Unit 29155 is a Russian military intelligence organization tasked with foreign assassinations and other activities aimed at destabilizing European countries. The Unit is thought to have operated in secret since at least 2008, though its existence only became publicly known in 2019.
Organisation
The Unit is commanded by Maj. Gen. Andrei Vladimirovich Averyanov and based at the headquarters of the 161st Special Purpose Specialist Training Center in eastern Moscow. Its membership included some honoured veterans from the Russian wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Ukraine identified as Denis Sergeev, Alexander Mishkin, Anatoliy Chepiga, Sergey Lyutenkov, Eduard Shishmakov, Vladimir Moiseev, Ivan Terentyev, Nikolay Ezhov, Alexey Kalinin, and Danil Kapralov. Le Monde reported in December 2019, citing French intelligence contacts, that 15 agents connected with Unit 29155 visited the Haute-Savoie region of the French Alps between 2014 and 2018 including Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov who are believed responsible for the Skripal poisoning. High-ranking GRU officer Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev has been identified by British authorities as the commander of the team that poisoned Skripal.
Activities
Unit 29155 was linked by the investigative Bellingcat website to the attempted assassinations of Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev in April 2015 and the former GRU Colonel Sergei Skripal in March 2018, both possibly overseen by the same agent. It has also been implicated in the recent Catalan independence movement. According to Ben Macintyre in the London Times in December 2019, the unit is believed to be responsible for a destabilisation campaign in Moldova and a failed pro-Serbian coup plot in Montenegro in 2016 including an attempt to assassinate the Prime MinisterMilo Đukanović and occupy the parliament building by force. Russia has denied all accusations. The unit's operations were described as sloppy by security officials since none of the operations to which it has been linked were successful.
Alleged bounty program
In 2020, a CIA assessment reported that Unit 29155 operated a Russian bounty program that offered cash rewards to Taliban-linked militants to kill U.S. and other coalition soldiers in Afghanistan. The assessment said several US military personnel died as a result of a bounty program. According to the New York Times, on 1 July, the National Intelligence Council, produced a document in which various intelligence agencies assessed the credibility of the existence of a bounty program based on the available evidence. Anonymous officials who had seen the memo said that the "C.I.A. and the National Counterterrorism Center had assessed with medium confidence—meaning credibly sourced and plausible, but falling short of near certainty”—that bounties had been offered. Other parts of the intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, said they "did not have information to support that conclusion at the same level", and so had lower confidence in the conclusion. Both Russia and the Taliban have denied the existence of a program.
