If you want to know about Vladimir Putin’s suffocation of power in Russia, watch the new film “Bulk”, which premieres on Sunday at 21:00 ET on CNN.
The Russian government has worked hard to remove opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was sentenced to prison after surviving an assassination attempt.
The film documents the amazing detective work that identifies the team of Russian spies who hunt and then tries to kill Navalny, as well as his recovery in Germany and his return to Russia, where he was immediately arrested.
I spoke with one of the investigators who uncovered the spies, Hristo Grozev – who works with the Bellingcat investigative team – about his methods, his new mission to document war crimes in Ukraine and his views on how journalistic ethics need to change in order to fights government corruption.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below:
WHAT’S IMPORTANT: In the documentary, you’ve collected all these parts – from phone numbers to car registrations and so on – to find out who poisoned Navalny. How did you and Bellingcat develop this investigation process? And what made you apply it specifically to Russia?
GROZEV: We started differently by simply collecting social publications in the context of the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
The first investigation that Bellingcat did by simply gathering available data from the Internet was the downing of (Malaysia Airlines) MH17 in July 2014.
There was a lot of public information at the time about Russian soldiers, Russian spies and so on and so forth – because they hadn’t caught up yet, so they kept a lot of digital footprints, social media, selfies in front of weapons that shoot down planes.
It was there that we somewhat perfected the art of reconstructing crime based on digital breadcrumbs. … But over time, something like the bad actors we were investigating, they started hiding their things better. … By 2016, it was no longer possible to find soldiers leaving status selfies on the Internet, because a new law was passed in Russia, for example, banning the use of mobile phones by secret services and soldiers.
So we had to develop a new way to get data on state crimes. We have found our way to this gray data market in Russia, which consists of many, many gigabytes of leaked databases, car registration databases, passport databases.
Most of them are available for free, completely free to download from torrent sites or from forums and the Internet.
And for some of them they are more relevant. In fact, you can buy the data through a broker, so we decided that in cases where we have a strong enough hypothesis that the government has committed the crime, we should probably abandon our ethical boundaries from using such data – as long as it can be verified, as long as not come from only one source, but is confirmed by at least two or three other data sources.
That’s how we develop it. And the first big case of using this approach was … the poisoning of Sergei and Julia Skripal in 2018 (in the UK), when we used this combination of open source and data purchased from the gray market in Russia to collect who it was the two poisoners. And it works amazing.
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