Investigation reveals ‘remote control killers’ behind Russia’s missile strikes

thehill: As Russia ramps up its airstrikes against Ukraine, a new investigation has revealed that “remote control killers” allegedly programmed Moscow’s missile attacks.

Russia has been hitting Ukraine with strikes since the start of the war eight months ago and has appeared to push forward a renewed surge of attacks against the country’s power grid and infrastructure in recent days.

The strikes have often hit nonmilitary sites and caused hundreds of civilian deaths, despite Russia’s touting of its high-precision weapons.

A six-month investigation conducted by Bellingcat, The Insider and Der Spiegel found a hidden group of dozens of military engineers working within the “Main Computation Centre of the General Staff” of the Russian armed forces to allegedly program the missile flight paths.

“These strikes, that hit non-military targets, suggest either that the missiles failed to follow their pre-programmed flight path, that targeting was based on defective intelligence information, or that civilian harm was intentional,” the report reads.

“Attribution of the programming of the flight-path of these allegedly high-precision weapons is relevant as the deliberate or indiscriminate targeting of Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure could constitute potential war crimes,” the report adds.

Phone data found in the investigation reportedly suggests the workers were active and in communication with their supervisors just before a number of the Russian strikes.

The clandestine group is made up predominantly of young men and women with information technology or computer gaming backgrounds, some with prior education or experience with missile programming, according to the investigation.

One member approached by the investigators shared anonymously that “certain contextual information about how the group was tasked with manually programming the sophisticated flight paths of Russia’s high-precision cruise missiles.” The rest reportedly didn’t answer calls, declined to speak or denied affiliation with the group.

“The clandestine group of engineers that we identified appears to consist of three teams of approximately 10 engineers each, with each team dedicated to one specific high-precision missile type,” the report reads.

The engineer subgroups appear to specialize in sea-launched, ground-launched and air-launched missiles.

Bellingcat is a Netherlands-based nonprofit and open-source investigative journalism hub. Der Spiegel is a German news outlet, and The Insider is an investigative journalism site from Latvia.