In the past two decades England has been the site of at least two high-profile deadly operations and more than a dozen other suspicious deaths that have been linked to Russia. Yet the trial of this six-person cell appears to be the first time in recent history that the authorities have successfully investigated and prosecuted Russian agents operating on British soil. The trial and its outcome, then, are victories. They are small ones, however, relative to the scope of the threat. The Bulgarians seem to be only one part of a multiyear, multicountry operation to kill Grozev. That in turn is only a small part of what appears to be an ever-broadening campaign by the Kremlin, including kidnappings, poisonings, arson and terrorist attacks, to silence its opponents and sow fear abroad.
The story of the resources that were marshaled to silence a single inconvenient voice is a terrifying reminder of what Putin, and beyond him the rising generation of autocratic rulers, is capable of. The story of how that single voice refused to be silenced — in fact redoubled his determination to tell the truth, regardless of the very real consequences — serves as a reminder that it’s possible to continue to speak and act in the face of mortal danger. But the damage that was done to Grozev’s own life and the lives of the people around him is a warning of how vulnerable we are in the face of unchecked, murderous power.
A decade ago, Grozev, like much of the world, was stunned when a Malaysian passenger plane was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people onboard. Russia and Ukraine immediately blamed each other, Russia unleashed a torrent of disinformation, and the West seemed confused. At the time, Grozev was living in Vienna and helping run a company that owned a string of radio stations. But he had always been afflicted with an insatiable hunger for information. Back when the Communist government of Bulgaria fell, he broke into one of his country’s embassies and spent two weeks reading through piles of documents marked “burn after reading.” (“Everyone in the embassy was snitching on everyone else,” he later told me.) He stopped only when the police showed up.
When the Malaysian plane went down in July 2014, he started looking at Flightradar24, an online service that tracks the movement of aircraft around the world, and he quickly fell down a rabbit hole.
His fascination with Flightradar24 set Grozev’s second career in motion. He joined Bellingcat, an innovative outlet that was practicing a new kind of open-source investigation. Using geolocation data and a trove of variously sourced videos and photographs, the Bellingcat team pinpointed the missile launcher used to shoot down the airplane, traced its route from Russia to eastern Ukraine, identified senior Russian military intelligence officers who were involved, and ultimately determined that Russia was responsible for downing the Malaysian plane, a finding later confirmed by professional investigators and the United Nations.
In later investigations, Grozev expanded his tool kit to include black-market databases such as Russian passport data and cellphone logs, which allowed him to name the Russian military intelligence officers who most likely poisoned the defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England in 2018. The following year, when a former Chechen rebel leader was gunned down in broad daylight in a park in Berlin, Grozev used passport and travel data, as well as a deep analysis of Russian government records, to identify the assassin, Vadim Krasikov, a Russian national who was later convicted of the crime in Germany. And in 2020, when Navalny, the Russian opposition hero, was nearly killed by poisoning, Grozev used a massive data set of airline bookings to identify a group of men who had been trailing Navalny for at least three years, and then traced them to a chemical weapons research lab run by the secret police in Moscow.
Most great ventures of Grozev’s life involve Karl von Habsburg, his best friend, who, in a narrative detail not out of keeping with the novelistic sweep of Grozev’s life, is the grandson of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, Charles I. Together Grozev and von Habsburg once rode into Timbuktu, Mali, with troops that liberated the city from Islamist rebels. At another time they started the first all-Ukrainian-language radio station in Ukraine. Around 2020 von Habsburg had become connected with a group of filmmakers. Grozev’s hunt for Navalny’s would-be assassins seemed as if it would make a great documentary, so the team drove to Germany, where Navalny was undergoing rehabilitation.
On Dec. 14, 2020, Bellingcat co-published Grozev’s findings about the people behind the Navalny attack.
The same day, the disgraced finance executive who had been recruited by Russian intelligence hired a team to follow Grozev. That financier was Jan Marsalek, who had gained international notoriety when his fintech company, Wirecard, was consumed by one of the biggest financial scandals in European history. Roughly $2 billion was missing. The company’s chief executive was arrested. Marsalek, a clean-cut 40-year-old who had served as the company’s chief operating officer, disappeared.
He was a logical choice for the Kremlin’s assignment. As a fugitive of the West, he had a strong incentive to stay in Putin’s good graces, whatever it took. And as a Vienna-born Austrian, Marsalek knew well the city where his target, Grozev, was living.
The first time I met Grozev in person was in 2023, at a New York City screening of “Navalny,” the documentary that started with his investigation. He appears in it prominently: all 6-foot-3, 200-odd pounds of enthusiastic nerdiness. It was later that night that law enforcement informed Grozev his life was in danger and he should not return home to Vienna. By this point, the Bulgarians had been tracking him for more than two years. A friend put Grozev up in a Manhattan townhouse, and he began his life in exile.