News
On December 16, the European Union imposed sanctions against 29 missile guidance specialists identified in a joint investigation by The Insider and Bellingcat in late October 2022. The sanctioned individuals are employees at a secret unit of the Main Сomputation Center (MCC) of the Russian Armed Forces, and are directly engaged in targeting the territory of Ukraine with high-precision Russian missiles, which mostly hit civilians and civilian infrastructure.
All of them are MCC employees, and most of them work in the missile strike planning unit.
The MCC's missile guidance specialists were divided into three clusters by their call logs
- Major General Robert Baranov – Director of the Main Computation Center of the General Staff (GVC) of the Russian Armed Forces
- Colonel Evgeny Kapshuk – Deputy Commander of the GVC of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces
- Colonel Igor Bagnyuk – Commander at the Missile Pre-Planning Unit at the GVC of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces
- Lieutenant Colonel Anton Timashinov – responsible for programming the route of all three types of guided missiles (Kalibr, R-500, Kh-101)
- Captain Elvira Obukhova
- Captain Pavel Obukhov
- Captain Vitalia Yaskelainen
- Lieutenant Artem Vedenov
- Major Ivan Popov
- Major Matvey Lyubavin
- Lieutenant Ekaterina Chugunova
- Captain Sergei Ilyin
- Captain Yuri Nikonov
- Senior Lieutenant Dmitry Tikhonov
- Captain Artem Chernov
- Captain Alexey Betekhtin
- Lieutenant Nikita Poplavsky
- Major Andrey Ivanyutin
- Lieutenant Igor Groza
- Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Tarasov
- Captain Georgy Starostin
- Major Roman Kurochkin
- Lieutenant Vladimir Petrov
- Captain Anton Chulikov
- Senior Lieutenant Olga Pismenskaya
- Senior Lieutenant Pavel Vasilyev
- Lieutenant Alexei Volkov
- Captain Anton Shatun
- Captain Stanislav Minkov.
The Insider’s sources indicate that the US will be imposing sanctions against the aforementioned guidance specialists in the near future.