At the end of 2022, a new top-secret intelligence unit was created in Russia, the purpose of which was, among other things, to kill and kidnap opponents of the Russian government abroad, I found out The insider. Journalists found out where it is based, who runs it, and who funds it.
The structure, called Center 795, was created by decision of the General Staff in December 2022 – due to the need to expand the tasks of the intelligence services after the start of the major war between Russia and Ukraine. According to The Insider’s sources, the idea was to create a fully autonomous unit that could bypass the Defense Ministry’s clumsy and ineffective structures. The head of the 795th Center was supposed to report directly to the Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov or the Deputy Head of the Military Department.
The center included the most experienced personnel from the FSB and the Main Directorate of the General Staff (formerly the GRU), and cooperation on this scale between the Defense Ministry and the FSB was implemented for the first time, one of the sources told The Insider. The 795th Center included people from the staff of General Andrei Avrianov, who had previously headed a unit in the GRU, and Denis Fesenko, a former employee of Alpha, became the immediate head of the 795th Center.
The unit is stationed on the territory of Patriot Park in Kubinka, near Moscow, at the Kalashnikov training center. Kalashnikov’s co-owner, sanctioned businessman Andrey Bokarev, is helping finance the unit.
In total, the 795th serves about 500 officers, divided into three sections: reconnaissance, assault and combat support. The largest department is the Intelligence Department, which includes 19 departments. These include, as The Insider points out, the Sniper Section: its presence within the Intelligence Section may indicate that its main role is to carry out targeted assassinations, not fire support on the battlefield.
According to The Insider, the hiring process was extremely difficult, and about a third of the candidates were rejected. Salaries are appropriate: today they are about half a million rubles a month at the level of the head of the department (and Vysenko has three million rubles a month) – and this is only from Kalashnikov, there is also a salary from the Ministry of Defense. At the same time, the 795th was given the authority to attract officers from various other units of the army, the GRU, the FSB, and even the FSO – not necessarily with the approval of the department concerned. This indicates the 795th position’s higher status in the hierarchy within departments.
The Insider wrote that the 795th “organized a number of assassination and sabotage attempts,” but did not provide details. Journalists promise to talk about this later. But at least one operation failed completely: in Colombia, officer Denis Alimov was arrested, who was assigned to kidnap a political opponent of the Kremlin and – according to The Insider, a family member of one of the former leaders of the self-proclaimed Republic of Ichkeria, Akhmed Zakayev, who lived in London for many years.
During the operation, Alimov recruited Serbian Darko Đurović, who lives in the United States, because he needed someone who could move freely around Europe and had no ties to Russian intelligence. Dorovich did not speak Russian, and Alimov did not speak Serbian or English, so they used Google Translate for quick communication. Although they exchanged messages in a secure messenger, the archive of the translations themselves was stored on Google servers. The FBI obtained a court surveillance order and was able to read all operational correspondence.
On February 24, Alimov was arrested, at the request of US authorities, at the airport in Santa Fe de Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, where he arrived as part of his next mission. Alimov was charged with organizing a murder, conspiracy to kidnap, providing material support to a terrorist organization, and conspiracy to finance terrorism. He is now awaiting extradition to the United States.