Christo Grozev revealed that a married couple, detained in Sweden on suspicion of espionage, owns an apartment in Moscow in the same building as the publicly exposed GRU agents.

Representatives of the Russian special services fail over and over again due to the public availability of data that can be used to trace their connections.

Eliot Higgins, the founder of the Bellingcat investigative group, wrote about this on Twitter.

According to Higgins, one of the leaders of Bellingcat, Christo Grozev, revealed that a married couple, detained on November 22 in Sweden on suspicion of espionage, has owned an apartment in Moscow since 1999 in the same building as the publicly "exposed" agents and heads of the GRU of the Russian Federation.

It is known that one of the Russians is accused of "gross illegal intelligence activities against Sweden and a foreign state." The Swedish Security Agency noted that the operation to detain the suspects was carried out with the assistance of the Swedish police and armed forces.

Earlier, the names of the detainees were named in the media - these are Sergey Skvortsov and Elena Kulkova. According to available data, since 1999 they and their family members have been the owners of an apartment in Moscow at ul. Sorge, 36.

In the same house, one of the apartments belongs to the GRU military intelligence officer Denis Sergeev, who is suspected of poisoning Sergei Skripal in the UK. Higgins noted that Sergeev, under the name of Sergei Fedotov, participated in the poisoning of the Bulgarian businessman Emelyan Gebrev in 2015.

Another apartment in the same building belongs to Major General Andrey Averyanov, who heads military unit 29155 of the GRU, also known as "161 training center", where GRU officers are trained.

Another apartment at st. Zorge, 36, belongs to GRU Major General Andrei Ilyichenko.

It is not known whether the Russians arrested in Sweden lived at this address since they moved to the country shortly after acquiring an apartment.

Skvortsov and Kulkova are suspected of being involved in espionage activities against the United States since 2013, and against Sweden since 2014, Swedish officials said.

Russian spies in Europe

David Ballantyne Smith, a former British embassy guard in Berlin, pleaded guilty to spying for Russia while working in Germany. He was charged with passing information about persons working in the embassy to Russian officials and intelligence agencies and collecting additional information about the embassy's activities.

At the same time, the head of British counterintelligence MI5, Ken McCallum, said that during the war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, the Russian intelligence network abroad was dealt the most severe blow in modern history.