Russia-Ukraine war: Young game designers used to launch missile attacks on Ukraine

Working to extinguish fires and search for missing people after a missile strike on a residential building in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Photo / Nicole Tung, The New York Times

An investigation has uncovered the secretive military unit of young engineers behind the Kremlin’s high-precision cruise missile attacks on Ukrainian civilians.

Game designers, engineers and IT professionals as young as 24 have helped orchestrate the Kremlin’s deadly strikes, open-source investigators from Bellingcat revealed on Monday night.

Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev spent almost six months parsing through employment data from Russia’s black market and tracking phone calls between graduates from Russia’s leading military engineering schools.

“Phone metadata shows contacts between these individuals and their superiors spiked shortly before many of the high-precision Russian cruise missile strikes that have killed hundreds and deprived millions in Ukraine of access to electricity and heating,” Bellingcat said.

The unit, which has at least 33 members working from secure command centres in Moscow and St Petersburg, is known as the Main Computation Centre of the General Staff, or the GVT. Its role in the Kremlin’s cruise missile attacks was not previously known to the public.

The young engineers identified by Bellingcat appear to come from military engineering backgrounds as well as civilian jobs in IT and computer science.

Engineers claimed they had regular jobs

“Some had prior military service as navy captains or ship engineers. Others had civilian work experience as corporate IT specialists or game designers,” Bellingcat said.

The unit appears to consist of three smaller teams of about 10 engineers each, with each team responsible for different cruise missiles launched from the air, ground or sea.

Most of the engineers contacted by Bellingcat confirmed their identities but claimed to have no links to the military and instead insisted they had regular jobs, ranging from florist to pig farmer.

Another officer asked for anonymity to provide a group photo of their unit and gave details of how they were tasked with manually programming flight paths for high-precision cruise missiles.

‘How do you sleep at night?’

The engineers calculate the flight path in advance, loading the data onto a USB stick which is then plugged into the missiles.

While the missiles rain down on Ukraine, the unit’s members appear to be living typical middle-class lives, pursuing niche hobbies and posting holiday photographs on social media.

Lieutenant Colonel Igor Bagnyuk, identified as a unit commander, was also an avid coin collector, who was buying and selling coins even as his team was preparing missiles for another attack.

“His obsession with numismatics appeared particularly striking on the morning of October 10, 2022 when, his records show, he communicated several times with the coin-trading website eurocoin.ru at 6.45am, about an hour before a salvo of missiles hit Kyiv, killing dozens,” the investigation said.

One of Bagnyuk’s most senior officers, Major Matvey Lyubavin, appeared to be living the comfortable life of a middle-class Muscovite.

Lyubavin did not explicitly deny his affiliation and snapped back when confronted by Grozev, who asked the officer how he sleeps at night after programming Russian missiles to hit civilians.

“You know well I can’t answer this,” he was quoted as saying.

A few years before the invasion, Lyubavin retweeted support for the Telegram messaging app’s refusal to hand over user data to Russian authorities.

His phone number appears in the leaked database of a strategic voting initiative by the team of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.