What's GRU? A look at Russia's shadowy military spies | iNFOnews | Thompson-Okanagan's News Source
Subscribe

Would you like to subscribe to our newsletter?

Current Conditions Mostly Cloudy  22.4°C

What's GRU? A look at Russia's shadowy military spies

In this photo taken on Monday, July 16, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking at the joint press conference with U.S. President Donald Trump after their meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland. The GRU is one arm of Russia's extensive security and intelligence apparatus, which also includes the Foreign Intelligence Service, known as the SVR, and the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which conducts domestic intelligence and counterintelligence. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
Original Publication Date September 06, 2018 - 1:11 AM

MOSCOW - GRU isn't as well-known a baleful acronym as KGB or FSB. But Russia's military intelligence service is attracting increasing attention as allegations mount of devious and deadly operations on and off the field of battle.

The latest charge came Wednesday, when Britain identified two suspects in this year's nerve-agent poisonings as GRU agents .

An overview of the GRU:

THE AGENCY

Formally named the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, the agency is almost universally referred to by its former acronym GRU.

It is the most shadowy of Russia's secret services. When its previous director Igor Sergun died in 2016, the Kremlin announcement was so terse that it gave neither the date, cause or place of death.

The agency has an apparently broad mandate. According to the Defence Ministry website, it is tasked not only with "ensuring conditions conducive to the successful implementation of the Russian Federation's defence and security policy" but with providing officials intelligence " that they need to make decisions in the political, economic, defence, scientific, technical and environmental areas."

ALLEGATIONS

Britain claims that two GRU agents carried out this spring's attack with the nerve agent Novichok on Sergei Skripal, a former GRU officer who became a British double agent, and his daughter. Both survived the poisoning in the city of Salisbury, but three months later two area residents were sickened by the same nerve agent, one of them fatally — it is believed they found the discarded bottle that had carried the Skripals' poison.

This week's claim came less than two months after the U.S. indicted 12 alleged GRU agents for hacking into the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and releasing tens of thousands of private communications, part of a sweeping conspiracy by the Kremlin to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election.

Also this year, the investigative group Bellingcat reported that a GRU officer was in charge of operations in eastern Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists were fighting Ukrainian forces, in July 2014 when a Malaysian passenger airliner was shot down, killing all 298 people aboard. International investigators say the plane was shot down by a mobile missile launcher brought in from Russia. The GRU officer named by Bellingcat reportedly was responsible for weapons transfers.

Russia's RBC news service reported this year that the GRU oversees Russian mercenaries in Syria, fighting there as a so-called shadow army.

Russian authorities generally deny allegations against the GRU and refuse to discuss its activities. They said they didn't recognize the suspects Britain named Wednesday in the Salisbury poisoning.

OTHER AGENCIES

The GRU is one arm of Russia's extensive security and intelligence apparatus, which also includes the Foreign Intelligence Service, known as the SVR, and the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which conducts domestic intelligence and counterintelligence. The SVR and FSB were spun off from the KGB after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin ran the FSB before ascending to the presidency.

And as president, Putin names the top brass in the GRU. Of all the agencies, the FSB looms largest in Russians' minds because it hunts domestic threats. The GRU, created under Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, has a more ruthless reputation, but focuses its energies on foreign threats.

The agencies' operations appear to both compete and co-operate.

Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent Moscow-based military analyst, told The Associated Press that if "the SVR runs into military intelligence, they have to share it with the GRU; that means they try not to run into military intelligence and tell their agents not to report anything military even if they know it. The other way around, military or GRU assets are asked never to report anything political."

But in the case of the alleged U.S. election-related hacking, he said, "I believe that was an inter-service operation, because it's not military but they gained some kind of hacking access and then they shared it with the FSB and the SVR."

___

Kate de Pury contributed.

News from © The Associated Press, 2018
The Associated Press

  • Popular kamloops News
  • No referendum for $150M Kamloops RCMP building
    Kamloops voters will soon be asked to decide whether to give their blessing for a new Kamloops RCMP building, along with a host of less expensive projects. Similar to the Build Kamloops loan
  • Kamloops RCMP release image of person of interest in dumpster fires
    Kamloops RCMP have released a photo of someone related to an ongoing arson investigation with the hope someone recognizes him. Police were called to a dumpster fire near the 100-block of Vic
  • RV strikes roof at Kamloops hospital entrance
    Royal Inland Hospital took some damage when an RV struck the building Monday afternoon. All entrances to the Kamloops hospital remain open, but signs of an impact remain on the ceiling at th
  • Missing person team fields new tips on Ryan Shtuka's disappearance
    It has been over six years since Ryan Shtuka went missing from Sun Peaks Resort, and while his case remains unsolved, his story is still fresh in the eyes of the public who continue to provide tip
  • Injured mountain biker rescued near Kamloops
    Paramedics and search crews scrambled to pick up an injured mountain biker near Kamloops this past weekend. Emergency crews were called to the Tranquille area for a rider with a suspected sp
View Site in: Desktop | Mobile