Ukraine

Center 795 was stood up in late 2022, its mandate was framed around assisting the Russian war effort in Ukraine through battlefield intelligence, special operations, and sabotage behind enemy lines

[...]

Alimov spoke Russian. Durovic spoke Serbian. Neither commanded the other's native tongue at the level sufficient for operational communication. Their solution was straightforward and, as it turned out, catastrophic: they used Google Translate, converting Durovic's Serbian field reports into Russian for his handler, and Alimov's Russian instructions back into Serbian for his agent.

The messages themselves were transmitted through encrypted applications that the men believed to be secure. But Google operates through servers in the United States, which fall squarely within the reach of an FBI surveillance warrant. Armed with a court order, investigators were able to access the logs of these translations directly from the service provider, reading the clear-text content of the entire operational communications thread in real time, even as Alimov and Durovic believed themselves protected by end-to-end encryption.

The surveillance logs, portions of which have been quoted in a newly unsealed U.S. grand jury indictment, read at times like an absurdist document: two operatives of Russia's most secretive assassination unit conducting a murder-for-hire plot through a consumer translation tool, their every instruction and status report preserved in legible, timestamped entries on an American company's servers. It was, as a source close to the investigation later noted, even better than a wiretap because it arrived transcribed.