‘Navalny’ Investigative Journalist Christo Grozev Signs With UTA, Preps Book On Recent Prisoner Swap
EXCLUSIVE: UTA has signed Bulgarian award-winning investigative journalist and author Christo Grozev as well as his IP holding company, M4 Studio, for representation in all areas.
Grozev is one of the world’s leading investigators of Russian clandestine operatives whose work was showcased in the Academy Award-winning documentary Navalny.
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Currently, Grozev is working on a book that chronicles his major role in plotting the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War, which took place earlier this month. The result of more than two years of backroom negotiations and delicate geopolitical maneuvering, the 24-person, multi-country swap included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and 15 others who had been held in Russia.
It was Grozev who had been able to identify and help secure the 2021 conviction of Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov. Grozev then pointed to Krasikov as the key to a successful prisoner trade that was to include the release of his friend and colleague, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Unfortunately, Navalny died under suspicious circumstances in a Russian penal colony, but the plan still proceeded, something that Grozev details in his upcoming book, along with highlighting several related investigations.
In 2020, as detailed in Navalny, Grozev successfully identified the Russian agents behind the assassination attempt on the Russian opposition leader.
Grozev took the stage at the Oscars when Navalny won for Best Documentary Feature in 2023 and was the first person director Daniel Roher acknowledged in his acceptance speech.
“We owe so much to our Bulgarian nerd with a laptop, Christo Grozev,” he said. “Christo, you risked everything to tell this story, and it’s investigative journalists like you and Maria Pevchikh that empower our work.”
Grozev, currently a lead investigator at The Insider and Der Spiegel, has recently published pieces on the origins of Havana Syndrome and on Russian spies infiltrating European centers of power.
He was formerly the executive director and lead Russian investigator at Bellingcat, an open-source investigative collective specializing in using cutting-edge intelligence techniques to expose human rights abuses, corruption, and disinformation. There, he and his team identified Russian military officers involved in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine.
Grozev won the European Press Prize for Investigative Journalism for his investigations into the identity of the suspects involved in the 2018 Novichok poisonings of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
Before joining Bellingcat in 2015, Grozev built a successful radio journalism career in his native Bulgaria.
Launched in 2024, Grozev’s M4 Studio aims to develop the dozens of investigations conducted by his team over the past decade into films and other media projects, in addition to supporting and protecting data-driven investigative storytelling around the world.
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