14 Facts About Igor Sergun

Igor Sergun was promoted to colonel general on 21 February 2015.

Igor Sergun was born on 28 March 1957 in Podolsk, Moscow Oblast.

Igor Sergun completed the Moscow Suvorov Military School and the Moscow Higher Military Command School.

Igor Sergun was in active military service from 1973, in the GRU from 1984.

In 1998, Sergun had a rank of colonel and served as military attache in Tirana, Albania.

On 26 December 2011, Igor Sergun was appointed Director of GRU, which had in 2010 received a new official name, the Main Directorate of the General Staff.

Igor Sergun became Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.

Igor Sergun was promoted to Lieutenant-General by a presidential decree on 31 August 2012 and Colonel General on 21 February 2015.

Igor Sergun was last spotted by media at Bocharov Ruchey, as one of the Russian delegation for negotiations with King Abdullah II of Jordan, on 24 November 2015.

Igor Sergun supervised the deniable undercover units that America struggled to find an effective response to.

In June 2013, Igor Sergun hosted Michael Flynn, then the Director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, at GRU headquarters, where Flynn gave a lecture to GRU officers and took questions and was entertained at a formal dinner.

Two days after his death, the US-based global intelligence company Stratfor questioned the official version of Igor Sergun's death citing an unattributed report that alleged he had died on New Year's Day in Lebanon.

In early March 2016, a similar theory was suggested by the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar that alleged Igor Sergun was killed when on a visit to Beirut in a "complicated secret mission" carried out by unnamed Arab and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies.

Igor Sergun's death was cited as one in a series of "dozens of high-profile" Russian officials' sudden deaths, such as Vitaly Churkin's, in "the past three years in Russia and abroad in suspicious circumstances" in a publication by USA Today of 2 May 2017.