Putin hates me and tried to kill me.
This is what Bulgarian investigative journalist Hristo Grozev said in an interview with the British television channel Channel 4 News, BTV reported. He was a guest on the occasion of his new documentary “Kill List: Pursued by Putin's Spies“.
According to Grozev, the operation against him began on the day of the publication about Navalny's poisoning - on December 14, 2020.
"In the publication, we essentially pointed out the program of attempted assassinations of political opponents. But we also mocked the FSB, Putin's favorite intelligence agency. We showed their faces. We showed how easy it is to track them. We showed all the mistakes they made. And we got one of them to admit on the phone in a 53-minute interview with his own victim, Navalny, that they tried to kill him. And that really, really embarrassed Putin," Grozev says.
He adds that Putin stood before the media to announce that all this was fake news and all this information was not the product of a journalistic investigation, but something that was given to Grozev and his team by the intelligence agencies, by MI6 or the CIA.
"So that explains why for a long time this group of six and many others who are part of this operation were looking for the fabricated, fantastic evidence that we had some connection with the intelligence services. And then, when they couldn't find them, they were so angry that they decided to move on to kidnapping or killing," says Grozev, who works for the publication "Bellingcat".
In late 2024, it became known that among the targets of the surveillance of the spies arrested in the UK working for Russia was Grozev, who, as part of his work at Bellingcat, was investigating the "Novichok" attack in Salisbury in 2018 and the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
According to the British prosecutor's office, the surveillance of the journalist, the theft of his laptop, his kidnapping or killing, and the infiltration of Bellingcat were discussed.