Christo Grozev

“There are tens of thousands of intercepted phone calls. You could hear the soldiers reporting they have been told to disregard civilian casualties.”
– Grozev on Russian soldiers in Ukraine

BIO

Christo Grozev is CEO of Bellingcat as of January 2022. For many years, he was lead investigator with Bellingcat, focusing on security threats, extraterritorial clandestine operations, and the weaponization of information. His investigations into the identity of the suspects in the 2018 Novichok poisonings in the UK earned him and his team the European Prize for Investigative Journalism. Grozev also authored, among other works, investigations into the 2016 Montenegro failed coup, the 2015 shelling of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, the poisoning of a Bulgarian arms entrepreneur by GRU operatives, as well as the identification of key suspects in the MH17 downing. The Bellingcat investigation into the Berlin Kleine Tiergarten murder in August 2019, led by Grozev, served as the basis for the indictment and final court verdict in the court case against the perpetrator and the Russian state, in its role as commissioner of the assassination.

Christo Grozev also supervised the multi-national investigation into the nerve-agent poisoning of Alexey Navalny, which earned the joint investigative team the German Nannen Prize and two Emmys for investigative journalism.

Grozev has a degree in Journalism and Mass Communications from the American University in Bulgaria, and Law and Economics degrees from IMADEC University in Austria. Prior to his role in Bellingcat, he managed a multinational media group with presence in 13 countries, and has spent several years living and working in Russia and Estonia, before moving to his current base in Austria.

Read Christo’s interview here: “Holding power to Account with Technology”

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Preliminary talk title at Millennium Innovation Forum:

“The technology race between modern autocrats and investigative journalists“