU operatives under
official cover in
Warsaw and were monitored by Polish counterintelligence. In July 2019, a Warsaw court sentenced former Economy Ministry employee Marek W. to three years in prison for passing classified information on the
energy sector to the GRU from 2015 to 2016. In May 2020, Polish journalists, supported by former intelligence officials, accused the GRU of conducting a 700-email bomb threat campaign against Polish schools as part of a
hybrid warfare strategy. Polish and Russian intelligence services did not comment on the accusations. In March 2022, the Polish
Internal Security Agency (ABW) arrested reporter Pablo Gonzalez, whom they identified as "an agent of the [GRU]," as he planned to cross the Polish-Ukrainian border. Gonzalez, a Spanish citizen of Russian origin, was found with two passports of different names and detained on suspicion of espionage. The ABW accused Gonzalez of "[carrying] out activities for Russia using his journalistic status" and traveling to worldwide zones of conflict and political instability. In January 2023, Warsaw authorities arrested a Russian and a Belarusian national. The
SKW, Poland's military
counterintelligence agency, accused the pair of spying on Polish military facilities for the GRU since 2017.
Qatar On 13 February 2004, in
Doha, two Russian men
assassinated Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, an exiled leader of
Chechen rebels and former
President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, in a
car-bombing. Yandarbiyev's son was also killed. Anatoly V. Belashkov and Vasily A. Bogachyov, thought to be GRU members, were found guilty of the murder by a Qatari criminal court, which said the men had acted under direct orders from the Russian leadership. A third suspected GRU agent, posted as
first secretary of the Russian Embassy in
Qatar, was arrested but released to his
diplomatic immunity. Those sentenced were sent to Russia to serve their sentences but disappeared shortly after. Approximately 300 commandos,
intelligence officers and other GRU personnel died during the fighting in Chechnya. GRU detachments from
Chechnya were transferred to
Lebanon independently of the
United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon after the
2006 Lebanon War. GRU officers have also been accused of creating criminal
death squads.
Slovakia In early 2022, Slovakia arrested four Slovak nationals described as a "Russian spying network [seeking] information about NATO and Ukraine." Two were charged with spying and bribery, with Slovak authorities alleging
undercover GRU officers at the Russian Embassy paid tens of thousands of euros for the "highly sensitive" information about Slovakia, the
Slovak military, and NATO. The men charged were a Slovak military academy rector and disinformation blogger; the other two were released without charge.
Slovenia In January 2023, the
Slovenian Intelligence and Security Agency arrested and charged two individuals in
Ljubljana with espionage on behalf of the GRU and using false documents. Both were reportedly operating under assumed identities with ties to Argentina. Media variously described those charged as either a husband and wife or two men.
Spain According to reporting by
Bellingcat,
El País and the Civica Media Foundation, the
Audiencia Nacional is investigating a GRU group known as
Unit 29155 and its operations in Spain. GRU members Denis Sergeev, Alexey Kalinin and Mikhail Opryshko are reported to have been operating in
Barcelona around the time of the
2017 Catalan independence referendum. In late 2022, elite police arrested Russian-born Swedish citizen Sergey Skvortsov, accusing him of nearly 10 years of "gross illegal intelligence activities against Sweden and against a foreign power" (later identified as the United States) on behalf of the GRU. Skvortsov reportedly worked to illegally transfer Western technology to Russia.
Syria The Sixth Directorate was responsible for maintaining the
Center S covert listening post in
Syria prior to its loss to the
Free Syrian Army in 2014. The Sixth Directorate also operates a signals intelligence listening post at
Hmeimim Air Base near
Latakia. In 2015 GRU special forces soldiers have reportedly appeared in
Aleppo and
Homs. GRU officials have also visited
Qamishli, near the border with Turkey.
Turkey In 2018 the Turkish government published CCTV videos from assassination of a Chechen commander Abdulvahid Edelgiriev, who was killed in 2015 in Istanbul, claiming the perpetrator was the same person as
Anatoliy Chepiga ("Ruslan Boshirov") from Skripal assassination in UK.
Ukraine The
Spetsnaz GRU were involved in the
annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and in the
war in Donbas.
United Kingdom In September 2018 the
Crown Prosecution Service formally named two Russian nationals, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov (the names used by the men when entering the UK), as suspected perpetrators of the assassination attempt of the former GRU officer
Sergei Skripal and his daughter in March 2018. As part of the charge announcement Scotland Yard released a detailed track of the individuals' 48 hours in the UK. This covered their arrival in the UK at
Gatwick Airport, trip to Salisbury the day before the attack, trip to Salisbury on the day of the attack and return to Moscow via
Heathrow Airport. The two men stayed both nights in the City Stay Hotel on
Bow Road, East London and
Novichok agent was found in their room after police sealed it off on 4 May 2018. British Prime Minister Theresa May told the Commons the same day that the suspects were part of the G.U. intelligence service (formerly known as GRU) and the assassination attempt was not a rogue operation and was "almost certainly" approved at a senior level of the Russian state. As a side effect of the Skripal poisoning investigation, Russian and Western media reported conclusions made by
open-source intelligence outlets that claimed that GRU operatives were issued Russian foreign travel passports with certain characteristics that would allow their tentative identification. Through further research, in the autumn of 2018, "Boshirov" was publicly exposed as
Anatoliy Chepiga, a decorated GRU officer, and "Petrov" as
Alexander Mishkin.
United States GRU officer
Stanislav Lunev, who defected to the U.S. in 1992 while he was posted in Washington under the cover of a TASS news agency correspondent, in the 1990s publicized his claims that small nuclear weapons that could be fit into a knapsack or a briefcase or suitcase had been secretly pre-positioned in the U.S. and other countries around the world to be used for
sabotage by Russia's agents in the event of war.
U.S. Congressman Curt Weldon pursued these claims publicly while admitting that they had been found largely spurious by the FBI. Searches of the areas identified by Lunev – who admitted he had never planted any weapons in the US – have been conducted, "but law-enforcement officials have never found such weapons caches, with or without portable nuclear weapons".
Electoral interference announcing in 2018 a grand jury indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking offenses related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election On 29 December 2016 the
White House sanctioned the nine entities and individuals, including the GRU as well as the FSB, for their alleged activities to disrupt and spread disinformation during the
2016 US presidential election. In addition, the
United States State Department also declared 35 Russian diplomats and officials
persona non grata and denied Russian government officials access to two Russian-owned installations in
Maryland and
New York. GRU Unit 26165 and Unit 74455 are alleged to be behind the
DCLeaks website, and were indicted for obtaining access and distributing information from data about 500,000 voters from a state election board website as well as the email accounts of
John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and volunteers and employees of the United States Presidential Campaign of Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the
Democratic National Committee (DNC). According to information leaked by
Reality Winner, the GRU attempted to hack the voting machine manufacturer
VR Systems, as well as local election officials. In July 2018 Deputy Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein released an indictment returned by a grand jury charging twelve GRU officers with conspiring to
interfere in the 2016 elections. According to
Microsoft VP Tom Burt, a GRU-run group dubbed Strontium (alternatively known as APT28, Sofacy, and Pawn Storm, and Fancy Bear) has been engaged in
spear phishing attacks against at least three campaigns in the
2018 midterm elections. On 19 November 2021, the Coordinating Council of Russian Compatriots in the United States (CCORC) or (KCOPC) closed and on 9 March 2022 Elena Branson was accused of working as a foreign agent by the FBI.
Yemen In August 2024,
Middle East Eye, citing a US official, reported that personnel of GRU were stationed in
Houthi-controlled parts of
Yemen to assist the
militia's attacks on merchant ships during the
Gaza war. ==Directors==