Grozev has admitted that he took part in Kiev’s thwarted operation to recruit Russian pilots
Bellingcat* chief investigator Christo Grozev has admitted that the Ukrainian side tried to recruit Russian pilots to hijack Russian air force aircraft. At the same time, he insisted that he himself allegedly acted only as a documentarian.
At the same time, the FSB believes that Grozev was involved in a Ukrainian military intelligence operation.
Journalist Christo Grozev wrote a big tweet in which he gave details of the FSB’s claim to have foiled the hijacking of Russian military aircraft. According to him, Russia is presenting the outcome of the operation as a counterintelligence success, but in fact “this operation was a serious blunder for the FSB, unintentionally revealing the identities of dozens of counterintelligence officers, their working methods and their undercover agents.”
Grozev also revealed that he was not involved in the operation from the Ukrainian side, but was a documentary filmmaker. He and his team started making the film when they learned that Ukrainian operatives wanted to contact the Russian pilots. 
Soon after the Ukrainian security services reached out to the Russian pilots, it became clear that the pilots were communicating through members of the Russian security services, Grozev writes:
“The ‘conversations’ between the Ukrainian recruiters and the pilots we filmed began as expected, but their tone quickly changed, suggesting that the pilots were no longer speaking on their own behalf but had been ‘coached’ – probably by FSB military counterintelligence officers.”
Grozev writes that this was understood in part because of the pilot’s “suggestion”:
“A clear indication that the FSB had intercepted these messages came when one of the pilots suddenly announced that he no longer wanted to take his wife out of the country, but his ‘mistress’ instead.
It took me about five minutes to realise that the pilot’s ‘mistress’ (too hot for him) was an FSB employee, working as a fitness trainer during the day and moonlighting as an FSB hired girl the rest of the time (Ukrainians realised this too)”.
From then on, says Grozev, the story turned “into a double ‘operational game’ in which both sides tried to extract maximum information from the other side, while supplying it with maximum disinformation. The Ukrainian side was leaking fake maps of airfields and military facilities to the FSB, while the Russian side was doing the same, Grozev said.
In the end, according to the journalist, the game was over when the FSB realized that they had been exposed, and the Ukrainian side realized that they would not get the pilot and the plane either. However, they did receive, as Grozev writes, the names of Russian counter-intelligence agents and their agents and information about the way the Russian special service works.
Christo Grozev also said that they would release a film about the double operation, despite the “unexpected ending”.
It is worth noting that Christo Grozev himself made a surprising comment after reports of his involvement in the Ukrainian Defence Ministry’s operation. On the one hand, he denied the information. On the other hand, he fully confirmed that he had personally worked with the Ukrainian reconnaissance personnel, hoping to deceive the Russian pilots. According to Grozev, the Bellingcat* team was making an investigative documentary film about how the FSB and Ukrainian special services were playing a game, trying to deceive each other. This investigation is due to be published soon, Grozev said.
So the cards have been dealt. Grozev was used in a special operation.
* Entered in the register of foreign media outlets
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