this is bbc news. we will have all of the main news stories and headlines for you as newsday continues at the top of the hour straight after hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. in a world awash with information and disinformation, who and what can we trust? fact, data points, original open sources — they are all powerful weapons in this information war. and that's 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. now, alexei navalny famously described you once as "just

a bulgarian nerd with a laptop". since he said that, you've become the joint winner of an oscar. you are in the international limelight as an investigative journalist. does all of this attention make yourjob harder? well, 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 me for a selfie. that's about the only disruption. you, until very recently, were based in vienna, but you are talking to me from the united states. did you move away from vienna because you didn't feel safe there? in fact, that's what happened. although i didn't physically move away, i was in the united states to help promote the film, navalny, the 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 unfortunately, i'm stuck in the united states. when you say stuck in the united states, people will be interested to know whether you, you 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 that's away from family and from 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'm based. before we get into the detail of all the different investigations and the work you've done looking at russia and some of its covert operations and some of its military operations, let's, if we can, 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. so why are you with bellingcat? and has bellingcat fundamentally shifted its main focus of attention? well, i mean, you are right, the founder of bellingcat, eliot... eliot higgins. ..higgins, he did start his blog and blogging platform initially because of his acute interest in the details of open—source investigations of the war in yemen and in syria. but by 2014, when he formalised bellingcat as the bellingcat platform with this particular name, i believe the first project that bellingcat looked at as bellingcat was the shoot—down of mhi7,

the malaysian airliner, over eastern ukraine injuly 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. i covered the same topics, mostly interested in disinformation and the weaponization of information because that was kind of part of my journalism 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 is a wide gap in the understanding of what russia's. .. not only russia's, but in this particular case, russia's security services are doing internationally. and that 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 clandestine

operations of russia. right now, i believe it is fair to say your key focus is trying 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? well, first of all, we're not doing anything better. we're doing things differently and with a different scale. and i'll talk about some of the things that i personally do but also my colleagues at bellingcat, from a particular part of bellingcat that is only focused on gathering open—source evidence of potential war crimes. we don't call them war crimes yet because they have to be qualified as such by an internationaljudicial body, but we're calling them

civilian harm incidents. and that is a large—scale process of scraping data, validating, geo—locating these particular photographs that may appear on twitter or on telegram or on facebook. preserving them in such a way that there's 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's what bellingcat is doing somewhat differently. one fascinating example of work you've done — you spend a lot of time trying to identify the 30 and more military engineers, i think they're 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. now, you've 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, we 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 precision, so—called precision cruise missiles by russia are not always as precise as they claim to be. so, that gave us some initial hypothesis of who this unit might be. furthermore, the people that have

worked in this unit had a particular training from missile and rocket engineering universities in russia with a military focus, and then what we did is we got... i got a lot of the phone records, the sort of metadata of the phone records of some of the key people in this unit and we found that they were communicating with one another, particularly in the eve of very massive strikes on ukrainian infrastructure. and some hospitals and kindergartens were also hit on the way. and then essentially i confronted all of these people one by one, and i have to say the first one i confronted did not even deny that that's what they do. he just said that he's not authorised to give me the answers to the questions that i'm asking. so, it was relatively traditionaljournalism, except it started with a data point and a hypothesis that was based on mathematics. yeah, what's fascinating about that story is that you rely so very 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, cos we can't always verify it, are you saying that you believe in data more than human intel, human intelligence? do you think that data dominates all now? well, i think data should be taken seriously and it wasn't always taken seriously byjournalism as a profession. and i think there's room for traditionaljournalism, which is source—based, but there's room for independently data—based journalism. what i like about data is that you don't have sources who have a bias or who have maybe a conspiratorial view of the surroundings that surround them. data cannot mislead you — well, it can mislead you if you misinterpret it, but it cannot consciously lead you down a rabbit hole. right.

but, mr grozev, you also at different times over the last few months have also said that you do have deep sources inside the russian security services. so i'm 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're building based on data bits and pieces. then sometimes you don't understand why something happens and then it's 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, do you have several sources, for example, inside the fsb, maybe within the wagner private military cooperation, whom you are talking to about what is happening on the ground? i've been open on social media that i do have sources within wagner and this is the result of previous investigations where we did contact

a lot of wagner over this, and some of them have agreed to continue a talking relationship late at night, where we may be on a different side of this particular war, but sometimes there is a reason for them to share and over—share. let's talk about another one of your methods, and that's a much more controversial one. that's making payments to third parties to acquire information which violates russian privacy laws, and which you know has 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 a product. i'm a volunteer for bellingcat, and i have been a volunteer for most of the time, and i've paid out of my own pocket.

and i have set my own boundaries and rules of when that is acceptable. and they're very strict. one of the things that must happen before i decide to pay for data is i might have, i must have a strong supported hypothesis that there is a government—perpetrated crime that i'm investigating, and it's not just any crime, but it's a government—mandated crime. right, but that's a suspicion you have. it's a hunch, it has to be, because the whole point is you're conducting an investigation. so you're essentially, some would say very arrogantly, assuming the right to violate the law in pursuit of your journalistic investigation, and you're doing it in a way that violates personal privacies. you access everything from flight manifests to driver licence details of individuals. i dare say maybe even health records of individuals in russia, because the truth is in russia all of this is for sale if you've got enough money. but there's an ethical problem here, because surely those on different sides of the ideological fence from you can say, "look at christo grozev. "he's 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." but again, i'm transparent about what i do. i've 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's a government crime that otherwise will remain uninvestigated unless you cross that boundary into getting data from a government that will 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 tested 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 considered whether this breach of privacy laws is overridden by the public interest. and they decided, the court decided that yes, there's no problem, there's no conflict here. there is a lower law which is called the privacy law, and there's an overriding public interest when we talk about government—mandated assassinations. so how far do you believe that

overriding public interest will allow you to go? for example, would you and your team undertake direct hacking yourselves? no. again, there would be an exceptional case when the hack would be on a fake identity email account, when this person does not exist. it's a spy. this may be a sort of borderline case, but we would never actively start hacking any personal email accounts. you've never hacked in that way? we've 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. just 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, changing the game in a sense when it comes to digital capacities. there is also, of course, the rise of deepfakes, 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 tradecraft in obtaining data. i mean, the source of 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 dataset, and vertically or longitudinally with previously released data. so you have to see the same person in a database that was leaked in 2018 as you find it in the 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 to 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... ah, well, yes, that's an important little caveat you just made. you've 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 ned 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, it's not an ethical dilemma at all. well, you say you're independent, but for example why do you still take money... as bellingcat. i know you're not right now the boss of bellingcat, but why does bellingcat still take money from the european union, for example? well, i mean, the european union foundations are very transparent about how they fund. they have auctions, they have standard procedures and bellingcat participate in those.

and again, i mean, it's a transparent organisation which has its own annual report that is extremely granular. it shows where money comes from and how it is spent, so as long again 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 absolutely love what you do, and 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 to. and burge says, "unaffiliated analysts are harder to smear." is there some sort of symbiotic relationship between you and, let's say, the cia, mi6 in the uk? well, i mean, it's up for them to answer this question, and some of them have opined, as you quoted.

but i know of the exact opposite scenario where intelligence services, including m15 or 6, have been very unhappy with the pace at 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 m15 and m16 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 not sure that they're always happy with the fact that we're very open and we 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, the motto then was "identify, verify, amplify". it's an interesting motto, but it seems to only work in one direction.

i mean, you do so much of your work... you personally, but the organisation does so much work, deep—dive investigations into what russia is up to, covert intelligence, its military operations. and 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 that you've just mentioned have been addressed and covered by bellingcat. barely, barely, mr grozev. and it is a matter of personal choices 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 interests of the researchers, and second, the fact that you might consider that a lot of the crime today, the cross—national government—mandated crime does come from a couple of bad actors that don't happen to be the united states this year, this decade...

well, i think a lot of people watching this might wonder whether that element or that absolutely amplified focus on russia is entirely justified. and why is 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've spent enough time to believe that i understand russian sources and russian information space. and that's what i do, and 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. we've published some very, very unpleasant investigations for the israeli establishment. we've been attacked by them. we've published investigations into far—right groups operating, for example, in ukraine, and the ukrainian government and many people in ukraine are very angry with bellingcat about that. so you can't please everybody,

and that's not our view. a final thought cos, 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". now, if you're seeking the impartiality that comes with data—driven analysis, why are you indulging in so much opinion? i think i'm being scolded 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 that day was that this could not have been

a ukrainian operation because they had no motive. and i simply described analytically that, in my opinion, ukraine would've considered that a legitimate target because it's not simply a journalist, it's also a fighter, and a legalfighter from their point of view. therefore ukraine might have been behind this attempt or this assassination. all right, well, christo grozev we've run out of time sadly, but i really appreciate your time. thank you very much for being on hardtalk. hello there. our weather story for friday is a tale of two halves, the best of the weather once again through scotland and northern ireland, closest to this area of high pressure. these weather fronts will introduce

some cloud and rain at times, be a bit of a nuisance, and that nagging easterly wind still making it feel rather raw on exposed east coasts. so first thing in the morning, the rain quite heavy across norfolk, lincolnshire, into the east midlands, gradually drifting towards wales. there'll also be some showery outbreaks of rain across essex and kent. but north of that, not a bad start. it will be a chilly start. a touch of frost not out of the question across the grampian, but at least in scotland and northern ireland, you will have some sunshine and it will continue like that for much of the day. that easterly breeze, though, always making it feel cooler on exposed east coasts. sheltered western areas seeing the best of the sunshine and warmth. and as we go through the afternoon, we'll see a line of more persistent rain stretching across the south coast. sunny spells and scattered showers driven in by that strong easterly breeze coming in off the north sea. so 10—12 degrees once again on exposed east coasts. further west, we could see 16 or 17 degrees.

favoured spots once again, northern ireland and western scotland. here, the pollen will be high — it's tree pollen at this time of year. medium, perhaps, across much of central and eastern england. now, as we move into the early hours of saturday, we are likely to see this weather front producing some showery outbreaks of rain through scotland and northern ireland, and at the same time, we've got some showery outbreaks of rain into the south—west. sandwiched in between the two, drier and brighter, and once again, much of scotland will see some sunshine. but the temperatures really subdued by then, 11—14 degrees. and as we move out of sunday into monday, we'll start to see this colder northerly flow take over and you really will start to notice the difference right across the country. so on sunday, we'll see some showery outbreaks of rain just drifting away from the east. drier behind it, but that northerly wind will make it feel quite chilly at times. so temperatures really falling away in scotland, 7—11 degrees by then. 1a degrees the maximum on sunday.

and that's going to be the trend as we move into the week ahead. it will turn wetter and then much colder.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm mariko oi. the headlines... thousands flee sudan as fighting between rival military factions shows no signs of abating. criminal charges are dropped against the actor alec baldwin over a fatal movie set shooting. in the uk the deputy prime minster�*s political future is in the balance — as the prime minister is handed a report on bullying allegations involving dominic raab. ignition is up two, one... and the most powerful space rocket ever built takes off, but explodes minutes later.