2024-03-03 19:14:35
On the afternoon of February 13, Russian pilot Maxim Kuzminov drove his car back to his new apartment overlooking a palm-lined Spanish beach, unaware that an assassin was waiting for him in the garage.
Officers at the local police station, less than 500 meters away, took only minutes to respond to the call, but witnesses said it was too late for the former Russian helicopter pilot.
His killer had disappeared, driving his vehicle over the bullet-riddled body of the 28-year-old victim. A doctor who cut Kuzminov’s shirt with scissors noted the accuracy of the five small-caliber shots. A bullet had pierced his heart directly.
Six months earlier, Kuzminov, who hailed from a town near Russia’s border with North Korea, had defected to Ukraine, and the Mi-8 helicopter had come under fire as it flew just 20 feet above the ground. After surrendering the warplane, he collected a $500,000 reward and encouraged his countrymen to follow suit.
Moscow has not denied killing the pilot. “This traitor and criminal turned into a moral corpse the moment he planned his dirty and terrible crime,” the head of Russia’s secret service’s foreign operations, Sergei Naryskin, told the state-run TASS news agency.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, “prominent Russians have died under unusual circumstances on three continents. Some are thought to have fed disruptive political beliefs, while others may have been involved in some “ordinary” criminal dispute,” comments the Wall Street Journal in its analysis. “Some may have died of natural causes. But there are enough of them that Wikipedia now has a list of 51 names under the heading “Suspicious deaths of Russian businessmen (2022-2024)”.
Businessmen have been found hanged in London and drowned in Puerto Rico. A leading ruling party figure fell from the roof of an Indian hotel and a 46-year-old deputy science minister died of an “unexplained illness” on a flight back from Cuba.
Spanish police are still investigating the deaths of Sergei Protosenia, former deputy chairman of gas producer Novatek JSC, his wife and daughter at their home near Barcelona in 2022.
Last month, independent Russian media reported that the 35-year-old son of Igor Sechin, a Putin confidant and chief executive of oil giant Rosneft, had died at his luxury Moscow apartment complex known as “Putin’s Friend’s House”.
There are no obvious traces of the Kremlin in these deaths, but “the same is not true of another assassination convoy, with spectacular enterprises designed like theatrical performances to leave the maximum possible imprint on the public sphere. Two months after his failed mutiny, renegade Wagner mercenary commander Yevgeny Prigozhin blew himself up at 28,000 feet. His plane crashed in a meadow about 40 miles from Putin’s lakeside residence,” the WSJ notes.
While Ukraine and its Western backers planned to recruit officers like Kuzminov, Russia’s FSB stepped up operations to stop them.
The agency’s Directorate of Military Counterintelligence, or DKVR, which is tasked with preventing incidents of military defection, has expanded since the start of the war to become the FSB’s largest division, according to security analysts cited by the US paper.
The agency’s tasks include, among other things, monitoring what happens inside the army, one of the largest in the world, even at the level of individual units, in a country with 11 different time zones. Even before the recent expansion, the DVKR department was huge: more than 20 agents watched over officers at just one small airbase housing just six aircraft in the Kaluga region, according to FSB documents leaked in 2012 and published in Russian research site Agentura.
This network of secret services at home and abroad has regained its influence after the chaos at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, European security analysts say.
Early on, Putin reportedly placed top FSB leaders under house arrest because they had grossly misjudged the resistance the Ukrainian side would put up. European countries have expelled around 400 Russian diplomats, many of whom are believed to have acted as spies.
Putin later released the heads of the FSB, choosing not to purge its ranks. He kept Russia’s borders open, allowing hundreds of thousands of Russians to avoid mobilization by fleeing to Europe, Central Asia and other regions, while intelligence agents followed them, rebuilding the groups decimated by the expulsions, European officials say.
The president, a former KGB colonel, has long threatened to hunt down Russian defectors: “Whatever they got in return, they will be suffocated by these thirty pieces of silverhe once said, when a reporter asked him if he had ever signed an order to exterminate traitors living in exile.
Now, spy agencies are “becoming increasingly brazen and creative in cracking down on defectors abroad,” US and European intelligence officials say. The lines between Russia’s three main secret services – the FSB, the GRU military intelligence service and the foreign intelligence service SVR – are becoming increasingly blurred, making it increasingly difficult to discern who is behind each operation.
“The services were largely separate, but now they share personnel and assets,” explains Andrei Soldatov, who has written about Russia’s security services for more than 20 years. “It’s just like in Stalin’s time,” he comments, when he had created a new agency called SMERSH, or “Death to Spies.”
Source Wall Street Journal
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