If you want to understand Vladimir Putin’s stranglehold on power in Russia, watch the new film “Navalny,” which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN.
Russia’s government has made great efforts to eliminate opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was sentenced to prison after surviving a poison attack.
The film documents the unlikely detective work that identified the team of Russian spies who were hunting Navalny and then attempted to kill Navalny, as well as his recovery in Germany and his return to Russia, where he was promptly arrested.
I spoke to one of the investigators who exposed the spies, Christo Grozev — who works with the Bellingcat investigation group — about his methods, his new mission to document war crimes in Ukraine, and his views on how the ethics of journalism are changing must to combat government corruption.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below:
WHAT MATTERS: In the documentary, you piece all of those pieces together — from phone numbers to car license plates and so on — to figure out who poisoned Navalny. How did you and Bellingcat develop this investigative process? And what made you decide to apply it specifically to Russia?
GROZEV: We started in a different way, simply stitching together social posts in the context of the first Russian invasion of Ukraine 2014
The first investigation Bellingcat conducted by simply stitching together available data from the internet was the downing of (Malaysia Airlines) MH17 in July 2014.
At that time there was a lot of public data available about Russian soldiers, Russian spies and so on and so on – because it still wasn’t up to date, so they have a lot of digital traces, social media, posting selfies in front of guns shooting down planes .
It was there that we sort of perfected the art of reconstructing a crime based on digital breadcrumbs. …But over time, the bad actors we studied got better at hiding their stuff. … In 2016 it was no longer possible to find soldiers with status selfies on the Internet because, for example, a new law was passed in Russia that bans the use of mobile phones by secret services and soldiers.
So we had to develop a new way to get data on government crime. We found our way into this gray data market in Russia consisting of many, many gigabytes of leaked databases, car registration databases, passport databases.
Most of these are available for free and can be downloaded completely free from torrent sites or from forums and the internet.
And for some of them they are more current. You can actually buy the data through a broker, so we decided that in cases where we have a strong enough hypothesis that a government committed the crime, we should probably drop our ethical bounds on using such data – as long as it is verifiable, provided they do not come from just one source, but are corroborated by at least two or three other data sources.
This is how we develop it. And the first major use case for this approach was the … poisoning of Sergei and Julia Skripal in 2018 (in the UK) when we used this combination of open source and gray market bought data in Russia to find out exactly who they were the two poisoners. And that worked great.
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