Сотрудники ГРУ могли вызывать “гаванский синдром” у американских и канадских дипломатов и работников спецслужб, считают авторы совместного расследования The Insider, передачи 60 Minutes американского канала CBS News и немецкого издания Der Spiegel.

“Гаванский синдром” – неофициальная болезнь, для которой характерны головокружение, тошнота, головные боли и проблемы со слухом и координацией. С 2014 года подобные симптомы наблюдаются у сотрудников посольств США и Канады в разных странах.

Расследовали выяснили, что симптомы “гаванского синдрома” наблюдались у зарубежных дипломатов в те же периоды и в тех же местах, куда приезжали сотрудники воинской части 29155 ГРУ. Именно это подразделение связывают с с отравлениями “Новичком” Сергея и Юлии Скрипалей в Великобритании, а также бизнесмена Емельяна Гебрева в Болгарии.

Об этой связи говорят данные перелетов сотрудников ГРУ, которые с 2014 года оказываются в тех же местах, где фиксируют случаи “гаванского синдрома”. По данным расследователей, в ноябре 2014 года жертвой “гаванского синдрома” стал сотрудник американского консульства во Франкфурте, который узнал в одном из вероятных нападавших предполагаемого сотрудника ГРУ Егора Гордиенко.

Еще один инцидент произошел в 2017 году в Китае – у одного из сотрудников американского консульства, ответственного за хранение секретной информации, врачи зафиксировали “неизвестное воздействие окружающей среды, вызвавшее черепно-мозговую травму”. Расследовали отмечают, что информация о китайских инцидентах у них неполная.

Подобный случай произошел с женой американского дипломата в 2021 году в Тбилиси. Незадолго до приступа женщина заметила из окна своего дома мужчину, в котором узнала Альберта Аверьянова, сына командира части Андрея Аверьянова. Также расследователи рассказывают о вероятных инцидентах в 2021 году в Белграде и Ханое.

Журналисты отмечают, что пережившие атаки не получили должной помощи − их жалобы списали на психическое расстройство.

Помимо описанных случаев, расследователи сообщили, что замкомандира части 29155 ГРУ Иван Терентьев получил госзаказ на изучение “потенциальных возможностей нелетального акустического оружия при военных (боевых) действиях в городе”.

Авторы расследования отмечают, что прямых улик в пользу причастности ГРУ к использованию “акустического оружия” нет, однако теперь “американские власти могут переосмыслить свое отношение к “гаванскому синдрому”.

В эфире Настоящего Времени один из участников журналистского расследования, главред The Insider Роман Доброхотов рассказал, что они три года хотели заняться темой “гаванского синдрома”, но не сразу нашли к ней подход.

– Мы года три присматривались к этой теме. И у нас были разные представления о том, кто может стоять за этими атаками, хотя сам факт, что это не просто какие-то странные инциденты со здоровьем, а атаки российских спецслужб, подозрения были довольно давно. Не бывает таких совпадений: редкие симптомы и именно американские дипломаты, часто так или иначе работающие по России.

Год назад мы стали работать с американской программой “60 минут”. Появилась уникальная возможность связаться с жертвами “гаванского синдрома”. Мы изучили несколько десятков эпизодов и смогли, очертив круг подозреваемых, показать их фотографии жертвам. Пострадавшие опознали сотрудников войсковой части 29155: Егора Гордиенко, это франкфуртская атака 2014 года, и сына Аверьянова, Альберта Аверьянова, который тоже сотрудник, несмотря на свою молодость, ему был всего 21 год во время атаки в Тбилиси. По словам жертвы, он находился просто на малолюдной улице напротив здания в момент, когда атака происходила.

У нас есть показания свидетелей, сопоставление поездок сотрудников в/ч 29155 с инцидентами, документы, которые подтверждают, что ровно те сотрудники получали государственный заказ на исследование так называемого акустического оружия. У нас также есть данные о работе ученых, связанных с Военно-медицинской академией имени Кирова. И это публичная информация. Именно эта военно-медицинская академия по странному совпадению изучала то, что называется “синдром Минора”. Это тот диагноз, который ставят многим жертвам “гаванского синдрома”. Очень редкое заболевание, которое в обычных условиях почти не встречается.

Если говорить о симптомах, то это потеря равновесия на ровном месте, когда человек не может даже нормально встать с кровати. У него настолько плохо работает вестибулярный аппарат. Человек может упасть на улице. Это ощущение сильного давления в ушах, иногда очень сильной боли в ушах, причем это приходит одномоментно. Человек вдруг себя очень плохо чувствует, испытывает давление в голове и в ушах, часто слышит очень громкий шум, похожий на ультразвук или стрекотание кузнечика. И после этого шокового состояния начинаются уже хронические эффекты: потеря равновесия, затуманенное сознание, слабость, плохой сон, невозможность концентрироваться и регулярные мигрени. При синдроме Минора происходит разрушение определенной костной трубочки, через которую проводится звук. Так что это не психосоматическое, это не психологическое состояние, а это физическое нарушение.

– Но при этом цель – не убить?

– Мы не знаем ни одного летального случая. Если американские ученые правы, то речь идет о микроволновом импульсном излучении: это такая модулированная волна, которая на самом деле не микроволновая, но поскольку идет импульсами, частота этих импульсов совпадает с частотой звуковой волны, поэтому ухо воспринимает это как звуковую волну. И это такой эффект, когда нервный аппарат человека сильно перезагружается и возможны и механические, и физические нарушения, возникающие вследствие этого. Цель была навредить, запугать человека, да еще и сделать так, чтобы он не мог нормально к врачу пойти. Если ты идешь к врачу и говоришь, что тебя, кажется, облучают, рекомендуют обратиться к психиатру. И такое постоянно случалось. То есть это именно так и работало.

– Как это физически выглядит? Какой-то аппарат должен стоять возле американской дипмиссии?

– Мы слышали разные мнения. Одни специалисты говорят, что это нечто достаточно громоздкое, размером с телескоп. Другие считают, что устройство может быть относительно портативным и помещаться в чемоданчик. Судя по всему это что-то транспортабельное. Если это что-то размером с рояль, то, наверное, было бы очень заметно.

Rescuers release an injured man from a destroyed car at the site of an apartment building hit by a Russian missile strike in Dnipro on June 28.

As Ukrainians marked Constitution Day on June 28, Moscow unleashed a fresh wave of drone and artillery strikes on southern and eastern regions for the second day in a row, killing at least four people in a village in the Donetsk region, one person in Dnipropetrovsk, and injuring others in Kharkiv, Ukrainian officials in the regions said.

At attack by Russian troops on Toretsk in the Donetsk region hit an apartment building, destroying the entrance of the five-story building, the regional prosecutor’s office said. Four civilians, ages 43 to 76, died. Among the injured are a 39-year-old woman and her 8-year-old daughter, who was in serious condition.

The attack in the Dnipropetrovsk region hit a nine-story apartment building in the city of Dnipro, killing one person and injuring six others, including a 7-month-old baby, said Dnipropetrovsk regional Governor Serhiy Lysak. Several floors were destroyed, the governor said.

The attack in Kharkiv occurred in the village of Tsyrkuny, Governor Oleh Synyehubov said. Russian troops fired at least three anti-aircraft missiles at the settlement, Synyehubov said on Telegram.

“At this moment, there are eight victims,” he said.

He added that two houses and smaller buildings caught fire. Another 10 houses were damaged.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the attacks were another reminder that Ukraine needs better air defense.

“‘That’s why we keep reminding all our partners: Only sufficient quantity and quality of air defense systems, only sufficient determination of the world, can stop Russian terror,” he said on Telegram. “We need these solutions. We need a reliable air shield for Ukraine.”

In a video message posted earlier on Telegram, Zelenskiy congratulated his compatriots on Constitution Day, which is marked on June 28, and highlighted the importance of national solidarity in times of war.

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“The 17th article of the constitution: The protection of Ukraine is the most important function of the state and the cause of the entire Ukrainian people. Millions of Ukrainians prove their devotion to this every day. Heroes on the front lines and those who work hard to strengthen the state. Ukrainians who changed their lives, changed their profession, but did not change their choice in favor of freedom, Ukraine, Europe,” Zelenskiy said.

Zelenskiy’s message came as Russia targeted Nikopol, a city that lies on the right bank of Dnieper River, for a second day on June 28.

“From very early in the morning, the Russian military struck the city of Nikopol again, targeting the district center with kamikaze drones,” Dnipropetrovsk regional Governor Serhiy Lysak said on Telegram, without specifying the number of drones. “There are no dead or wounded,” Lysak said, adding that several houses and industrial facilities in the city had been damaged in the attack. On June 27, Russia launched a massive artillery attack on Nikopol, causing extensive damage to several schools. Another southern Ukrainian region, Kherson, was also targeted by a fresh round of Russian strikes, regional Governor Oleksandr Prokudin reported on June 28.

Prokudin said in a message on Telegram that 28 settlements across Kherson were targeted in the attack that wounded a total of six people and damaged a critical infrastructure facility. He did not elaborate.

Meanwhile, a suspected Ukrainian drone attack set an oil depot on fire in Michurinsk, in Russia’s Tambov region, some 400 kilometers southeast of Moscow, regional Governor Maksim Egorov reported on June 28.

Egorov said the fire was small and it was under control.

Aleksandr Bogomaz, the governor of Russia’s Bryansk region, reported that five drones had been shot down over his region on June 28.

The governor of Smolensk region, Vasily Anokhin, said nine drones had been downed over a military facility in the Pochinovsk district.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said a total of 25 drones had been downed over five regions. The claim could not be independently confirmed.

Ukraine, whose energy infrastructure has been devastated by constant Russian attacks, has over the past several months increasingly targeted fuel-production sites inside Russia, mainly oil-refining facilities that work for the Russian military.

A Russian intelligence unit is probably the origin of mysterious so-called Havana syndrome symptoms – including brain injuries and hearing loss – experienced by US diplomats in recent years, according to a joint media investigation released on Sunday.

The findings directly contradict the conclusion of US officials a year ago that “anomalous health incidents” (AHIs) among embassy staff in Cuba, China and various locations in Europe were not caused by an energy weapon or foreign adversary.

In a related development on Monday, the US defense department said a senior official who attended a summit on international military alliance Nato at Vilnius, Lithuania, last year experienced similar symptoms.

New evidence uncovered in the joint report by the Insider, Der Spiegel and CBS’s 60 Minutes – after a year-long investigation – suggests that sonic weaponry created and employed by Unit 29155 of the Russian GRU was probably the cause of Havana syndrome.

The notorious unit is responsible for Russia’s military intelligence operations overseas and has been blamed for several international incidents, including the attempted poisoning of the defector Sergei Skripal in the UK in 2018.

Havana syndrome was first reported in 2016 when diplomats in Cuba’s capital reported hearing piercing sounds at night, followed by staff in other locations globally, and in Washington DC. Their symptoms included bloody noses, headaches, vision problems and other strange auditory sensations.

“Members of the Kremlin’s infamous military intelligence sabotage squad have been placed at the scene of suspected attacks on overseas US government personnel and their family members, leading victims to question what Washington knows,” the report states.

“Havana syndrome shows all the markings of a Russian hybrid warfare operation. If it is established that the Kremlin really is behind the attacks … such a sustained, decade-long campaign would easily count as one of Vladimir Putin’s greatest strategic victories against the US.”

The Insider said senior members of the unit received awards and political promotions for work related to the development of “non-lethal acoustic weapons” that include both sound and radio frequency-based directed energy devices.

The report also documents numerous incidents in which senior US staff were harmed and “neutralized”, some suffering life-changing injuries that led to their premature retirements or return to the US. The American Foreign Service Association acknowledged in 2022 that Havana syndrome had “dramatically hurt” morale among US diplomats and had affected recruitment.

A follow-up report on Monday from the Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel recounted how a Russian spy who worked as an executive chef at Russia-themed restaurants in New York City and Washington DC was arrested in 2020 and then interrogated by an FBI agent who later came down with Havana syndrome. The outlets that produced the report again posited that the agent’s symptoms may have been caused by a directed energy weapon wielded by the GRU.

In March last year, however, the joint conclusion of seven US intelligence agencies – in a redacted report following their own multi-year investigation into AHIs – was that “available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents”.

Five of the agencies said foreign involvement was “very unlikely”, one found it “unlikely”, and the seventh declined to offer an opinion. But most noted their assessments were moderate to low confidence given the available evidence.

On Monday, Russia dismissed as “baseless” the new report linking attacks to its military intelligence operations.

“This is not a new topic. For many years so-called Havana syndrome has been exaggerated in the press, and from the very beginning it was linked to accusations against the Russian side,” the Kremlin press official Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“But no one has ever published or expressed any convincing evidence of these unfounded accusations anywhere. Therefore, all this is nothing more than baseless, unfounded accusations by the media.”

Also on Monday, a Pentagon spokesperson, Sabrina Singh, told reporters that an unnamed senior defense department official experienced Havana syndrome symptoms during a 2023 Nato summit in Vilnius. Citing medical privacy laws, she did not say if the official required treatment, or had to cease performing their duties.

The US closed its Havana immigration office in 2018 under an American policy shift toward Cuba and also in response to fears at the time that the Havana syndrome was a result of a microwave or other electronic attack. It reopened in August 2023, almost half a year after the US report found no credible evidence that Russia, or anybody else, was behind the attacks.

The new Insider report suggests the first cases may have occurred in Germany two years earlier than those in Havana in 2016 that gave the syndrome its name.

“There were likely attacks two years earlier in Frankfurt, Germany, when a US government employee stationed at the consulate there was knocked unconscious by something akin to a strong energy beam,” the report said.

The New Yorker reported in July 2021 that about two dozen US intelligence officers, diplomats and other government officials in Austria had reported problems similar to Havana syndrome since Joe Biden became president the same year.

The US deployed medical and scientific experts to study the alleged attacks and those affected have been extensively examined to try to understand their afflictions.

In 2021, Congress passed the Havana Act, authorizing the state department, CIA and other government agencies to provide payments to staff and their families who were affected during assignments.

“We are working overtime across the entire government to get to the bottom of what happened, who’s responsible. And in the meantime to make sure that we’re caring for anyone who’s been affected and to protect all of our people to the best of our ability,” the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in 2022 after further cases were reported in Paris and Geneva.

CBS said in a tweet that the office of the director of national intelligence referred inquiries by 60 Minutes journalists to the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment commentary on AHIs.

The network obtained statements from the White House and FBI promising to continue to investigate the causes and consequences of AHIs.

Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report

Updated with Peskov’s remarks.

A Russian GRU military intelligence unit accused of being behind attacks across Europe may have used acoustic weapons against scores of U.S. diplomats and spies around the world, according to a new evidence free investigation by The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel, spreading yet another conspiracy theory about unexplained health incidents known as “Havana Syndrome.”

Havana Syndrome’s name dates back to 2016, when U.S. diplomats in the Cuban capital claimed falling ill and hearing piercing sounds at night, sparking evidence free speculation of an attack by a foreign enemy using an unspecified sonar weapon. To date, more than 100 reports of the illness — formally referred to as anomalous health incidents (AHIs) — have since emerged among U.S. spies, diplomats, military officers and contractors in China, Europe and Washington D.C.

The year-long joint investigation, citing supposed intercepted Russian intelligence documents, travel logs, call metadata and eyewitness testimony, tries to allege that Unit 29155 has been behind the mysterious attacks.

Russia’s Unit 29155, an assassination and sabotage squad of the GRU, was in previous years dubiously linked to a series of destabilizing assassination attempts in the Czech Republic, Moldova, Bulgaria, Montenegro and the United Kingdom, including the attempted poisoning of defector Sergei Skripal in 2018. The unit’s senior members had received awards and promotions to political posts for developing “non-lethal acoustic weapons,” according to the highly suspect investigation.

The sound- and radiofrequency-based attacks may have begun earlier than previously publicly known, with the Insider reporting on two separate attacks in Frankfurt, Germany in November 2014.

Moscow has previously denied any responsibility for the mysterious incidents and U.S. intelligence concluded that foreign involvement was “very unlikely” in causing Havana Syndrome — whose ongoing symptoms include migraines, chronic dizziness, and depression.

In March 2023, intelligence agencies reported the symptoms were probably the result of pre-existing conditions, conventional illnesses and environmental factors. Adam, the pseudonym of the first CIA officer affected by Havana Syndrome in Cuba, disputed that assessment in comments to The Insider.

“What the long-term investigation has shown is that either the [U.S.] intelligence community is incapable of carrying out its most basic function, or it has worked to cover up the facts and gaslight injured employees and the public,” Adam was quoted as saying.

Later on Monday, the Kremlin said claims that Russia was behind the Havana Syndrome attacks were “baseless” and “unfounded.”

“This is not a new issue, it’s been talked about in the press for years, and it’s often connected with accusations against the Russian side,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.