A champion like no other: The curious life of a Unit 29155 operativeChristo Grozev,
Roman Dobrokhotov,
Michael Weiss
4 November 2025
Investigation: The Salisbury Gang. GRU operations with Novichok in Europe
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s military Intelligence, the GRU, has dramatically stepped up its activities across Europe — from assassinations and acts of sabotage to cyberattacks and “psychological operations.” Just a few years ago, the GRU depended heavily on operatives working in Europe under false identities. Today, because of the efforts of investigative journalists and Western security services, nearly all of them have been compromised or declared persona non grata. Nevertheless, many of these burned assets continue to play an active role in Moscow’s hybrid war against the West — only now, they do so from within the sanctuary of Russian territory. This is the curious story of one such operative.
On the sunny morning of July 1, 2018, thirty university students from around the world descended on Rottenbach, a postcard-perfect Austrian village surrounded by green hills and tidy farmhouses. They came from Taiwan, Uganda, Syria, and India to learn about wastewater treatment at the DEX Summer School, an annual program for young professionals in environmental engineering. That year’s host, VTA Austria, an industrial sewage treatment company, prided itself on pioneering chemical and biological purification technologies.
Among the attendees was a fresh-faced man from Russia, who told the company newsletter he wanted “to refresh my knowledge and learn more about VTA.” His name, he said, was Sergey Konovalov.
That wasn’t his name, nor was he a university student. Sergey Konovalov, 32, was a career officer of the GRU — the Russian military intelligence agency — and a member of its most infamous sabotage squad, Unit 29155. Just months earlier, operatives from that same unit had poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, with the deadly Novichok nerve agent, killing an innocent bystander in the process. Yet here was one of their own, close enough to the poisoners to have their numbers saved in his phone, sipping coffee in the Austrian countryside and taking selfies with wastewater engineers. Konovalov’s main mission on this trip was arguably slightly less toxic: he was tending to his own “legend,” or spy cover story, which would allow him to travel the world without raising suspicion as to his true employer. VTA Austria seemed like a convenient corporate masquerade for him in Central Europe, since Konovalov officially worked for a Russian affiliate, VTA Eurasia.
The smiling student who traveled to Rottenbach in 2018 was born Sergey Kononov on May 7, 1986. In Russian bureaucratic databases, a few letters added to his surname were enough to generate a new identity. The difference was minor by design, a discrepancy easily brushed away as a typo or misrememberance by an old classmate or acquaintance who might accidentally bump into the GRU operative living under his assumed identity. “Sergey Konovalov,” as it happened, was a new breed of “illegal,” a Russian intelligence operative living abroad outside of diplomatic cover. Traditional illegals in the Soviet or post-Soviet periods burrowed into foreign societies unnoticed for years, even decades, using their fake names and imagined backstories. They almost always posed as non-Russians, speaking the language of whatever other country they claimed to come from fluently and without an accent, so as to maximize plausible deniability. (The hit FX series The Americans remains the popular standard-bearer of this genre of espionage.) However, in the post-Soviet era, a new potential tool had emerged: a large, inconspicuous Russian diaspora residing permanently outside the Russian Federation.
“Sergey Konovalov” was a new breed of “illegal,” a Russian intelligence operative living abroad outside of diplomatic cover
Both Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, and the GRU seized the opportunity and began experimenting with hybrid illegals. It was convenient, inexpensive, and did not require years of training operatives as citizens from third countries to such exacting standards of linguistic and cultural passability. Hybrid illegals don’t hide their Russian nationality; they live parallel lives under intricately invented counterfactual histories that allow them to move around without any discernible links to the Russian intelligence services. The flame-haired femme fatale Anna Chapman, arrested in the United States and swapped back for Skripal and others in 2010 as part of the FBI’s “Operation Ghost Stories,” was the SVR’s best-known hybrid illegal. In the summer of 2018, “Sergey Konovalov” was poised to be one of the most promising editions from the GRU. But then fate took a rather funny turn.
Recruitment and resume-buildingThe real Sergey Kononov was born in the last days of the Soviet Union in the town of Kursk, near the border with Ukraine. Both his parents were (and remain) military engineers working for the GRU’s secretive 18th Research Institute of the Defense Ministry, also known as Military Unit 11135. In the 1980s, the institute focused on signals intelligence, the creation of “special non-lethal weapons,” and the development of encryption systems for use by GRU operatives. More recently, the 18th Institute has been implicated in offensive cyber operations against the West. The unit’s activity was shrouded in such secrecy that rumours abounded that it engaged in research on captured UFOs, attaining a conspiracist stature in Russia not unlike “Area 51” in the United States.
In his late teenage years, Kononov was a competitive judo and sambo wrestler. After being conscripted into the Russian military, he followed in his parents’ footsteps by joining the GRU signals intelligence unit in Klimovsk, near Moscow, according to leaked address registrations examined by The Insider. At 20, he married Elena Kuracheva, also a Kursk native, and in 2011 they moved with their two-year-old son, Ivan, to an apartment just outside the GRU garrison. It was there that Sergey was spotted by GRU recruiters and selected to go through the elite training program for spies at the military intelligence headquarters in Moscow.
Sergey was spotted by GRU recruiters and selected to go through the elite training program for spies
Records show that by 2015, Sergey, Elena, and Ivan, now six, had moved to a tiny new Moscow living quarters — 323 square feet — in the GRU corporate “dormitory” located at 76 Khoroshevskoe Shosse. In March 2017, he took out a $93,000 mortgage from Sberbank, one of Russia’s largest state-owned financial institutions, and bought their modest dorm unit. Konovov had by now become a full member of Unit 29155. His career prospects looked rosy.
https://theins.ru/en/inv/286477
