Christo Grozev

He's probably as far, as high as anyone can go in the Russian military intelligence structure.

And the loss of a general like him will be felt profoundly.

He's what you might call the chief operating officer of the GRU, the Third Russian Military Intelligence Unit.

And he survived several of his own commanders.

And as such, he's seen by many people.

as probably the most influential person in the organization, more important even than its commander, Igor Kostykov.

Over the last 10 years that I've been following his career, he has been involved with absolutely every significant operation that we know of, starting from the

trying to extricate and destroy the evidence of the shooting down of MH17 in 2014.

He personally never felt the need to not get his hands dirty in operations.

He smuggled the book, the weapon that shot down MH17, the airliner, back in 2014.

He accompanied the team that shot it down and tried to hide the evidence.

He was also involved with the actual operation of the annexation of Crimea.

Later, he was sanctioned over his personal involvement in supervised

the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter and the murder of Don Sturgis.

That was the result of that operation.

More recently, he was directly involved in probably the most trusted architect of the invasion of Ukraine.

Before the invasion started, he was tasked with organizing several quasi-private military companies of the like of the period Wagner so that they have the capacity to invade Ukraine.

So literally, he's been across the board on all of these operations.

Well, first of all, he was probably the top target of Ukrainian intelligence services for years, not only because he was so significant in the invasion, but also partly because he himself is Ukrainian born and he's considered somewhat of a traitor in Ukraine proper.

He did create a lot of powerful enemies within Russia as well.