LONDON: One of the two suspects in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Britain was an intelligence operative who was personally decorated as a hero by President Vladimir Putin after conducting covert operations in Ukraine, investigative group Bellingcat said on Tuesday.

The site said on Monday that the man, who used the alias “Alexander Petrov”, was in fact Alexander Mishkin, a trained military doctor employed by Russia’s GRU military intelligence service.

Mishkin’s name and his work for the GRU were independently confirmed on Tuesday by the Conflict Intelligence Team, a respected Russian-language investigative website.

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins and researcher Christo Grozev told reporters at an event in the British parliament that they discovered Mishkin had taken part in covert operations in Ukraine and the breakaway republic of Transnistria.

Higgins and Grozev said that Mishkin was made a Hero of the Russian Federa­tion — the country’s highest honorary title — by Putin in the autumn of 2014.

The investigative group has previously identified GRU colonel Anatoly Che­piga as the other suspect behind the March poisoning attack. It said that he too had received Russia’s highest award the same year in a secret ceremony in the Kremlin.

Using open-source records such as leaked residential, telephone and vehicle databases, the Bellingcat probe found Mishkin was born in the remote village of Loyga in northern Russia in 1979.

He graduated in 2003 or 2004 from the Russian military’s medical academy in St Petersburg, where he specialised in “deep underwater physiology”.

The researchers said that he was recruited by the GRU “at some point before 2003” and moved to Moscow in around 2009 where he adopted the identity of Alexander Petrov.

Bellingcat said it reached out to hundreds of fellow graduates from the academy, and two recalled Mishkin, but added that all of the class had been contacted recently and told not to speak about him.

In contrast to Chepiga, Mishkin’s cover identity retained most of his authentic biographical characteristics, such as the same birth date and first names of his parents.

Bellingcat said it obtained incomplete border crossing records showing Mishkin travelled — under his undercover persona of Petrov — multiple times to Ukraine between 2010 and 2013.

They also showed he often crossed by car back and forth from Transnistria, where he stayed for short periods of time, it added.

Bellingcat said its Russian investigative partner, The Insider, sent a reporter to the village of Loyga, where at least seven residents recognised photos of Petrov as “our local boy” Mishkin.

The journalist heard that his grandmother had shown many villagers a photograph of Putin shaking hands with Mishkin. Bellingcat added the reporter was not able to talk directly to the grandmother or see the photograph.

Published in Dawn, October 10th, 2018