On December 16, the European Union imposed sanctions against 29 missile guidance specialists identified in a joint investigation by The Insider and Bellingcat in late October 2022. The sanctioned individuals are employees at a secret unit of the Main Сomputation Center (MCC) of the Russian Armed Forces, and are directly engaged in targeting the territory of Ukraine with high-precision Russian missiles, which mostly hit civilians and civilian infrastructure.
All of them are MCC employees, and most of them work in the missile strike planning unit.
The MCC's missile guidance specialists were divided into three clusters by their call logs
Major General Robert Baranov – Director of the Main Computation Center of the General Staff (GVC) of the Russian Armed Forces
Colonel Evgeny Kapshuk – Deputy Commander of the GVC of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces
Colonel Igor Bagnyuk – Commander at the Missile Pre-Planning Unit at the GVC of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces
Lieutenant Colonel Anton Timashinov – responsible for programming the route of all three types of guided missiles (Kalibr, R-500, Kh-101)
Captain Elvira Obukhova
Captain Pavel Obukhov
Captain Vitalia Yaskelainen
Lieutenant Artem Vedenov
Major Ivan Popov
Major Matvey Lyubavin
Lieutenant Ekaterina Chugunova
Captain Sergei Ilyin
Captain Yuri Nikonov
Senior Lieutenant Dmitry Tikhonov
Captain Artem Chernov
Captain Alexey Betekhtin
Lieutenant Nikita Poplavsky
Major Andrey Ivanyutin
Lieutenant Igor Groza
Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Tarasov
Captain Georgy Starostin
Major Roman Kurochkin
Lieutenant Vladimir Petrov
Captain Anton Chulikov
Senior Lieutenant Olga Pismenskaya
Senior Lieutenant Pavel Vasilyev
Lieutenant Alexei Volkov
Captain Anton Shatun
Captain Stanislav Minkov.
The Insider’s sources indicate that the US will be imposing sanctions against the aforementioned guidance specialists in the near future.
