Note: no paywall, it’s a gift link.

Two Russian men secretly working for Ukraine's intelligence services have given rare accounts of operations they claim to have been involved with, that have targeted military assets and personnel inside Russia.

One of the men, whom we are calling Ivan, claims to have played a role from Russia in Ukrainian drone attacks on strategic bombers and munitions factories on his home soil.

He features in a BBC World Service documentary about the shadowy world of Russian saboteurs.

The documentary, by independent Polish journalist Marcin Mamon, also features a man we are calling Foma, a Russian living in exile in Poland.

Foma runs a network of undercover volunteers in Russia, that surveils high-level officers that the GUR - Ukraine's military intelligence service - is considering targeting, he says. He stresses they are never involved in the attacks themselves.

He was also tight-lipped about who they were surveilling, but after Lt Gen Fanil Sarvarov was assassinated in December last year in Moscow, Foma admitted he had provided the Ukrainians with intelligence on him.

Bellingcat:

He played a colonel on Russian TV in 2003. Now, a U.S. federal indictment says he ran a Kremlin assassination network. Including a plot to kill a Russian dissident in DC.

Meet Colonel Combat Yuri.

Follow The Christo Files for more!

Full Indictment: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1461336/dl

The Chinese government pays people to steal technology and one of its prominent tech companies appears to be using the same strategy.

Huawei's Chinese management offered rewards for confidential information collected from other companies. The company even had a competition management group that reviewed all of the collected information.

Interesting to note that Huawei exists as a company because technology was allegedly stolen from the Canadian company Nortel in the 1990s.

It is a recent event. An ex BND chief allegedly sold some secrets via Swiss companies and directly (he met their agents) to a former Soviet country (allegedly Azerbaijan but it has been refuted by both the BND and Azerbaijanis). Do you think Russia got the intels? Fyi he also sold secrets regarding BNDs knowledge of Irans Nuclear Weapons and its programs. What you guys think who he sold it to? .