Gunmen sent by Moscow killed defector sheltering in Alicante, Spanish intelligence services say

Spanish intelligence services have no doubt that the long hand of the Kremlin is behind an unprecedented crime: the assassination in Alicante of Maxim Kuzminov, the Russian captain who defected last August and crossed over to Ukraine with his Mi8 combat helicopter. Publicly, the Spanish government has been very cautious regarding who was possibly responsible for the murder. “We have to let the Civil Guard [a national law enforcement force] do its job and for the investigation to progress,” said government spokesperson Pilar Alegría on Tuesday. However, diplomatic sources recognize that, although they are still waiting to gather enough information, it is a “very serious” matter. If the involvement of the Russian authorities is confirmed, they add, Spain will give a “forceful response.”

It is not the first time that a dissident has been killed in Western Europe (the most famous case is that of Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with plutonium in 2006 in the United Kingdom), but it is the first time that it has been done on Spanish soil. Contrary to other occasions, Moscow has not stayed in the shadows. It has shown its satisfaction. When the victim’s identity had not yet been confirmed, Russian media were the first to report the news of Kuzminov’s death. They said the Russian pilot suffered from problems with alcohol and drugs, and that he had become an “uncomfortable and dangerous witness” for Kyiv. After the news was confirmed by Ukraine, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, said Tuesday that the victim was “a criminal traitor” and “a moral corpse” since he defected from his country.

Moscow has been publicizing his murder because it serves as an example, according to the sources consulted. It is not only a warning to those who might be tempted to follow his example (Kyiv rewarded the defector with $500,000), but also to avenge the pilot’s two companions: two lieutenants who were unaware of his escape plan were shot down by the Ukrainians when they tried to flee, after Kuzminov landed at a military base near Kharkiv. The deceased, the navigator and the mechanic, were decorated as heroes by the Russian Army, while the pilot was prosecuted for treason. Last October, Russian public television claimed, showing three alleged GRU members, that they had been ordered to kill the defector. “He will not live long enough to stand trial,” said one of them.

The only doubt experts have is whether the operation was the work of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), whose head justified the assassination; of the Federal Security Service (FSB), heir of the KGB; or of the Military Intelligence Service (GRU), since Kuzminov was a captain and, therefore, under its jurisdiction. Sources in the Spanish intelligence services admit, however, that it is very difficult for the investigation to find evidence of the involvement of any of them. They assume that the crime was committed by gunmen (probably hired killers) from outside Spain, who by now are abroad; the body, with half a dozen gunshot wounds, was found on February 13 in the garage of the residential complex where he lived, in Villajoyosa (Alicante), although his death was not made public until Monday. After shooting him, the murderers ran over him with a car, which was found burned in the nearby town of El Campello. At first, the Civil Guard believed that it was a settling of scores between criminal gangs.

Intelligence experts believe that the Russian Embassy in Spain has most likely stayed on the sidelines of the operation to avoid being implicated. Although some 20 SVR or GRU agents were stationed at the Russian delegation in Madrid with diplomatic status — most of them were expelled in April 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine —, the sources consulted do not believe they had any direct involvement and argue the crime was committed by professional hitmen.

Beyond the material authors, the crime required a previous surveillance operation: the Russian agents would have had to verify the identity of the victim and carry out a follow-up to know his schedules and habits. Those familiar with the Moscow secret services say that they frequently resort, in order to achieve their objectives, to the collaboration of Russian citizens living in Spain (there are more than 80,000) and of mafia organizations, to which they offer favorable treatment.

The decision to settle in a residential complex where the majority of the population is Russian and Ukrainian was, in the opinion of the sources consulted, a mistake. Alicante is the Spanish province with the largest Russian population (17,500). If Kuzminov thought he could go unnoticed among the 600 Russians and more than 300 Ukrainians registered in Villajoyosa (according to the 2022 census), they were in fact the ones who could more easily recognize him or suspect that he was Russian. He had false papers, in the name of a 33-year-old Ukrainian citizen, but no protection, despite the threats made against him.

Government sources explain that the more than 4,000 Ukrainian military personnel who have received training in Spain and the dozens of wounded treated at the Military Hospital of Zaragoza are under the protection of the Spanish authorities, but this was not the case for Kuzminov, who decided on his own to settle on the coast of Alicante. The Spanish secret services were not officially informed of his arrival, they add.

The young captain — he was 28 years old when he defected — was not discreet either. According to some sources, the clue that led the Russian secret services to him was a call to his former girlfriend, who remains in Russia, inviting her to visit him. “He decided to move to Spain instead of staying here [in Ukraine]. As far as we know, he invited his ex-girlfriend to the place where he was and was later found shot to death,” Ukrainian intelligence sources told the website Ukrainska Pravda.

In any case, the sources consulted stress that Spain cannot look the other way in the face of an event of unprecedented gravity. In February 2019, the North Korean Embassy in Madrid was raided, an operation that was attributed to an alleged North Korean dissident group behind which the CIA was implicated, as concluded then by Spain’s CNI intelligence services. On that occasion, there was no diplomatic protest, but no deaths either.

On the other hand, Russian secret services have a long history of assassinations on European soil. In the aforementioned case of former KGB agent Litvinenko, who visited Spain and offered his services to the CNI, he was poisoned in 2006 in London with Polonium-210 by two Russian agents. The British justice system concluded that the crime was “probably” ordered by the head of the FSB and authorized by Putin. Two spies sent by Moscow were also accused by London of the attempted poisoning of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury (UK) in 2018. Meanwhile, German judges sentenced a Russian spy to life imprisonment for the murder of a Chechen rebel in a park in central Berlin in 2019. Two other Chechen exiles were killed in Austria in 2009 and 2020. Until now, Moscow’s extrajudicial killings had left Spain on the sidelines.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition