 The meeting was arranged by a retired officer of the GRU Anton Surikov and took place at a villa owned by the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi between Nice and Monaco.Many of the participants of the meeting had fought on the same side during the Abkhazia-Georgia conflict during the early 1990s.According to Boris Kagarlitsky, those who arranged the meeting made one mistake; the security system blocked monitoring from the outside but provided perfect conditions for monitoring from the inside.