A British-based investigative group claims that one of two men charged with attempted murder in the nerve-agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal earlier this year is a highly decorated officer in Russia's military intelligence service.
Bellingcat, an open-source investigation website that has reported on the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, says that one of the two men — whose passport name is Ruslan Boshirov — is actually Anatoly Chepiga, who was deployed to Chechnya three times and in 2014 was given a "Hero of the Russian Federation" citation, the country's highest award.
Boshirov and another man whose passport name is Alexander Petrov, have been charged in the U.K. in the March attack in Salisbury on the Russian ex-double agent Skripal and his daughter Yulia using the Novichok, a type of nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.