Russian opposition warns: A special GRU team is forming, aimed at destabilising several European states

Among the five commanders of the GRU team, Khodorkovsky included Eudard Shishmakov, a special Russian agent who was, along with another GRU agent, Vladimir Popov, one of the organisers of the terrorist attempted in October 2016 on the day of parliamentary elections in Montenegro.

Shishmakov is a Russian Army officer, at one time he was expelled from the position of military attaché of the Russian Federation Embassy in Poland for recruiting Polish officers.

On 9 May 2019, with the initial decision of the Supreme Court Council, Shishmakov and Popov were sentenced to 15 and 12 years in prison as organisers of the theoretical group respectively.

The then leaders of the Democratic Front, Andrija Ma persecuted and Milan Knezevic, were indicted by the Special State Prosecutor, led by Milivoj Katnic, and the Supreme Court sentenced them to five years in prison for participating in the 2016 plot.

The Appeals Court's decision in January 2021, half a year after the August “election liberation”, annulled the Supreme Court Council's sentence in Podgorica and turned the matter into retrial. In the retrial, the Supreme Court, led by newly elected Judge Zoran Radovic, released all indictees, including two Russian agents, on July 12th of this year.

Thus, the Montenegrin court backed the defence thesis that two GRU agents whose passports are in the same series with passports of GRU agents poisoning Agent Sergei Scripal in Great Britain were actually standing in Belgrade and Serbia at” under a tourist visit to Serbia. Vladimir Popov, meanwhile, was sentenced in absentia in Moldova for organising a terrorist attack in 2014, according to plans much like an attempted terrorist attack.

And while for the Supreme Court in Montenegro, Edward Shimakov is an innocent man, Russian opposition Khodorkovsky lists exactly all the leading members of the GRU team for special operations.

“Sulmes imagined, railway sabotages and false protests we expose the latest tactics of the Russian military intelligence service to destabilise Europe and slow weapons shipment to Ukraine”, writes Khodorkovsky on the X social network.

He emphasises that the new GRU team includes Colonel Denis Smolyinov, who, claiming Khodorkovsky, previously sent mercenaries to Donbass and “tried to plant a wedge among NATO allies”. She claims that Smonjanov now supervises a team of experienced officers in military, sea and special operations.

The other key player is Edward Shishmakov, a former military attaché expelled from Poland who now manages remote political intervention operations. “He was previously accused of attempting to orchestrate a coup in Montenegro in 2016,” writes Khodorkovsky.

He later claims that among the subordinates of Smolyanov's chief, Vladimir Lipchenko, who acts with the nickname “vlodek Lyak” and is linked to the Latvia attempted fire in Latvia, then Major Yuri Sizov, who is the group's newest member. He was allegedly charged by Ukrainian authorities with planning terrorist attacks on Kiev on Victory Day. The group's fifth member is Alexander Sabpetko, who once headed the covert war in Baltic, like many intelligence officers, he was born in Magdeburg when Soviet troops were deployed in East Germany.

According to Khodorkovsky's information, the GRU is working increasingly through criminal networks to recruit sabotage agents in Europe, paying them with cryptovaluta and communicating via telegram. The same team also tried to exploit divisions in European societies, planning left-wing and right-wing protests against NATO and support for Russia.