Now Kuzminov—gunned down in Villajoyosa, a coastal resort that translates as “Joyful Town”—has become the latest name on a lengthening list of unsolved deaths of Russians who soured on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Spain hasn’t identified a suspect, although investigators believe the murder was ordered by the Kremlin, an official involved in the investigation said.
Moscow hasn’t denied killing the pilot. “This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse at the very moment when he planned his dirty and terrible crime,” Sergey Naryshkin, Russia’s foreign intelligence chief, told its state news agency TASS.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, prominent Russians have died in unusual circumstances on three continents. Some were thought to harbor politically subversive ideas, while others may have been caught up in run-of-the-mill criminal warfare. Some may have actually died of natural causes. But there are enough of them that Wikipedia publishes a running list, at 51 names, entitled “Suspicious deaths of Russian business people (2022–2024).”
Businessmen have been found hanged in London and drowned in Puerto Rico. A ruling-party boss fell from the roof of an Indian hotel and a 46-year-old deputy science minister died of an unexplained illness on a return flight from Cuba. Spanish police are still investigating the 2022 deaths of Sergey Protosenya, the former deputy chairman at gas producer Novatek JSC, and his wife and daughter in their home near Barcelona.
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The mafia-style assassination of Kuzminov fits into another hidden undercurrent of the new spy war between Russia and the West. Since Putin’s invasion, Ukraine and its Western allies have ratcheted up attempts to hollow out the Russian state and military by attracting a stream of defectors they hope could become a torrent. The Kremlin, in turn, has tried to hunt down its turncoats, one after the next, to deter more losses through the morbid power of example.
In Ukraine, military intelligence set up a 24-hour “I Want to Live” hotline for Russian soldiers who wished to drop their arms and cross over. More than 260 have deserted ranks through it, while another 26,000 have dialed in, and daily calls briefly shot up some 70% after Kuzminov went public in September, according to Petro Yatsenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s prisoners of war department. Those numbers couldn’t be independently verified.
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Now, his spy services are becoming more brazen and creative in squashing dissent abroad, U.S. and European intelligence officials say. The boundaries between Russia’s three main intelligence agencies—the FSB, the GRU military intelligence and SVR foreign intelligence—are increasingly blurring, analysts say, making it more difficult to know which is responsible for an operation.
“The services used to be very separate but now they are exchanging personnel and assets,” said Andrei Soldatov, who has been writing about Russia’s security services for more than 20 years. “It’s just like Stalin’s time,” he added, when the Soviet dictator created a new agency called SMERSH, or “Death to Spies.
They are also increasingly using foreign nationals in operations.
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