Russia created an elite hit squad to target its opponents abroad. One of its agents was compromised by using Google Translate.
In late 2022, Russia established a top-secret unit of elite intelligence agents with a sweeping mandate to carry out assassinations, abductions, and sabotage abroad. But according to a new investigation by The Insider, one officer has exposed the entire group by using Google Translate.
Known internally as Center 795, this unit was established by a Russian General Staff order in December 2022 as part of an effort to expand intelligence operations following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to The Insider’s sources, it was designed to function as a “shadow army” and given full autonomy, allowing the unit to bypass the Defense Ministry’s cumbersome and ineffective bureaucracy.
Despite reporting directly to General Staff Chief Valery Gerasimov, the unit was embedded inside the Kalashnikov Concern, a privately held Russian arms manufacturer. In addition to providing the unit with cover, the company provided its operational base: an administrative building in the Patriot Park military-industrial complex outside Moscow.
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According to The Insider’s sources, Center 795’s “ideological architect and principal backer” is billionaire arms dealer Andrei Bokarev, who co-owned the controlling stake in Kalashnikov until 2018.
The Center recruited the most experienced agents from multiple branches of the Russian security services. It allegedly fields around 500 officers in total, under the leadership of Denis Fisenko, a 52-year-old veteran of the FSB special forces Alfa Group. The “rigorous” selection process weeded out roughly a third of candidates for failing to prove themselves “in a unique way.” As The Insider writes,
Center 795 was granted the authority to poach officers from various other units of the army, the GRU, the FSB, Rosgvardia (Russia’s National Guard), and even the FSO, the Kremlin’s elite protection force — not necessarily with the consent of the relevant agency. Center 795 thus enjoys a comparatively higher status within the internal hierarchy of the Russian special services.
According to leaked tax records, those selected received compensation “unparalleled in the Russian army,” with department heads earning around $7,800 a month and Fisenko raking in roughly $500,000 a year.
The unit’s officers were divided into three directorates: Intelligence, Assault, and Combat Support. “The organizational structure and the choice of staff indicate that the unit’s goals were clearly linked to transnational repression and targeted neutralization conducted under a veil of corporate deniability,” The Insider says. By way of an example, journalists point to the unit’s sniper teams, which belong to the Intelligence branch: “a structural choice that suggests its primary role is not battlefield fire support but targeted liquidations.”
According to The Insider, Center 795 was designed to carry out everything from military operations in Ukraine to political assassinations and abductions targeting Kremlin critics abroad. However, the recent exposure of one agent is “bound to create lasting problems.”
The officer, Denis Alimov, was arrested at the Bogotá Airport in Colombia on February 24, 2026. He stands accused of orchestrating assassination attempts targeting at least two prominent Chechen dissidents based in Europe. According to The Insider, Alimov recruited a triggerman — Darko Durovic, a Serbo-Croatian speaker living in the United States — and offered a $1.5-million bounty for each target successfully “deported to Russia” dead or alive.
But the operation had a fatal flaw: Alimov and Durovic didn’t share a common language and relied on Google Translate to bridge the gap. While they communicated via an encrypted app, copying and pasting their messages into the translator created a plaintext trail on Google’s servers. Having obtained a surveillance warrant for the translation logs, FBI agents were able to monitor their correspondence in real time.
Alimov is currently in Colombian custody, pending extradition to the United States, where he faces charges of conspiracy to kidnap and murder and conspiracy to finance terrorism, which could land him in prison for life. “The most secretive unit in Russian military intelligence was undone not by a defector or a mole — but by a language barrier and a warrant,” The Insider concludes.