The invisible war Moscow decided to institutionalize
There comes a moment when a state stops fighting only on the battlefield and decides to turn clandestinity into a permanent function of power. For the Russia of total war, that moment seems to have a precise name: Center 795. Not just a special unit, but a structure created after the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, designed to operate where the Kremlin needs opacity, speed, and plausible deniability the most: sabotage, kidnappings, political assassinations, sensitive cross-border operations, but also missions directly linked to the Ukrainian theater. According to the investigation published by The Insider on March 13, 2026, Center 795 was created by decision of the chief of the general staff in December 2022 and by June 2023 it was already almost fully operational. It was an autonomous, separate structure, answering directly to Valery Gerasimov or the deputy defense minister, and therefore outside the normal GRU chain of command, even though many veterans of military intelligence were brought into it.
A GRU duplicate to control power more effectively
Its creation says a great deal about Putin’s logic. After 2022, Russian targets multiplied: facilities working for Ukraine, Western support networks, Russian opponents abroad, journalists, Chechen figures hostile to Moscow. Old restraints disappeared, and actions that were once exceptional became systematic. Moscow already had a structure experienced in such operations, the infamous Unit 29155 linked to Andrei Averyanov, associated with the Skripal poisoning and other sabotage acts in Europe. But that structure had become too exposed: many agents had been identified, several missions had failed, and accusations of corruption, crude mistakes, and even internal scandals were piling up. So the Kremlin did not remove Averyanov; it placed a competing body alongside him: a more secret, better shielded duplicate with partly overlapping missions. This is the classic method of contemporary Russian power: multiply centers of authority, fuel rivalries, and prevent any single apparatus from becoming indispensable.
An unprecedented fusion between Defense and the Federal Security Service
The most striking aspect may be the composition of the new structure. Although formally placed within the Ministry of Defense, Center 795 was reportedly heavily filled with men from the Special Purpose Center of the Federal Security Service, especially from the Alfa and Vympel units. Commander Denis Fisenko is described as an Alfa man, as are deputy commander Nikolai Zryachev and other key officials. Sources cited in the investigation describe this cooperation between agencies as something unprecedented in both scale and depth: personnel from the Federal Security Service transferred en masse under the Ministry of Defense, yet still within a command chain leading upward to Gerasimov. The reason appears to have been twofold: on the one hand, Putin wanted to use his preferred apparatus more directly in external operations; on the other, it was believed that the Federal Security Service would provide better protection of secrecy. Ironically, that assumption would prove unfounded.
The shadow of Chemezov, Bokarev, and Kalashnikov
At this point, the picture becomes even more interesting, because Center 795 does not appear to be a mere bureaucratic creation of the state. Its operational base is reportedly located in Kubinka, inside Patriot Park, on the site of the former military unit 75127, specifically in an administrative building linked to the Kalashnikov Group and therefore to the Rostec empire of Sergei Chemezov, one of Putin’s closest associates since the KGB era. The project, again according to the investigation, also benefited from the financial support of oligarch Andrei Bokarev, co-owner of Kalashnikov. Some sources attribute to Bokarev himself the idea of building a fully autonomous elite unit; others connect the project to Sergei Vasilenko, former deputy head of Alfa’s combat branch, with Bokarev acting as political and financial sponsor. In any case, the result was clear: to create an army within the army, freed from the slowness, leaks, and inertia of ordinary structures. In the background one can also discern another element: providing Chemezov, a powerful figure but regarded by some as not entirely aligned with the war, with his own mini-armed force led by trusted men. Yet after the Prigozhin precedent, the idea of granting too much autonomy to an armed structure also fed suspicions inside the system.
How Center 795 is organized
The internal architecture of Center 795 alone reveals the scale of its ambitions. The figures point to around five hundred officers divided into three major directorates: reconnaissance, assault, and combat support. The reconnaissance directorate, the largest, includes nine departments covering almost the entire spectrum of modern intelligence: monitoring open sources and social networks, commercial satellite imagery, public databases, interception of signals and satellite communications, operational and tactical optical reconnaissance using Orlan and Eleron drones, plus three parallel ground surveillance groups deliberately designed to watch the same target without each knowing about the others. There is even a nineteenth department of snipers placed not under assault but under reconnaissance, suggesting that its function was targeted elimination rather than battlefield support. The assault directorate has four operational departments, each divided into four autonomous groups, compartmentalized so that if one cell falls it cannot compromise the others. The combat support directorate reveals ambitions almost comparable to those of a small complete armed force: armored units, artillery, medical services, bomb disposal, air defense, logistics, maintenance, fortification, and anti-tank capabilities. The investigation even mentions equipment such as T-90A tanks and 300-millimeter Smerch multiple rocket launchers. This was therefore no longer just a sabotage team, but a core capable of combining intelligence, firepower, and operational projection.
Harsh recruitment, very high salaries, civilian cover
Selection was reportedly strict: about one-third of applicants were rejected. Pay, by contrast, was very high. The investigation speaks of roughly half a million rubles a month for a directorate chief and up to three million for Fisenko, in addition to the Defense Ministry salary. The Center also reportedly had the power to recruit men from the army, the GRU, the Federal Security Service, and even the Federal Protective Service without needing approval from their parent agencies, a sign of superior status within the Russian hierarchy. Even more interesting is the role of civilian cover. Figures such as chief of staff Drozdov and intelligence head Radkevich allegedly passed through Kalashnikov without leaving traces in military documentation. Both are said to be veterans of the Belarusian KGB’s Alfa Group, suggesting targeted recruitment even from allied services, useful precisely because it provided personnel without an easily traceable Russian institutional biography for Western counterintelligence services.
The Alimov case and the Chechen track
The most concrete and explosive part of the investigation concerns Denis Alimov, forty-two years old, a former Stavropol OMON officer and later an Alfa member from around 2008 onward. Sources describe him as linked to North Caucasus counterterrorism circles and even in direct contact with Ramzan Kadyrov, whom he allegedly helped in 2023 in the search for a missing nephew in Moscow. After his transfer to Center 795, Alimov reportedly continued working on the Chechen file, but with an external projection. According to The Insider, one of his tasks was the kidnapping of members of the family of Akhmed Zakayev, the Chechen exile living in the United Kingdom. To operate in Western Europe, he needed an intermediary who could not be directly linked to Russian services. He allegedly found one in Darko Durović, a Serbo-Croat residing in the United States, recruited as the main asset for the operation. The investigation also states that Alimov was in contact with other Serbs, including Davor Savić and Dejan Berić, a figure known for recruiting Serbian and Bosnian fighters for Donbas. During a meeting in Moscow in October 2024, in a restaurant near Lubyanka, Alimov allegedly handed Durović an advance of 60,000 dollars, promising about 1.5 million for each target successfully deported and more than 10 million for a third target to be captured alive or dead.
The grotesque failure: Google Translate
This is where the story takes on an almost tragicomic strategic dimension. Center 795 had been designed as a structure isolated from the outside world, with encrypted applications, pseudonyms, compartmentalization, and protection against electronic tracking. But Alimov spoke Russian, Durović Serbo-Croatian, and neither truly mastered the other’s language. The solution adopted was as simple as it was suicidal: using Google Translate to turn Serbian reports into Russian and Russian orders into Serbian. Messages passed through applications considered secure, but the translation itself moved through the servers of an American company and could therefore be obtained by the FBI through a warrant. Investigators thus allegedly gained access in plain text to the entire operational flow: surveillance in Western Europe, the description of a white villa by the sea surrounded by a white wall with an Islamic symbol on the gate, attempts to monitor during Friday prayer at the mosque, searches for Glock 17 and Glock 21 pistols, all the way to the package of technical data supplied by Alimov with IP addresses and European phone numbers used by the target. A structure built to be invisible was thus pierced not by a sophisticated hostile penetration, but by the convenience of an automatic translator.
The arrest in Colombia and the political meaning of the whole affair
On February 24, Alimov was arrested at El Dorado Airport in Bogotá after arriving on a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. According to the investigation, the trip had been organized in haste, including an attempt to buy a prepaid burner phone at the last minute. He was traveling under tourist cover with a hotel reservation in Cartagena, a pattern that Center 795 officers reportedly used frequently to mask international movements. The charges are extremely serious: conspiracy to commit murder, kidnapping, material support for terrorism, and financing terrorism, with the risk of life imprisonment. But the damage to Moscow goes beyond Alimov’s personal fate. The real problem is that the organization chart, the base, the names, the methods, and the industrial ties of Center 795 are now entering judicial files and Western intelligence archives. Fisenko and the other commanders, until now hidden in the shadows, will hardly be able to continue operating as before. Thus, Russia’s latest attempt to rebuild, after Unit 29155, a more efficient and more invisible clandestine machine ends up stumbling over the same human weakness that haunts all secret apparatuses: the temptation of the shortcut.
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