GRU unit No. 29155, headed by General Andrei Averyanov, has been carrying out explosions in European Union countries since 2011 — the first of them occurred at a warehouse in Bulgaria, where ammunition was delivered that could be intended for sale to Georgia. This follows from The Insider's investigation.
Averyanov was appointed commander of unit No. 29155 of the GRU in 2008. After this, he assembled a group, the number of which later reached 70 people, for sabotage operations abroad. From 2009 to 2011, the general visited Dushanbe, Warsaw, Belgrade and Chisinau. According to journalists, during his trips he “prepared the ground” for a series of operations in Europe. After this, Averyanov went to Krasnodar.
Four subordinates went with him — they lived in the guest house for four days — during which time each of the members of group No. 29155 prepared a project for a remote-controlled explosive device. Their designs were to include “an actuator with safety and radio-receiving mechanisms,” a “command device,” and “a case with a magnetic mount for placing a projectile.”
A few months after this trip, the first explosion occurred on November 12, 2011 in the Bulgarian village of Lovnidol. There, six thousand Soviet-style artillery shells purchased by EMCO, which Slovakia decommissioned in 2009, were stored in a warehouse there. The GRU decided to prevent the sale of ammunition to Georgia, as the Kremlin expected a response to policies related to Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Initially, a batch of 152-mm shells was stored in a Czech warehouse near the village of Vrbetica. To attach explosives to the ammunition during delivery to Bulgaria, six members of group No. 29155 flew to Vienna and Bratislava. These were Nikolai “Kononikhin” (real name Yezhov) and Sergei “Ryzhikov” (Romanov), Andrei Averyanov himself with a passport with the surname “Overyanov”, Colonel Alexey Kapinos, who was flying on a diplomatic passport, Rustam “Dzhamalov” (Dzhafarov) and “ Ruslan Boshirov» (Anatoly Chepiga).
On November 10, 2011, «Kononihin» and «Ryzhikov» crossed the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, and then probably went to Bulgaria. 10 days after the explosion, they crossed the border with Russia at the Goptivka border crossing near Kharkov. Bulgarian experts concluded that the warehouse was blown up by improvised explosive devices, but the prosecutor's office stopped the investigation three years later due to the lack of other evidence.
The next explosions occurred in 2012 and 2015; unlike the first sabotage, they resulted in civilian casualties. On June 5, 2012, a series of explosions occurred at ammunition depots located on the main highway between Sofia and the port of Burgas. Then the country's seismic laboratories recorded an earthquake measuring 1.5 on the Richter scale. As a result, three warehouse workers were killed and another 18 people were injured.
The prosecutor's office concluded that the cause of the incident was negligence in storing ammunition. The Insider noticed that one of the members of the GRU unit, Vladimir “Popov” (Vladimir Moiseev), booked tickets to Bulgaria for the day of the explosion. At the last moment, he changed plans and two hours after the explosion, he left Odessa directly for Moscow.
He flew to Bulgaria in 2015 along with three colleagues from group No. 29155 — this happened two weeks before another explosion. “Popov” stayed in the country from March 6 to March 11. Before his arrival, Nikolai “Kononihin” (Ezhov), Ivana “Lebedev” (Terentyev) and Alexey “Nikitin” (Kalinin) had been there since February 25.
On March 21, more than 2 thousand missiles and anti-tank grenades, prepared for export to Ukraine, exploded in a warehouse in Iganovo. The police collected evidence to investigate the sabotage, but on May 31 of the same year they disappeared — a fire broke out in the building where they were stored. Two days earlier, Averyanov’s subordinate Egor “Gorshkov” (Gordienko) flew to Sofia.
Investigators noted that some members of group No. 29155 became representatives of the presidential apparatus in various Russian regions. Ivan “Lebedev” (Terentyev) became the chief federal inspector for the Sakhalin region, Nikolai “Kononihin” (Ezhov) took the same position in the Far Eastern Magadan region, Rustam “Dzhamalov” (Dzhafarov) received the post of first deputy representative of Vladimir Putin in the Far Eastern region, Sergei “Ryzhikov” (Romanov) worked as a trade representative of Russia in Thailand. According to The Insider, Vladimir «Popov» (Vladimir Moiseev) in the first days of the war in Ukraine was tasked with killing the country's political leadership.
«Ruslana Boshirov» (Anatoly Chepigu) and his colleague known as Alexander «Petrov» (Mishkin) is associated with the poisoning of former GRU colonel Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in early March 2018. British security officials believe that a Novichok-class nerve agent was used for this purpose. Earlier, Bellingcat and Radio Liberty discovered that “Boshirov” attended the wedding of Andrei Averyanov’s daughter.