Meet Kirill Griaznov, Russian reality TV star and an FSB officer, arrested for the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony terror plot.
Griaznov has direct ties to the GRU's infamous sabotage and assassination squad, unit 29155 — the one responsible for 2021 Navalny’s poisoning and linked to “Havana syndrome” attacks around the world.
The terror plot to disrupt the opening ceremony of Paris Olympics was discovered because Griaznov got drunk.
- Griaznov lived in France for 14 years.
- In 2010, after years of working as a lawyer for financial services companies, he suddenly decided to become a chef.
While in Luxembourg, he met Lord Robert Skidelsky, a British peer. Griaznov managed to forge a connection and asked to meet Skidelsky again in Moscow. Skidelsky appeared keen.
(Skidelsky was suspended from the House of Lords last year for not properly disclosing his ties to a think tank bankrolled by sanctioned Russian oligarchs. He was also very critical of the UK's security assistance to Ukraine and stood against Swedish and Finnish NATO membership.)
Griaznov's social media showcases food photos, selfies, and humorous videos with him playing the main character.
In Russia, Griaznov became known after appearing on the show "Choose Me” (Russian copy of "The Bachelor”), where he was positioned as a successful businessman and restaurateur.
But according to his former girlfriend, Griaznov had a drinking problem — which at the end became the reason of his shameful downfall.
Griaznov was unmasked because he got drunk en route to Paris from Russia via Turkey. He was so inebriated that the airline refused to let him on the plane in Istanbul — and because of the way he behaved, he got blacklisted.
Distressed Griaznov phoned a friend in Bulgaria and asked to pick him up at the Turkish-Bulgarian border. The friend agreed and drove to get him.
In St. Vlas town, Griaznov and the friend went for dinner, he again drank too much, and under the influence, bragged about his personal involvement into a Russian operation to disrupt the Olympic opening ceremony in Paris. The friend didn’t believe him. So, to prove that he wasn’t lying, Griaznov showed his FSB ID.
”They will remember this Olympics for a long time!” he snarled.
As the duo was traveling to Varna, Griaznov took a call from his FSB supervisor and reported to him that everything was on track for Paris. He also reported that he recruited “one more Moldovan." (Moldovans, recruited by Russia, were previously caught painting “Stars of David” in Paris to ramp up fears of anti-Semitism.)
Griaznov’s brother, Dmitri, is the chief of staff at the secretariat of Belarus-Russia Union Assembly (a clearinghouse for FSB types). Unsurprisingly, Dmitri’s registered address is the same as the address of Denis Sergeev, who was the Unit 29155 operational commander for the Skripal poisoning in the UK in 2018.
Griaznov also had a sensitive military dossier in his email inbox that belongs to a GRU Spetsnaz colonel — you know, the sort of thing any self-respecting Russian lawyer-turned-chef would normally have in their attachments.
Griaznov in Prague.
On July 19, Griaznov was arrested on charges of espionage and faces up to 30 years in prison. Some "diplomatic materials" and identification indicating his affiliation with "Unit V" of the Russian secret services were found on him.
Griaznov's decision to get into the culinary arts reminds another late-in-life chef, whom you may have seen on @60Minutes: Vitalii Kovalev, once a military engineer with security clearance, who was arrested after a high-speed car chase in Key West. After 2 years in a U.S. prison, he went back to Russia, got mobilized and then killed somewhere in Ukraine.
How many more of these “chefs” residing in the West are cooking plots aimed to destabilize and destroy our way of life?
