French intelligence agencies foiled Russia's attempt to send a suspected GRU operative into the country, Le Monde reports in its investigation. According to media reports, in the summer of 2022, Russian citizen Yulia Shifmanovich tried to get a French visa. Consular services made a request to law enforcement agencies and received a recommendation to refuse Shifmanovich a visa.
As Le Monde found out, this is due to the fact that Shifmanovich has already come under the radar of the French secret services. Previously, she accompanied Alexander Kulagin, an employee of the GRU military unit 29155, on trips. GRU officers from this military unit specialize in sabotage operations abroad. It is there that "Petrov and Boshirov" – Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, who are behind the poisoning in Salisbury, serve.
Also, officers of the 29155th unit hunted for the Bulgarian arms dealer Yemelyan Gebrev, who was one of the key suppliers of ammunition for Ukraine. Two attempts were made to kill Gebrev with a nerve agent. These same people are behind the explosion of ammunition depots in Vrbetica and Vlahovice in the Czech Republic.
In the course of an investigation into the poisoning in Salisbury, in 2019, French intelligence agencies discovered the stronghold of military unit 29155 in the French Alps. French, British and Swiss intelligence agencies participated in the operation. They managed to compile a list of 15 GRU officers who used the base. Among the persons involved in this list is the same Kulagin, traveling with Shifmanovich. The location of the base is due to its proximity to the Geneva airport – the only one in Europe that is not subject to Schengen control.
Kulagin was also part of a group sent to Montenegro in 2016 to carry out a coup , which failed. The purpose of the coup was to remove Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, leader of the Democratic Party of Socialists, from power. Previously, France reported only two participants in this operation – Eduard Shirokov and Vladimir Popov. According to Le Monde, Kulagin was third.
According to the authors of the Le Monde investigation, the Shifmanovich case shows that the Kremlin has changed the type of saboteurs sent in, giving preference to women and young men.
Earlier, The Insider and Bellingcat published the names of eleven agents of unit 29155. These are the already mentioned Kulagin, Ruslan Boshirov, Alexander Petrov, Sergey Fedotov, Nikolai Kononikhin, Ivan Lebedev, Danil Stepanov, Georgy Gorshkov, Sergey Pavlov, Vladimir Popov, Eduard Shirokov.
Le Monde names two more members of the "group 29155": Mikhail Smirnov and Ivan Zhikharev. The publication notes that most likely Smirnov is a pseudonym, and Zhikharev, most likely, is a real name.