this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, straight after this programme. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. in a world awash with information and disinformation, who and what can we trust; facts, data points, original open sources, they're all powerful weapons in this information war and that is why my guest today, christo grozev, bases his investigative journalism in digital detective work. he is bellingcat�*s lead russia

investigator and the cause of serial embarrassment to the kremlin with his revelations about the poisoning of alexei navalny and other russian military and intelligence operations. he says he follows the facts wherever they lead but what's his motivation? christo grozev, in washington, dc, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me on hardtalk. it's a pleasure. alexei navalny famously described you once as just

a bulgarian nerd with a laptop. since he said that, you have become thejoint winner of an oscar, you are in the international limelight as an investigative journalist. does all of this attention make yourjob harder? not necessarily. i was oblivious of any attention before all of these awards and i'm oblivious of it now. i like to work from cafes so i get a lot more people approaching me and asking for a selfie but that is about the only disruption. you, until very recently, were based in vienna but you're talking to me from the united states. did you move away from vienna because you didn't feel safe there? in fact, that is what happened, although i didn't physically move away, i was in the united states to help promote the film, navalny documentary, and i was advised not to return to vienna at the beginning

of january because of serious and imminent concerns about my safety so fortunately i am stuck in the united states. when you say stuck in the united states people be interested to know, because you are a figure who spends a lot of time particularly focused on what russia is up to and it obviously is interesting to people where you are based. are you now officially based in the united states? well, i don't know whether it's official or unofficial but i am spending 100% of my time in the united states. and that's sad because it is away from family and home but it doesn't matter where i work from, as i said, i work from cafes and hotel lobbies so i can continue working from here, regardless of where officially i am based. before we get into the detail of all the different investigations and the work you have done looking at russia and some of its covert operations and some of its military operations, if we can, let's get to the origin story

of bellingcat, and then you with bellingcat. bellingcat really first emerged as an investigative force, looking at what was happening in the conflict in syria in the period around 2013, 2014. you focus your attention on russia. why are you with bellingcat and has bellingcat fundamentally shifted its main focus of attention? well, you are right. the founder of bellingcat, eliot... eliot higgins. ..higgins, he did start his blogging platform initially because of his acute interest in the details of open source investigations of the war in yemen and syria but by 2014, when he formalised bellingcat as the bellingcat platform with this particular name, i believe the first project bellingcat looked at as bellingcat was the shooting down of mh—i7.

the malaysian airliner, over ukraine, in 2014. so in fact there was attention by bellingcat proper to the war in ukraine from the official start of bellingcat. i was blogging independently at the same time, covering the same topics, mostly interested in disinformation and the weaponisation of information because that was part of myjournalism background. and eliot higgins asked me to contribute a couple of articles for bellingcat, which i did, and then i discovered more and more that there was a wide gap in the understanding of what russia's, not only russia's, but in this particular case, russia's security services were doing internationally and only small snippets of this information is made public by intelligence services of the west, but there is much, much more that would be of interest and also in the interest of public safety to be disclosed, so i started digging into that and that resulted in a long sequence of investigations into the clandestine

operations of russia. right now i believe it is fair to say your key focus is to delve and dig deep into what is happening with russia's military operations in ukraine. why do you believe you can glean different and better information than the various investigators from national and international courts who are on the ground investigating alleged war crimes? first of all, we're not doing anything better. we're doing things differently and with a different scale. i will talk about some of the things i personally do but also my colleagues have done at bellingcat from a particular part of bellingcat that is only focused on gathering open source evidence of potential war crime. we don't call them war crimes because they have to be qualified by an international judicial body, but we are calling them civilian harm incidents.

that is a large—scale process of scraping data, validating, geolocating these particular photographs that may appear on twitter or on telegram or on facebook, preserving them in such a way that there is a chain of custody trail because that is what future courts will want to have. many people are doing this sort of gathering evidence and compiling it and preparing briefs but bellingcat has a tradition in testing judicially whether some of this evidence can hold up in court. and in particular we know how to preserve the chain of evidence, and that is what bellingcat is doing somewhat differently. one fascinating example of work you have done, you've spent a lot of time trying to identify the 30 or more military engineers, i think they are described as, the people who are responsible for the launching of cruise missiles, some of which we know

from verified reporting have hit civilian targets in ukraine. you have gone public identifying some of these military engineers. on what basis? you tell me exactly how confident we can be in your evidence. again, we try to be transparent in what we know and what we don't know. in this particular case was started by using a mathematical model of correlations to try to find out if any particular entity within the ministry of defence makes particular communication, has particular communication peaks around the time of hits by these cruise missiles, the so—called precision cruise missiles by russia, although they are not as precise as they claim to be. that gave us some initial hypothesis of who this unit might be. furthermore, the people that had worked in this unit had a particular training for missile and rocket

engineering at universities in russia with a military focus. then what we did is we got, i got, a lot of the phone records, the meta data of phone records of some of the key people in this unit and we found that they were communicating with one another, particularly on the eve of very massive strikes on ukrainian infrastructure and some hospitals and kindergartens were also hit along the way. and then essentially i confronted all of these people, one by one, and i have to say, first of all, i confronted and they did not even deny that's what they do. he just said he was not authorised to give me the answers to the questions that i'm asking. it was relatively traditional journalism except it started with a data point and hypothesis based on mathematics. what is fascinating about that story is you rely so heavily on the deepest of deep dives into the electronic trails and the data trails.

are you of a mind to say that today, when so many of us are sceptical about so much information we receive because it cannot always verify it, are you saying you believe in data more than human intel? human intelligence? do you think the data dominates all now? well, i think data should be taken seriously and it wasn't always taken seriously byjournalism as a profession. i think there is room for traditional journalism which is source—based but also room for independent database journalism. what i like about data is that you do not have sources who have a bias, or who have may be a conspiratorial view of their surroundings. data cannot mislead you, well it can if you misinterpret it, but it cannot consciously lead you down a rabbit hole... right, right but, mr grozev, you have said at times over recent months that you have

deep sources inside the russian security services. so, i am a little confused. are you using human intel or not? human intel is very useful as a follow up to provide context, to provide colour for this puzzle because the puzzle, you are building up based on data, bits and pieces, and then sometimes you don't understand why something happens and then it is very useful to rely on sources that you can trust. but i would never start an investigation based on a tip from a source just because of the bias of these sources. to be clear, do you, right now as we speak to each other, have several sources, for example, inside the fsb, maybe inside the wagner private military corporation who you are talking to about what is happening on the ground? i have been open on social media that i do have sources within wagner and this is a result of previous investigations, where we did

contact a lot of wagner operatives and some of them have agreed to continue a sort of a talking relationship late at night where we may be on different side of this particular war but sometimes there is a reason for them to share and overshare. let's talk about another one of your methods and that is a controversial one, and that is making payments to third parties, to acquire information which violates russian privacy laws and which you know have been acquired illegally. you're paying for an illegal product, aren't you? do you have any qualms about that? yeah, let's first make something clear, that bellingcat has never paid for such product. i'm a volunteer for bellingcat and i have been a volunteer for most of the time and i paid ou of my own pocket and i have set my own boundaries and rules of when that is acceptable. they are very strict. one of the things that must happen before i decide to pay for data, is i must have a strong, supported hypothesis that there

is a government perpetrated crime that i am investigating and it's notjust any crime but a government mandated crime... right, but that is a suspicion, a hunch because the whole point is you are conducting an investigation. you are essentially, some would say very arrogantly, assuming the right to violate the law in pursuit of your journalistic investigation and you are doing it in a way that violates personal privacies. you access everything from flight manifests, to driver license details of individuals, i dare say even health records of individuals in russia because the truth is in russia all of it is for sale if you have enough money. but there is an ethical problem here because, surely, those on different sides of the ideological fence from you can say, "look at christo grozev, he is idolised in the west as this investigative journalist of the highest moral standing. he basically does this stuff.

we're going to do it, too!" again, i'm transparent about what i do. i have never misled the audience about how i do it and i'm also open about my standards, when i do it, and i have to have a strong hypothesis based on open source data, publicly available data, that there is a government crime that otherwise would remain uninvestigated unless you cross that boundary to getting government data from a government that would never share it with law enforcement. it's a gap in the legal system that i'm trying to bridge in this way. it was contested in court, by the way, in germany when a german court looked at my data in the case of the assassination of an asylum seeker in germany in 2019 and the court said, considered, whether the breach of privacy laws is overridden by the public interest and they decided, the court decided, yes, there is no problem, no conflict here. there is a law called the privacy law and there is an overriding public interest when you talk about government mandated assassinations. so how far do you believe the overriding public interest

will allow you to go? for example, would you and your team undertake hacking yourselves? no. again, there would be the exceptional case when the hack would be on a fake identity email account when this person does not exist, it's a spy. this maybe sort of a borderline case but we would never actively start hacking any personal e—mail accounts. you have never hacked in that way? we have used hacked material that has been provided, and pre—hacked, and made publicly available to us and otherjournalists but we have not hacked ourselves, and certainly bellingcat hasn't. a final thought on this sort of digital detective work. what we live in right now is an era where ai, artificial intelligence, is changing many of the rules and changing the game in a sense when it

comes to digital capacities. there's also, of course, the rise of deep fakes, and we know that some of the stuff we see online on our social media platforms, which looks extremely convincing and compelling, is nothing but fake material. are you sure that with your focus on electronic investigative journalism, you are not going to enter a world where you are going to be increasingly at risk of being deceived? no, absolutely, but this has always been a problem with data because data can be just as false as words. and that's why you have to apply a particular trait craft in obtaining data. the source of the data should never know who you are, why you're looking for this particular data, and you have to match it both horizontally and vertically, horizontally with other sources of data that corroborate this particular data set, and vertically, or longitudinally, with previously released data.

so we have to see the same person in a database that was leaked in 2018 as you find it in current data, otherwise this person was just added or invented or deleted. you've been declared by russia now as a wanted man and they, in essence, paint you as a puppet and a stooge of the west. would you acknowledge that you and bellingcat over the years have made some decisions, particularly about where you take money from, that actually play into that russian narrative? well, i mean, bellingcat has been primarily funded through — about 30% of fees that are charged of people that bellingcat trains and the rest is donations, and the donations at this point in time and for the last couple of years have been only from private foundations and private... yes. that's an important little caveat you just made. you have received over the years significant funding from the national endowment for democracy, in washington dc, which is pretty much funded by the us congress,

by federal government money. i know you've stopped taking that money now but would you acknowledge it was a mistake from the very get—go to take that us federal money? i would not see that as a mistake. i was not in any executive position at the time, but i still think taking money from any deed to provide training to countries where otherwise the journalists would remain untrained in open—source investigations, as long as you have internal rules that but i still think taking money from any deed to provide training to countries where otherwise the journalists would remain untrained in open—source investigations, as long as you have internal rules that make you independent from any funder, which bellingcat does have, is not an ethical dilemma at all. you say you're independent. for example, why do you still take money — i know you're not the boss of bellingcat but why does bellingcat still take money from the european union, for example? the european union foundations are very transparent about how they fund.

they have auctions, they have tender procedures and bellingcat participates in those, and, again, i mean, it's a transparent organisation which has its own annual report. it is extremely granular. it shows where money comes from and how it is spent. as long as you don't have any problem with saying, "i will investigate my funders and nothing can stop me from that", then i don't see an ethical problem. cia officials have been quoted in the press as saying they absolute love what you do. it was interesting to read the comments of a british foreign office official, tom burge, who said that, "bellingcat can, when it conducts its investigations, basically come up with information that governments want out there but would never want to sign up and to," and burge says, "unaffiliated analysts are harder to smear." is there a sort of symbiotic relationship between you and, say, the cia, m16 in the uk?

well, i mean, it's up for them to answer this question. some have opined, as you quoted, but i know of the exact opposite where intelligence services, including mi5 or 6, have been very unhappy at the pace with which we discover things and make them public because they would prefer in many cases to keep things off of the public view, in particular also with the skripal investigations. we were, i believe, ahead of both the mis and mi6 in discovering many of the members of the team that was after the assassination of the skripals. we made everything public and we must have embarrassed them, some people, at intelligence services. so i'm not sure they're always happy with the fact that we have been very open and publish things as soon as we find them. it's just that bellingcat�*s motto, i checked back to the early days with eliot higgins, and the motto then was "identify, verify, amplify". it's an interesting motto but it seems to only work in one direction.

you do so much work, you personally, but the organisation does so much work, deep dive investigations into what russia is up to, covert intelligence, its military operations. you do so little on what the united states might be doing, for example, covertly in latin america or what israel might be doing with its intelligence and secret services. saudi arabia in yemen. why do you focus so much of your time, staff, energy on russia? first of all, all of the alternative topics you have just mentioned have been addressed and covered... barely, mr grozev, barely. ..and it is a matter of personal choice of the investigators. this is an organisation that gives independence to its researchers and there's two factors at play here. one is the personal interest of the researchers and, second, the fact that you might consider that a lot of the crime today, cross national, government—mandated crime, does come from a couple of bad actors that don't happen

to be the united states this year or decade. a lot of people watching this might wonder whether that element, absolute amplified focus on russia is entirelyjustified and why it that so many of your, as you put it, your staff have personal interests, which is all about investigating putin and russia rather than anything else? well, again it's a function of our backgrounds. i myself worked in russia. i love russia. i have spent enough time to believe that i understand russian sources and russian information space, and that's what i do. i've been very successful in making interesting investigations. but, again, a lot of my colleagues focus on their passion and that includes what israel is doing with human rights and we have published some very, very unpleasant investigations for the israeli establishment.

we have been attacked by them. we have published investigations into far—right groups operating, for example, in ukraine, the ukrainian government. many people in ukraine are very unhappy with bellingcat for that. so you don't please everybody and that's not... a final thought. as a journalist, ifind fascinating your work and your attempt to provide a different level of information to the general public, and it's all about data and it's all about detective work on an electronic level. but, it seems in recent months you've coloured a lot of your analysis with opinion. for example, just recently you opined that the bomb attack which killed vladlen tatarsky in st petersburg was, you said, aimed at "a legitimate target". if you're seeking the impartiality that comes with data—driven analysis, why are you indulging in so much opinion? i think i've being misquoted here because that was an analytical opinion.

i was trying to prove that ukraine might have been behind this because the prevailing opinion of experts on this day was this could not have been a ukrainian operation because they had no motive. i simply described analytically, in my opinion, ukraine would have considered that a legitimate target because it's not simply a journalist but also a fighter, an illegal fighterfrom their point of view, therefore, ukraine might have been behind this attempt or this assassination. christo grozev we have run out of time, sadly, but i really appreciate your time. thank you very much for being on hardtalk. hello there. high pressure is continuing to bring a lot of dry, settled, sunny weather throughout the day for most areas on thursday,

but like the last few days, we've got a keen easterly wind out there. that's taking the edge off. the temperatures will be noticeably chilly along north sea coasts and there will be some rain at times and more cloud across southeast england courtesy of this weather front, which will move in off the near continent. you'll notice there's a slight blue hue to the air mass, indicating that the air is quite chilly as well. so when you factor in the strong wind and slightly cooler air, then it will be a little bit fresher across the board. however, most places starting off dry, widespread sunshine and much of the country will stay dry and sunny all day. but then we'll see that area of cloud and some splashes of rain pushing into east anglia in the southeast during the afternoon. it's here where the winds will be quite gusty as well. so with a lack of sunshine here and the gusty winds, it'll actually feel on the cool side now. now, certainly cool along north sea coasts, 9 or 10 degrees at best, but head further inland, it's the low to mid—teens or the warmest spots again, western scotland, the high teens, maybe

even more than that. and like the last few days with the dry and sunny weather, tree pollen will be high or very high for many of us. so, as we head through thursday evening and overnight, that area, clouds, splashes of rain in the southeast starts to migrate westwards across much of england and also wales. whereas the northern half of the country will see clearer so another chilly one here. less cold, though, where we have the cloud, the rain and also the stronger breeze. so for friday, some changes for england and wales. we've got a number of weather fronts bringing more cloud outbreaks of rain, whereas scotland, northern ireland poking out into the high pressure. we'll have yet another dry and sunny day. pretty decent temperatures for western scotland, but england and wales will see outbreaks of rain. longer spells of rain, northern england, showery in nature, i think parts of wales, central and southern england, a little bit of sunshine in between. but with more cloud and showers around, that'll impact the temperatures, 10 to 13 degrees here, whereas again, another fairly warm one for parts of scotland. but it is all change as we head into the weekend. lower pressure starts to bring more unsettled weather for a time. and as that low clears into the north sea, it opens

the floodgates to a cold arctic northerly. so a much colder spell expected, particularly towards the end of the weekend and into next week. but you can see those temperatures beginning to fall across the north of the uk.

live from london, this is bbc news. i'm sally bundock with the headlines. at least 78 people are killed in a crush at a ramadan charity event in a school in yemen. thousands flock to a small town in western australia