How Google Translate Exposed Russia's Secret Army

February 24th, 2026.

A man walks through arrivals at El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá.

Middle-aged, salt-and-pepper beard, light carry-on.

He has a connecting flight from Istanbul behind him and a beach hotel reservation at Cartagena ahead of him.

He looks like a man who has been looking forward to this vacation, but Colombian border guards put handcuffs on his hands within minutes.

His name is Denis Klimenkov, but that's his cover name.

We found his real name is Denis Alimov, a decorated veteran of the FSB's elite Alpha Special Forces Unit.

And since 2023 has been a senior operative inside one of the most secretive intelligence structures the Russian state has ever built.

A unit specifically engineered to be impossible to find.

And yet, the FBI knew everything about him.

They had been reading his communications for over a year. And not through a mole, not through a signals intercept, not through any sophisticated technical means, but through Google Translate.

I'm Christo Grozev. I'm an investigative journalist, and for the past decade, I've been tracking Russia's intelligence operations around the world.

This video is about a Russian intelligence unit that didn't exist until 3 years ago, and that was designed specifically so that people like me would never be able to find it.

It's the product of a joint investigation that I conducted together with colleagues at The Insider and Der Spiegel.

Everything I'm about to tell you is well-documented in leaked Russian government materials, in corporate presentations and records, in a federal grand jury indictment unsealed in the United States.

To understand why this unit exists, you need to understand the failure that made it necessary.

Between 2018 and 2022, Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, watched one of its most important covert units collapse under the weight of its own self-confidence and carelessness.

The unit was called 29155.

If you followed this channel, you would know it well.

For newcomers, this is the unit that carried out the 2018 nerve agent attack in Salisbury, England, that poisoned Sergey and Yulia Skripal and killed a British civilian.

It was behind a coup attempt in Montenegro, a series of bombings in Eastern Europe, and targeted killings across the continent.

My colleagues and I spent years identifying the officers of this unit.

The single biggest break came from something almost laughably simple that the GRU had done.

They had issued its operatives passports in numerically sequential batches.

Once we knew what to look for, tracing them was straightforward.

We published their names, their photographs, their travel records.

Several had even been caught using mission funds to support personal lavish lifestyles, a pattern of corruption that generated its own paper trail.

By the time we were finished, their biometric data was in customs databases across Europe.

One leaked Russian internal assessment described the unit in plain language as a full hardy liability.

The unit's founding commander, General Andrey Averyanov, didn't lose his job. In fact, he was promoted.

That's how Putin often deals with failures.

He puts people into an orbit where they become almost harmless.

The Kremlin couldn't afford to lose experienced officers who knew too much in the middle of an expanding war.

But Moscow's thinking had shifted. What Unit 29155 needed, it was decided, was not rehabilitation.

It needed competition.

A replacement built from scratch, designed to avoid every mistake that had made 29155 so easy to expose.

The order establishing the new structure came from the Russian general staff in December 2022.

It was formally designated as military Unit 75127, a number recycled from a defunct unit that had been once stationed near the Chinese border.

While unit 29155 had been built within the GRU existing command chain, Center 795 was built outside of it.

It reported directly bypassing the head of the GRU to the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, and it was given a much wider breadth than its predecessor, what Russian military planners call a full cycle mandate.

This means that a single command handling everything from intelligence collection and agent recruitment to surveillance, sabotage, and when necessary, assassinations without relying on outside support at any stage.

By the summer of 2023, it was already fully staffed.

But where do you hide more than 500 operatives so that they're not immediately visible by investigators and intelligence agencies around the world?

You need to hide it inside an institution that is large enough and logical enough for them to be there.

You need institutional cover.

The people who designed Center 795 chose theirs very carefully.

Rather than burying it inside the GRU's bureaucracy, which had its own corruption problems and its own leaks, they embedded it inside Russia's most recognizable commercial brand, the Kalashnikov Concern, the company that makes the AK-47.

Operatives were placed on Kalashnikov payroll, as civilian employees.

Their physical base was a two-story administrative building called the "Patriot Park," a military-industrial complex outside of Moscow, where Kalashnikov already had a legitimate presence.

Putin had visited it even.

Training was logged as test shooting, routine enough for an arms manufacturer that nobody would think to ask questions about.

The principal backer of all of this, according to two sources and a lot of leaked data, was Andrei Bokarev, a billionaire arms dealer best known as the controlling shareholder of Transmashholding, one of Russia's largest defense and rail conglomerates.

Bokarev has a deep and deliberately obscured connection to the Kalashnikov concern itself.

In 2014, he and a business partner purchased a 75% controlling stake in this company.

Four years later, when Western sanctions were looming on the horizon, he appeared to divest of it, to sell it.

But our investigation found out that the financial trail tells a different story.

Tax declarations from 2019 through 2021 show a continuous stream of income from Kalashnikov to Bokarev, and he remains on the payroll of a company that is controlled, ostensively at least, by the current Kalashnikov main shareholder.

This financing model would be familiar to anybody who followed the Wagner group. Just as the Yevgeny Prigozhin channeled revenue from his catering

group. Just as the Yevgeny Prigozhin channeled revenue from his catering contracts into the private military or so-called private military company Wagner, Bokarev has been directing money from overpayment for the state contracts by Kalashnikov and Transmashholding into 795. In this way, the state pays for everything but in a hidden deniable way.

If something goes wrong, it's Prigozhin's fault or Bokarev's fault.

The third key figure in this arrangement was CEO of Rostec, Sergei Chemezov.

Rostec is Russia's largest state-owned arms manufacturer.

And Chemezov is one of the most powerful people after Putin.

I mean, he served with Putin back in the 80s in Dresden, Germany.

And he's probably the only person who can walk into Putin's office at any time of day or night without knocking.

Now until 2014 when Bokarev got the controlling stake in Kalashnikov it was Chemezov through Rostec that controlled the concern, but he remained a 25% shareholder through the state on Rostec that he's the president of.

So Bokarev and Chemezov together through this arrangement got something that previously only Prigozhin had had, a private military company, a private army.

To lead this unit the informal polit bureau of generals and oligarchs chose a guy by the name of Denis Fisenko.

A 52-year-old veteran of the FSB's Alpha Unit, three-time recipient of the Order of Courage, as we can read in his own bio.

Russia's national champion in combat shooting, author of the FSB's training operation manual.

Here he is in 2018 teaching Putin how to shoot a sniper rifle manufactured by the Kalashnikov Institute at the Patriot Park.

What made Fisenko specifically right for this role wasn't just his combat record.

I mean, there are many other decorated veterans available, but it was what came after his career as an alpha officer.

Between 2019 and 2023, he served as a senior executive at Kalashnikov Concern, overseeing more than a thousand employees and managing the ZALA Aero division drone division, whose drones/UAVs are currently flying combat missions over Ukraine.

He understood both sides of what this unit needed to be, an elite commando structure operating under corporate cover.

He was also close to Bokarev.

I mean we saw in leaked records that he was flying on his private jet around Russia in the years that preceded the creation of this unit.

So he had the trust of the bosses.

Now here comes the crazy part.

To brief his Kremlin sponsors and President Putin personally, Fisenko produced a PowerPoint presentation.

It was by all accounts indistinguishable from a standard Kalashnikov board meeting deck.

It had organization chart, personnel projections, growth charts, icons of tanks and drones, all of them colorcoded and put in different columns.

It was also, as it turned out, a comprehensive intelligence gift.

Within months of its creation, the full presentation had found its way to Western intelligence services and to journalists, including our own investigative team.

How?

Ukrainian hackers have been targeting the Kalashnikov concern thinking they will find just data on Russian drone manufacturing and production of weapons.

They found something much more sinister.

Every detail of the unit structure, staffing, weapons, and ambitions laid out in clean Kalashnikov branding on slides that were never supposed to leave Russia.

So, let's have a look.

What does Center 795 actually look like from the inside?

Just over 500 officers organized into three directorates, intelligence, assault, and combat support.

The recruitment process was selective and one could say draconian. Of the initial 535 candidates processed, one-third, 177 were rejected and had to be replenished by other candidates.

Those who made it through the very fine needle of the vetting pipeline of questionnaires, psychological testing, polygraphs and interviews were drawn from the elite services, the FSB alpha and Vympel units, the GRU Spetsnaz, and even the FSO, the presidential security department.

Now, how were they able to get those people?

Well, department heads in this unit earned the equivalent of around $8,000 a month. Fisenko

himself, according to leaked tax filings, earned close to half a million per year.

Now, this got them not only the best people, but also the anger and envy of every peer in other intelligence services in Russia.

The intelligence directorate, the unit's largest, runs nine departments covering the full range of modern surveillance.

Department 11, open source intelligence, social media monitoring, commercial satellite imagery, public databases.

Department 12, the most sensitive, is a network of human agents operating abroad.

It is staffed almost entirely by veterans of Unit 29155, the same operatives who carried out the Salisbury attack.

Department 13 signals intelligence and intercepts with a full suite of radio technical intelligence equipment, including satellite intercept stations.

Department 14 and 15 handle optical reconnaissance, Orlan and Eleron drone platforms used for virtual and visual surveillance of both operational and tactical levels.

And then three parallel ground surveillance teams, Department 16 through Department 18, each equipped identically so that any of them can run the same operation or the same type of operation without any of the other teams knowing what they're doing.

And then Department 19, the sniper department.

Here's a detail that stood out to me when I first saw the PowerPoint presentation.

This department sits inside the intelligence directorate and not the assault directorate.

A dedicated sniper unit placed alongside surveillance teams classified as an intelligence function.

That structural placement tells you exactly what the snipers are being used for inside this unit.

They're not there for battle support.

They're there for targeted assassinations.

The assault directorate is organized around strict compartmentalization for combat application departments, each containing four separate strike teams. No team has any knowledge of what the other teams are up to.

If one cell is blown or caught, it cannot burn the rest.

The combat support directorate makes clear that Center 795 was designed as something more than just an assassination unit.

The PowerPoint presentation that we looked at shows five departments: armor, artillery, medical, EOD, and air defense.

This gives the unit T-90 main battle tanks and Smerch rocket systems. Now, neither of these would be useful in targeted assassinations, but it's clear what they're useful for.

This is a self-contained combined arms formation capable of conventional military operations on a battlefront.

One of the most deliberate features of Center 795's design was where it was recruiting its leadership from.

The unit didn't want people that were already burned, people with traceable Russian military histories.

It wanted people who the Western counterintelligence and Western investigative journalists simply didn't know existed.

Fisenko's deputy, for example, Dmitry Drozdov is a very good example.

Drozdov served in the KGB, but not the Russian KGB, the Belarusian Intelligence Service, which is still called the KGB.

He served in the Alpha Department of the KGB, which is in fact their own version of the GRU.

He left the KGB of Belarus around 2017 and moved through the corporate ladder and was hired, actually, at Kalashnikov Institute as a civilian employee before he joined Center 795 in 2023.

Exactly the same pattern holds for Sergei Radkevich, the head of the intelligence department.

Departed the KGB around 2017 and like his colleague Drozdov passed through the Kalashnikov letter, arrived at Center 795 only at the end of 2022.

Both men carry no Russian institutional footprint that Western agencies would know to look for.

That is not a coincidence. This is by design.

While most of the meat- the people who would actually work the streets and travel the world were from the FSB, GRU, and FSO, from Russia's ecosystem of military operations, the leadership- the ones that were likely to be seen by Western intelligence services- had no connection to Russian military ecosystems. Now, despite their attempts to keep everybody on the management team away

from public connections to the GRU or the FSB, they were blunders as usual.

I mean for a senior role they employed somebody by the name of Alexei Iliushin a man whose CV attached to the PowerPoint presentation reads like it was written to impress a boss.

Four languages, including Danish and Norwegian.

Author of military academy textbooks, architect of a GRU university recruitment program.

But what is more important back in 2014 he already had been burned.

He had been caught red-handed while posted at the Russian embassy in Paris by French intelligence while attempting to bribe somebody close to President Hollande for compromising personal information.

He was declared persona non grata at the time and expelled.

And apparently the GRU had thought he had been forgotten about and appointed him to this senior role.

And now on to my favorite part of the PowerPoint presentation.

This is the 12th Department, the human intelligence section.

It bridges the FSB and the GRU with their institutional networks.

It is led by Anatoly Kovalev.

He's a GRU officer who's travel records and communication patterns indicate that he was at least integrated with if not an actual member of Unit 29155.

All of his deputies are also from the GRU.

And this makes sense because the GRU traditionally have operated abroad and the FSB traditionally only domestically.

And the people with knowledge of networks abroad come from the GRU.

And it is the 12th department that Denis Alimov the man in handcuffs in Bogotá, coordinated and took instructions from for his work.

Through leaked communications we can see that he had a particular status.

He reported not just through the department chain but also directly via dotted line to Nikolay Zriachev a former GRU officer who had gone to the FSB and then on to Kalashnikov and was currently serving as the senior deputy to the head of Center 795.

Back to Denis Alimov the person in handcuffs in Bogotá airport.

Alimov began his career at the OMON, the Russian riot police in Stavropol near Chechnya in the early 2000s before being transferred to FSB's Alpha team and he worked and was registered at the Center for Special Tasks in Balashikha on Moscow's eastern outskirts.

Actually, the address that he is registered as residing at Trubetskaya Street 116, is the same facility where Vadim Krasikov the assassin from Berlin trained for a few weeks before traveling to kill the Chechen dissident Zelimkhan Hankili back in 2019.

You may remember that Krasikov spent years in German custody before being swapped and given back to Russia as part of the big prisoner exchange that also freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in 2024.

Within Alpha, Alimov worked under the unit's deputy head of internal counterintelligence tasks, maintaining strong contacts with the North Caucuses, Chechen and Dagestan counterterrorism directorates.

Now, we were able to obtain leak communications by Alimov and they show that the first year at Center 795 was by the standards of what came later quite unremarkable.

He was helping Kadyrov locate the missing nephew who had vanished in Moscow and needed to be brought back.

He used his old FSB contacts to clear some cargo shipments between Russia and Ukraine.

He was passing on information and tips he was getting from his former colleagues at the FSB to the people at Center 795 that were actually fighting the war in Ukraine.

But he himself was sitting and waiting for the first task.

At the same time, his extracurricular activities were more colorful.

Again, open source data shows that his phone number was registered to multiple Telegram channels dedicated to muscle building through anabolic steroid use.

He posted the following question to one of them.

How can I continue muscle growth while getting rid of side effects such as man boobs?

By 2024, his professional focus had expanded considerably.

He was building a recruitment network drawing on his Rolodex of Chechens whom he had personally jailed over terrorism related charges in the past.

People with outstanding prison sentences who could be easily pressed into cooperation and who could plausibly present themselves abroad as political refugees fleeing Russian persecution.

And at least one of them succeeded.

We can see that in communication with one such former Kadyrov opponent who had been sitting in jail for eight years, he obtained a foreign passport.

He was released from jail and left Russia for Istanbul in 2024. We lose his track after that, but we know that he was working with Alimov before he vanished into Europe and he's probably parked somewhere waiting to be tasked with something.

By late 2024, Alimov's attention had narrowed to one particular objective.

He was targeting members of the Chechen dissident community in Europe and specifically figures connected to the Zakayev family.

Now, Akhmed Zakayev is the acting prime minister in exile of the unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, one of Kadyrov's most prominent symbolic opponents, but more importantly, somebody who speaks out against Putin, and somebody who wants Chechnya to be free from central rule from Moscow.

And clearly somebody that the Kremlin cannot afford to continue to create allies across Europe.

The price that was put on his head was $1.5 million.

Dead or delivered back to Russia and Alimov was in charge of this operation.

Running an assassination operation ring on Western soil requires somebody with local access, a person who can move freely throughout Europe going from one city to another without the attention drawn by a Russian passport, especially after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The man whom Alimov found for this job was Darko Durovic, a Montenegrin citizen living in the United States, and a former MMA champion of Montenegro.

We found videos and photographs of him competing.

And the MMA connection may be less incidental than it sounds.

Many of the Chechen operatives whom Alimov was communicating with based on leaked communication data came from the combat sports world.

MMA gyms in the caucuses have long served as a recruiting ground for both Russian security services and Chechen armed gang networks.

The fighting circuits is where Durovic might have been introduced to one of the contacts that already had been working for Alimov.

And this is how Alimov likely got on the track of Darko Durovic.

Conveniently for Alimov, at the time he was recruited, Darko Durovic was living in the United States, giving him access as a traveler both to Europe, but also to North America.

Durovic made two trips to Moscow in 2024.

Both of them were disguised as holidays to Turkey from the United States.

On the second trip in October 2024, he met a Alimov at a restaurant close to the FSB headquarters at Lubyanka Street.

At that meeting, Alimov handed to Durovic a bag of cash, $60,000 as a down payment for the future job.

And we have seen the actual photo of the cash simply because Darko Durovic was so happy to receive it that he immediately emailed a photo of it to a close friend boasting with the cash.

But that cash was just a down payment.

The first target was Akhmed Zakayev.

For him, a price tag of 1.5 million to be brought to Russia dead or alive.

The second target, same price tag, another Chechen dissident living in Europe. The third target was unnamed and remains unnamed in the indictment, but it was a very high priority target.

Whoever was able to achieve that would get a bounty of $10 million.

These prices are completely out of market.

Even $1.5 million is more than any organized crime group would pay as a bounty.

10 million is practically unheard of.

Each time Durovic returned from Moscow to the United States, FBI agents were waiting for him with questions.

Had he by chance been to Russia?

No, he answered every time. He was in Turkey on holidays.

The agents already knew everything.

They had been trailing him.

They had access to his airline records, but they let him go. Why?

Because they were watching something far more useful.

They were trying to create the full network of people that were engaging with him.

Center 795 had invested heavily in what intelligence professionals call "Airgapping."

They had created an operationally sealed insulated unit isolated from electronic penetration.

They used only encrypted messengers. They used

burner phones. They never used their real names only assumed identities.

Communication compartmentalized at every level. On paper it was perfect.

It was the most technically savvy, the most hardened covert structure that Russia had ever deployed.

But there was one thing that nobody had thought to address.

Durovic typed his field reports in Serbian.

The app Google Translate converted them into Russian for his handler.

Alimov, the handler, typed his instructions in Russian and sent them by encrypted messenger.

But then Durovic would take that and put it in the Google app, translating into Serbian.

The messages themselves were transmitted through very encrypted unhackable messengers.

What they hadn't considered is that Google servers are in the United States physically and that puts every query that runs through them within reach of an American court order.

And the FBI who had already grown suspicious of Durovic because of his continued lies about his trips to Russia had obtained one.

From that point forward, agents were reading in real time fully translated, fully transcribed copies of the murder-for-hire instructions and reports.

A source close to the investigation described that, "that was even better than a wire tap because it arrived already transcribed."

The grand jury indictment gives us portions of these logs.

On November 28th, 2024, Durovic reported to his handler that he couldn't confirm a target's location in New York.

He was in Montenegro at the time, but would resume his search after returning around December 20th.

The target, he noted, went out of his way to appear to be in the European Union, but was actually in the United States most of the time, he wrote.

Earlier that month, the Google log showed that Durovic was searching online for Glock pistol models and where to acquire them in Podgorica, Montenegro.

On December 19th, a message to Alimov about the second target that he lives in a white villa near the sea, surrounded by a white fence with an Islamic symbol on the gate, also made it way to Google Translate.

As we can see from the logs that were published in indictment, Durovic was reporting to Alimov about every move he made and every target he surveiled, enough for an indictment to hold its weight in court.

By March 2025, the FBI had enough evidence to arrest Durovic, and they did.

But that's not the goal they were after.

They really needed to get the mastermind Alimov.

11 long months passed after the arrest of Durovic.

The FBI continued to build a case.

They were accumulating a lot of evidence from Jurovich's own confession, from his devices, from the translation logs, but they needed to get Alimov.

And for that to happen, Alimov needed to make a mistake.

He needed to travel outside of Russia.

And by the beginning of 2026, that's exactly what happened.

Alimov decided to travel abroad.

Now, we don't know why.

Maybe it was for him to meet a new asset or maybe he was so self-confident that he thought he could do some of the stuff that others could not do.

But he made this fatal mistake.

On the 23rd of February, a very important holiday for Russian intelligence operatives, the Defender of the Fatherland day, he took a one-way ticket via Istanbul from Moscow to Colombia and he traveled under a fake identity, an identity which had been known to the FBI for a few months.

The FBI had been waiting for that mistake and the moment they saw somebody with that passport number and that name board a plane, they issued an arrest warrant via Interpol.

The arrest warrant was actually made public while Alimov was in flight.

There was nothing he could do to reverse course and upon arrival in Bogotá.

He was expected and handcuffed by immigration authorities of Colombia.

Now he faces charges of conspiracy to commit murder and kidnapping, material support for designated terrorist organization, and conspiracy to finance terrorism.

Each primary count carries a potential life sentence.

He remains in Colombian custody pending extradition to the United States.

And leaked communications show that Russian authorities are desperately trying to find out what the outcome of this extradition proceeding is and trying to prevent Colombia from handing him over to the United States.

Now, the damage from all of this extends well beyond the arrested operative that they lost.

The entire architecture of Center 795, its embedding within the Kalashnikov Concern, its headquarters at the Patriot Park, its reliance on Rostec infrastructure is now documented in Western court filings and in this investigation.

Fisenko, Drozdov, Radkevich, Polonsky, Zriachev, their names, corporate histories and roles in this supposedly super secret unit are all exposed in our investigation.

This changes what they can and cannot do. And we've seen the consequence.

Intercepted communications from Moscow already show that the government has decided to probably close down this unit.

The irony of them creating a new unit to fix the problem of the old unit leaking and the unit being undone by Google Translate of all things.

That's bound to hurt for a long time.

As a source within Russian intelligence recently wrote to me, "Well, not a problem. We will create a new unit. We're already quite used to having to create new units that you ultimately will burn down."

And it's true. Russia will build another unit.

Since Unit 29155 was burned, they have tried at least twice to construct a replacement capable of operating below the threshold of Western investigative visibility.

Both attempts failed on the same underlying problem.

Not the sophistication of their adversaries, but the convenience seeking of their own people.

Cutting corners. Corruption.

Unit 29155 fell apart because its officers couldn't be bothered with proper cover documents. Center 795 was engineered to avoid exactly those mistakes.

It had commercial camouflage, compartmentalized command, freshly built false identities, non-sequential passport numbers.

What it couldn't fix was two people who needed to talk to each other and reached out for the nearest available tool.

That tool happened to route them through service in California.

Next time they'll be more careful about translation software.

Whether they will be more careful about who they recruit is a harder problem.

But if my experience is anything to go by, it's like a game of whack-a-ole.

Next time they'll be more careful with the service, but they'll be less careful with something else and will be here waiting and watching.

To find out more about this investigation, you can read the full text version on the link below.

And to make sure that you don't miss any of our future investigations on Russian intelligence operations, subscribe to our channel and follow for more.