Yesterday, we learned about the recent revelation that Denys Bihus, one of Ukraine’s most well-known western-funded ‘independent anti-corruption journalists’ is also a proud agent of the country’s infamously corrupt Security Services (SBU).
Today, we will look at the same phenomenon at a grander scale. We will see exactly what sort of operations the likes of Bihus conduct, using the example of Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev and the 2020-1 ‘Wagnergate’.
First, militaristic Ukrainian intelligence agents attempt to discredit Zelensky’s peacemaking efforts with a covert operation intended to enrage Russia.
Then, when Zelensky’s administration wrecked that plan, Grozev and other western-funded publications in Ukraine whipped up a media storm about Zelensky’s ‘treason’. For a time, it even seemed that a military coup by pro-western intelligence officers was imminent.
And finally, after 2022, Grozev took intimate part in an anti-Russian covert operation by his Ukrainian spook friend. Today, I’ll highlight proof of Grozev’s participation that contradicts his denials of involvement. As far as I can tell, I am the first to point out the inconsistency in the words of the western world’s greatest ‘independent journalist’.
The OCCRP
To understand the media ecosystem behind Wagnergate, we need to take a look at one of Denys Bihus’s former employers - the OCCRP - the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
As the DropSite described it in a landmark recent investigation, this ‘collaborative journalistic institution has reshaped global affairs with its investigations of enormous tranches of leaked documents’.
For their part, the OCCRP boasts of its role spurring regime change in non-western countries:
All good journalists want impact, and OCCRP has delivered. “We've probably been responsible for about five or six countries changing over from one government to another government,” said Drew Sullivan [head of the OCCRP - EIU]. (He identified four: Bosnia, Kyrgyzstan, the Czech Republic, and Montenegro.) “People do a lot of stuff to try to get that same impact. But investigative reporting actually does it.”
The DropSite was also able to find that this network of ‘independent journalists’ is largely funded by western governments:
Between 2014 and 2023, the American federal government provided 52 percent of the money actually spent by OCCRP, and, since its founding in 2008, has shoveled at least $47 million (and committed $12 million more) to the ostensibly independent, nonprofit newsroom. Other Western governments—including Britain, France, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands—have kicked in at least $15 million during the last 10 years. That’s according to a tabulation of OCCRP’s annual audit reports, cross-referenced with federal budget documents outlining disbursements. The review was conducted by a consortium of international news outlets, including Drop Site News, and is being published in conjunction with news outlets in Italy, France, and Greece. (Head of the OCCRP] Drew Sullivan quibbled with the methodology behind the analysis, arguing grants that are passed through to other organizations shouldn’t be counted. Using his methodology, the figure still reaches 46 percent.)
As the Dropsite notes, the biggest ‘scoops’ by the OCCRP were levelled at geopolitical enemies of the US: ‘OCCRP did the Russia-focused reporting from the Panama Papers and played a key role in the Pandora Papers, the Suisse Secrets, the Russian Laundromat, and China Tobacco.’
I have written here in detail about how USAID-funded media cooperated with the SBU back in 2016 to ‘spark’ the ‘Russiagate’ saga. Naturally, many in Ukraine believe that these ‘independent journalists’ were simply given orders to set such a fire by their handlers in the Democrat Party.
Anyway, the key ‘journalist’ in that saga was Serhiy Leshchenko. The OCCRP covered the questionable details of Russiagate in a range of articles, and Leshchenko even wrote an article for the OCCRP in 2018. Today, Leshchenko continues his beloved craft as ‘DJ technocrat’, moonlighting as advisor to Zelensky’s chief of staff.
Indeed, OCCRP’s role in the impeachment of Trump was highlighted earlier this year by US journalist Michael Schellenberger. His description of CIA-OCCRP cooperation is quite relevant to the story of the SBU agent Denys Bihus - in this world, it appears to be normal for journalists to work for intelligence agencies:
As such, it appears that CIA, USAID, and OCCRP were all involved in the impeachment of President Trump in ways similar to the regime change operations that all three organizations engage in abroad. The difference is that it is highly illegal and even treasonous for CIA, USAID, and its contractors and intermediaries, known as “cut-outs,” to interfere in US politics this way.
Who else has worked at OCCRP? They conduct constant training programs worldwide, particularly in Eastern Europe - just about every ‘independent journalist’ in the region is partly an OCCRP creation.
One prominent example of a former writer for the OCCRP is Veronika Melkozerova, currently Ukraine editor at Politico Europe. She also has experience at Deutsche Welle, the Washington Times, NBC, Kyiv Post, and the New Voice of Ukraine. There’s also Natalya Sedletskaya, currently presenter of ‘Skhemi’, the ‘anti-corruption’ publication set up partly by Radio Free Europe. And Anna Babynets, head editor of ‘slidstvo.info’ - she was OCCRP’s official representative in Ukraine. Dmytro Hnap is another journalist at slidstvo.info with experience at the OCCRP.
And, of course, Denys Bihus, the SBU agent. Though I have the suspicion that he isn’t the only ‘independent journalist’ who works directly for Ukraine’s intelligence services.
In any case, what unites them all is the same hysterical anti-Russian militarism, the same support for total mobilization of every Ukrainian other than themselves.
Bellingcat and ‘Wagnergate’
Let’s take a look at another independent journalist who has written for the OCCRP - Christo Grozev. He is best known as lead Russia researcher at Bellingcat until February 2023 and executive director since 2022. And like the OCCRP, he played a major role in what may have been an attempted regime change levelled against the Zelensky government.
Journalists at MintPress and the Grayzone have already gone into the details of Bellingcat’s relationship with NATO government intelligence agencies. I won’t rehash them here.
Today’s topic is something that I haven’t seen remarked upon in the press - recent admission by the western press that Christo Grozev was an active participant in both pre-war and wartime special operations by Ukrainian intelligence agents.
To begin with, a word on Grozev. He isn’t just a journalist - he is the owner of multiple media corporations in both his native Bulgaria and abroad. In 2000, Grozev became CEO of the Radio Division of Metromedia, which supervised more than 30 radio stations in 11 countries, from Russia and other post-soviet countries to central Europe. It expanded into Ukraine in 2005, following the pro-western ‘Orange Revolution’.
Bellingcat was founded in 2014 after the start of the war in Ukraine. It is well known for its role in attempting to prove that pro-Russian forces were responsible for the downing of Dutch passenger plane MH-17 in July of that year.
But Grozev and Bellingcat played a truly explosive role in Ukrainian politics in 2021. This was the bizarre story of Wagnergate. At the time, I remember how Ukrainian media was absolutely swamped with arguments over the arcane details of this strange matter.
Exiting the metro one day, I was apprehended by a loud young man from the nationalist svoboda party, who handed me a flier about how ‘Zelensky’s traitorous chief of staff Yermak betrayed Ukraine’. My clarifying questions had little effect.
Yermak and Zelensky in a Ukrainian BBC article on Wagnergate
In short, this is what happened. Roman Chervinsky, a Ukrainian SBU officer with a wealth of experience assassinating those deemed to be ‘enemies of the Ukrainian state’ in the 2014-2020 period, was head of the SBU’s ‘Fifth Directorate’ from 2017 to 2019. The Fifth Directorate was set up with CIA funding, as openly admitted by the likes of the New Yorker.
Chervinsky
However, in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected on the platform of a peacemaker with Russia. He dismissed Chervinsky from his post. Chervinsky, however, itched for action. That year, he was given a role in the HUR - the Main Intelligence Directorate. I wrote about the HUR’s status as a joint CIA-MI6 creation in detail here.
The emblem of the HUR
Chervinsky got to work aiding in a supposedly long-existing scheme to kidnap and extradite to Ukraine a group of Russian mercenaries from the Wagner PMC. The justification was their suspected participation in the war between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian armed groups in Ukraine’s east. The Wagnerites were to be lured to a third country (Belarus) as part of a fictional mission, whereupon their plane would be diverted to Ukraine and tried for war crimes.
However, this so-called ‘Operation Avenue’ went at crossroads with the intentions of the Ukrainian government. At the time, Zelensky and head of his administration Andriy Yermak were deep in negotiations with Russia. The OCCRP ecosystem of journalists, those like Bihus.info, Slidstvo, skhemi, Radio Free Europe, and Ukrainskaya Pravda, were all up in arms about the possibility of ‘betrayal of Ukraine’s euro-atlantic integration’. Yermak was constantly singled out as a nefarious Russian spy.
They and their sponsors feared that the Ukrainian government might eventually return to geopolitical neutrality and remove the constitutional clause about the necessity to join NATO. The infamous ‘“red lines” President Zelenskyi can’t cross’ document released in 2019 by Ukraine’s western-funded liberal nationalist ‘NGOs’ exemplifies the atmosphere of the time.
Chervinsky’s HUR team informed the presidential administration about their operation in mid-July 2020. But Yermak told the head of the HUR that ‘Avenue’ would have to be delayed, since Zelensky and Putin had agreed to a ceasefire that was to take effect two days after the planned operation was to take place. Kidnapping Russian citizens in a country allied with Russia would have wrecked Yermak’s diplomatic efforts.
Following this delay, at the end of July, the dozens of Wagner fighters that had been painstakingly lured by Chervinsky’s HUR team to Belarus were arrested by local security services and eventually deported back to Russia. The head of the HUR, Vasyl Burba, became convinced that Yermak had purposefully leaked information on their operation. Burba was sacked in early August 2020 and replaced by Kyryllo Budanov, who remains in place.
Burba on left
From this point onwards, the so-called ‘Wagnergate’ became the chief obsession of Ukraine’s ‘independent media’. Their TV channels and websites were filled with exposes of how Yermak was in fact a duplicitous Russian spy. Yermak, for his part, called the affair a ‘well-planned disinformation campaign’ against the Ukrainian government.
And possible the chief role was played by Christo Grozev’s Bellingcat. His authoritative western voice lent crucial credence to the claims made.
In Ukrainian liberal nationalist discourse, ‘Wagnergate’ was practically synonymous with ‘Bellingcat’. This is partly because of their massive November 17 piece 2021 on the matter, which was meant to be the first article of a series. Its findings were summarized by the likes of Euromaidan press as follows:
More importantly, Bellingcat also constantly announced the release of a shocking documentary film on Wagnergate, which Ukrainian lib-nat media eagerly awaited. The way they hyped it up, it was clear that it would contain thunderous proof of Yermak and Zelensky’s Putlerite treachery. The film was never released.
In any case, in the written material Bellingcat did release, Grozev painted the Wagner operation as a genius plan that would have detained war criminals but was mysteriously wrecked at the last minute.
There is a particularly interesting admission in Grozev’s article on the causes of the operation’s failure (my bolding):
Unusually for Bellingcat, the Wagnergate investigation relied to a large extent on sources who could not be named either because they requested anonymity to discuss classified matters or, in the case of Russian mercenaries, who requested they not be named for their own safety.
In other words, Grozev was clearly getting his information on Yermak’s supposedly treasonous conduct from members of Ukraine’s securocratic deep state. What interests might they have in trying to torpedo Zelensky’s government, then perceived as dangerously close to entente with Russia?
Wagnergate wasn’t just a media circus, but an attempted regime change operation - in the best traditions of the OCCRP.
Throughout the 2019-21 period, as I’ve written here, there was the serious fear that Ukraine under Zelensky would undergo the so-called ‘Georgian scenario’ - geopolitical neutrality, re-integration of the pro-Russian territories in the east, and detente with Russia. Peace and economic development - a horrifying prospect for those surviving off western grant money.
Accordingly, the pro-western liberal nationalists even attempted to impeach Zelensky for his supposed role in thwarting the Wagner operation. Whether or not they really intended to remove him, the aim was certainly for the president to be under sufficient pressure to exclude detente with Russia.
On February 18 2021, the former head of HUR Burba along with a group of other high-level military intelligence officers sent a request to the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI).
In it, they demanded investigation as to whether Zelensky and Yermak had committed state treason by leaking details of Project Avenue. This was triumphantly announced by pro-western liberal nationalist media allied to ex-president Petro Poroshenko, such as Censor.net.
Poroshenko meeting with HUR leader Burba in 2016
In the following extract from the February 28 Censor.net article, note in particular the fact that Burba, for whatever reason, had a car supplied by the US embassy. In general, the supposed wrecking of Avenue is depicted not only as a betrayal of Ukraine, but also of the US:
President Zelensky evicted former head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine (HUR), Vasyl Burba, from his house and removed his security detail after he gave testimony regarding the failed operation to capture Russian terrorists. The head of the President's Office, Andriy Yermak, phoned Christo Grozev, the author of the film about "Wagnergate", which is set to be released in March.
On February 26, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation announced a reward for the capture of Yevgeny Prigozhin – owner of the Russian private military company “Wagner,” which is essentially a terrorist organization waging war in Ukraine and other countries around the world. The U.S. is increasing pressure on Putin’s regime and is investigating Wagner’s activities. Prigozhin was declared wanted in June 2020 – just before the failed special operation to detain Wagner operatives.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine on February 22, without any prior notice or warning, the family of Colonel General Vasyl Burba was evicted from the secured settlement in Koncha-Zaspa. Burba, who holds information of particular state importance, was also stripped of his cover documents by the HUR and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). His only remaining protection is a vehicle provided by the U.S. Embassy.
According to Censor.NET sources, President Volodymyr Zelensky gave the order to silence the witnesses of the failed special operation to capture the Wagner terrorists, which was carried out by the Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine in cooperation with U.S. and Turkish intelligence services in July 2020.
This happened shortly after Burba and a group of other senior military intelligence officers testified before the State Bureau of Investigation and the Prosecutor General’s Office, fully confirming the act of betrayal and the disruption of the special operation against the Wagner terrorists following a meeting at the President’s Office on July 24.
According to Censor.NET, on the eve of the eviction from Koncha-Zaspa, Burba met with a special services officer acting as a trusted representative of President Zelensky, who offered him the position of Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia in exchange for a public denial of the Wagner scandal, a refusal to give interviews, and a cessation of any cooperation with Bellingcat journalist Christo Grozev. Otherwise, Burba was directly threatened – with eviction from the guarded residence, loss of documents, dismissal of his brother from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the opening of criminal cases. Burba refused this disgraceful deal. And the threats were immediately carried out.
The official reason for the eviction was “reconstruction of the guard booth” at the entrance to the property, which was used as justification to instantly terminate the housing agreement.
By ordering the eviction, President Zelensky effectively documented an attempt to pressure a key witness. That is, the President's Office demonstrated that it was responsible for the betrayal and is now trying to cover up the crime.
According to Censor.NET’s sources, this unprecedented blackmail is connected to the imminent release of the first part of Christo Grozev’s investigation into Wagner PMC and, specifically, the failed special operation to capture the terrorists. Our sources state that Andriy Yermak personally called Grozev, trying to find out what would be included in the film and how the President’s Office could explain its position. He was heard, but it will not affect the film’s release schedule.
I spoke with Grozev, and according to him, the first part of “Wagnergate” will be released in March, with a full-length film coming in the summer. The eviction of Burba and attempts to cover up the traces of betrayal, in my view, will serve as an obvious example for every Netflix viewer in the U.S. of how adequately President Zelensky handles matters of national defense.
Censor.net’s main journalist, the firebrand close to western embassies Yury Butusov, also threatened Zelensky and accused him of harboring Russian spies at the highest levels of government:
Let me remind you that I gave testimony to the State Bureau of Investigation regarding the leak of information on “Wagnergate.” I demand an official statement from the investigation – was it a failed special operation or not? Did I disclose classified information about a special operation, or did I deceive everyone? You’ve been investigating the case for six months – when will you tell the public the truth? Let the leadership of the SBI, not the deceptive PR team at the President’s Office, make an official conclusion – was there an operation or not?
Butusov
I warn the President about the consequences. After you ordered the removal of security from HUR officials who worked on the Wagner case, you exposed them all to potential Russian sabotage. It seems to me that this is exactly what the Russian spy and traitor Ruslan Demchenko – whom you appointed head of the Intelligence Committee – is hoping for. But if anything happens to the DIU personnel, all responsibility for their fate will lie entirely with Zelensky. And the protest in front of the President’s Office will no longer be peaceful. And then, the film about “Wagnergate” – starring the President of Ukraine – will be watched by the whole world.
Censor.net was acting as part of a large-scale media campaign throughout 2019-21 to put pressure on Zelensky as insufficiently patriotic. It was partly as a result that the president began trying to constantly demonstrate his status as a ‘real anti-Russian nationalist’. The rest is history.
Along with the spook Burba’s efforts, USAID-funded, OCCRP-partnered publications like Ukrainska Pravda put out publication after publication on how Yermak and Zelensky ‘betrayed’ Project Avenue. This was spearheaded in particular by ex-president Petro Poroshenko and his party, who portrays himself as the true Atlanticist nationalist against the crypto-Russian agent Zelensky. He also claimed responsibility for planning Project Avenue under his presidency (2014-19).
In November 2020, for instance, representatives of Poroshenko’s ‘European Solidarity’ (ES) party claimed that Zelensky’s ruling party was blocking ES’s initiative to set up a temporary investigative committee. This committee was, in their words, to look into ‘likely state treason committed in the country's highest offices, [as a result of which] the operation against the "Wagnerites" was foiled”.
The pressure continued all the way through late 2021. On November 25, a few days after the release of Bellingcat’s piece, a group of nationalist west Ukrainian military veterans officially demanded that the General Prosecutor set up an independent investigative commission regarding ‘Wagnergate’:
Note the blood and soil flag of the fascist Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the 1940s
Dmytro Haidutskyi, the coordinator of the public organization Brothers in Arms in Ternopil Oblast, emphasized that the new statements by Vasyl Burba, who led the Main Intelligence Directorate, along with the information released by international investigations, have shed light on this operation. In his opinion, it has become clear that Volodymyr Zelensky lied, and that the president’s close circle, together with him, committed a crime.
Participants in the event consider the disruption of the special operation to detain Wagner fighters to be a criminal act. Meanwhile, they described the temporary investigative commission currently handling the investigation of these circumstances as biased and politically motivated.
The head of the Ternopil regional branch of the Union of Officers of Ukraine, Oleksandr Varakuta, stressed that cases are now emerging which, unfortunately, border on treason. He believes that in such matters, there must be a clear response from Ukrainian public officials—especially from the Commander-in-Chief. Varakuta stated that such matters are extremely dangerous, particularly when the country is at war.
Angry nationalist officers accusing the president of ‘crimes’ and even ‘treason’. It all sounded quite like the preparation for a military coup.
Remember Roman Chervinsky, the HUR agent in charge of Project Avenue? He left the HUR in June 2021 - all the better to take part in what one might call Operation Wagnergate. In December of that year, he took to Ukrainian television, declaring that the failure of Project Avenue was the result of ‘betrayal’ and blamed a mole in the President’s Office:
“I am ninety-nine per cent certain that this was an act of treason.”
the battle lines surrounding Wagnergate were clear: those who favored a more hawkish policy toward Russia, including powerful figures in Poroshenko’s camp, had used the incident as a cudgel against Zelensky and his team.
Luckily for Zelensky, Russia invaded in February 2022. Nevertheless, given Poroshenko’s ongoing support for Chervinsky and his increasingly open oppositional activity to Zelensky, I’m sure the interminable Wagnergate saga has yet to be exhausted. Particularly if elections are ever to take place.
Another missed flight
Though the time for Wagnergate was over, Grozev continued working alongside his HUR friends in wartime Ukraine.
In 2022, Roman Chervinsky, the man who had played the leading role in the failed ‘Project Avenue’, became possessed with another zany idea (he was also later blamed for the Nord Stream explosion, a matter I won’t even try to go into here).
He intended to get Russian pilots to defect to Ukraine, taking a Russian jet with them. However, it failed spectacularly - Russian military intelligence was aware of what was going on. They used the information to launch a missile strike on the Ukrainian airfield, killing a number of personnel. As a result, Chervinsky was arrested in April 2023. Poroshenko would pay his lawyer fees and bail in July 2024, in what has been a major instance of subterranean wartime political struggles.
Chervinsky in court
When the Chervinsky plane scandal broke back in July 2022, Russian media accused Grozev of involvement, which he publicly denied:
This ‘maverick ex operative’ mentioned by Grozev was obviously a hint at Chervinsky. But in the same thread, Grozev shared some of his sleuthing on the FSB agents involved. Hardly the activities of a mere observer shooting a documentary film:
Now let’s have a look at a February 2025 article from the New Yorker.
The piece is filled with that beloved device of western legacy media - cheerfully admitting the western/Ukrainian organization of assassinations in the 2014-21 period they’d previously blamed on Russia.
And more importantly, it shows that Grozev played quite an active role in Chervinsky’s operation (my bolding):
[Chervinsky’s operative] Bohdan had identified three possible candidates. One of the pilots, who flew a long-range bomber on missions to Mariupol, said that he was worried about getting his wife and their three children out of the secure military town where they lived. “I don’t want to have the same story as Skripal,” he told Bohdan, referring to the former Russian intelligence officer who, in 2018, was poisoned in the U.K. Another pilot wanted to defect not with his wife—“It’s a complicated relationship,” he said—but with his mistress, a fitness trainer in her twenties. Chervinsky asked Christo Grozev, then a researcher at the open-source-intelligence outfit Bellingcat, to share a trove of Russian cell-phone billing records. Geolocation data showed that the pilot’s mistress had visited F.S.B. facilities in Moscow. Soon, both candidates disappeared.
All in all, Grozev was certainly being coy when he claimed back in July 2022 that his role in Chervinsky’s plane operation was merely as a ‘chronicler’. Chroniclers don’t get to work sharing, and probably churning through databases to help the ‘subject of their documentary’ narrow down his targets.
I guess that’s just what independent journalism means nowadays - working with ultra-militaristic spooks to try and get rid of excessively pacifistic presidents and to make sure they succeed in their violent wartime missions.
The whole wagnergate thing is guilt by association. The one thing everyone agrees on is that the presidents office through yermak asked it to be put on hold because of the pending ceasefire. It's nuts to think that a countries intelligence service should get to set it's own policy and not have to worry about direction from political leaders, that's probably a tendency the Ukrainians picked up from their CIA "friends".
The whole wagnergate thing is guilt by association. The one thing everyone agrees on is that the presidents office through yermak asked it to be put on hold because of the pending ceasefire. It's nuts to think that a countries intelligence service should get to set it's own policy and not have to worry about direction from political leaders, that's probably a tendency the Ukrainians picked up from their CIA "friends".