Bellingcat, Der Spiegel and The Insider investigators found a secret unit within the Main Computer Center of the Russian Armed Forces and identified 30 military engineers who direct missiles at civilian targets in Ukraine.

▪️Most of these people are young men and women with a background in the field of information technologies and even in the development of computer games;

▪️All of them are registered as living and working in Moscow at the address: Znamyanka, 19. This is the official address of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation;

▪️The GOC division consists of three teams, each of which programs the flight trajectories of one specific type of missile (“Calibre”, “Iskander”, Kh-101);

▪️Telephone recordings of the conversation of the commander of the GOC with subordinates a few weeks before the strikes on October 10 show an increase in the activity of calls from October 2, reaching a peak on October 9;

▪️This means that the attack on the energy infrastructure of Ukraine could not be a consequence of the detonation of the Kerch bridge in Crimea on October 8, 2022, but was planned earlier.

The direct commander of the missile guidance unit of the main computer center (GOC) is Colonel Igor Bagniuk – it was from his number that the head of the GOC, Major General Robert Baranov, was called before each launch, reports Bellingcat and Der Spiegel.

What else managed to install:

• This unit consists of three teams that program the flights of one specific type of missile and include:

• ZM-14 (“Calibre”, sea-based) – Ivan Popov, Matvii Byubavin, Roman Kurochkin, Kateryna Chugunova, Sergey Ilyin, Yuri Nikonov, Georgy Starostin, Dmytro Tikhonov, Mykola Tarasov and Igor Groza.

• 9М728 (Р-500, Iskander operational-tactical missile complexes, ground-based) – Oleksiy Mykhailov, Pavlo Obukhov, Elvira Obukhova, Nikita Poplavskyi, Viktor Yaskelainen, Oleksandr Grigoryan, Volodymyr Petrov, Artem Vedenov.

• Kh-101 (airborne) – Artem Chernov, Oleksiy Betekhtin, Andrii Ivanyutin, Anton Chulikov, Olga Pismenska, Pavlo Vasiliev, Oleksiy Volkov, Anton Shatun, Stanislav Minkov.

At the same time, it was established that a number of officers of the National Security Service are IT specialists who worked in civilian private companies. All are registered at the official address of the Russian General Staff in Moscow.