Brazil, fertile ground for the Kremlin to incubate its spies?

President Vladimir Putin during a military ceremony in Moscow, Russia, on June 22, 2022. Contributor (Getty Images)

Brazilian police are investigating whether Russia has systematically used its territory for its spies to construct elaborate false identities to cover up their mission to gather information on the enemy.

The discovery of three cases of alleged Russian spies traveling halfway around the planet presenting themselves as Brazilians has set off all the alarms in the Latin American country.

One, who was discovered by the Netherlands when he was about to enter the International Criminal Court as an intern, is serving a 15-year sentence in Brasilia for using false documentation;

another was discovered in Norway, where he was researching security at a university in the Arctic Circle, and is accused there of espionage, and a third evaporated from Rio de Janeiro in January without notifying his local girlfriend, who launched a campaign to track him down.

Police, judicial and journalistic investigations in several countries place the trio in the ranks of the GRU, the military intelligence unit of the Russian Armed Forces.

This information also makes it possible to reconstruct part of the career of Serguei Cherkasov (imprisoned since his cover blew up in The Hague as Viktor Muller Ferreira), Mikhail Mikushin (who introduced himself as José Assis Giammaria at the Norwegian University of Tromso) and a Russian surnamed Shmyrev (everyone in Rio knew him as Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich).

The Brazilian Federal Police has pointed out two factors that make Brazil especially attractive for international espionage to use as fertile ground to build cover-ups.

One, the facility to obtain false documents;

two, your passport is one of the ones that opens the most doors, it allows you to travel to 170 countries without a visa.

And there is a third obvious to anyone who has traveled through different parts of Brazil: society is so diverse that there are men and women who look like they are Russian, South African, Lebanese, Japanese, Spanish, German, Polish... Before he succeeded his father North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was traveling the world with a fake Brazilian passport.

Brazil, which maintains its traditional neutrality in the face of the war in Ukraine, will receive a visit from Russian Foreign Minister Serguei Lavrov next Monday.

Months ago, Moscow requested before Brasilia last September the extradition of the alleged spy Cherkasov -arguing that he is a drug trafficker-, the transfer is authorized by the judges pending the conclusion of the investigations.

Handing him over to Moscow would likely anger the US, which has just formally accused him of spying on his territory while he was enrolled in a master's degree in Washington.

Cherkasov, 37, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Brazil last July, just three months after the Netherlands deported him upon discovering that he was not what he appeared to be, a Brazilian scholar interested in the investigations being carried out by the La Haya on the most serious violations of human rights in the war in Ukraine.

The ICC recently ordered the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin for the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children.

Cherkasov is being held in a maximum security prison in Brasilia.

Everything indicates that a past like Ferreira, born near Rio and three years younger, was built for 12 years.

At the end of March, the US Department of Justice formally accused Cherkasov of collecting information in its territory on behalf of the Russian authorities.

"Cherkasov began acting as an illegal agent in Brazil in 2012, under the name of Ferreira, and moved to the United States in 2018 after being admitted to a graduate program at a university" in Washington DC, says the order, which refers to the Johns Hopkins.

With that baggage he tried to infiltrate the court in The Hague.

Shortly after arresting him, the Brazilians found a mobile phone, a computer, several electronic memories of the suspect, which they handed over to the FBI, and a letter with a detailed fictitious biography, according to the Brazilian press.

It was allegedly the information from these teams that led the investigators to a park in Cotia, a city near São Paulo, where, like the spies in novels, he had a cache of sensitive material, apparently communication equipment, according to the prosecution. of the USA cited by

.

They also discovered old photos of him dressed in a Russian military uniform posted on VKontakte, the Russian Facebook.

While in Brazil, he took dance classes, had a girlfriend and had a whole circle of support for his illegal activities, including a Russian consulate official named Mikhail Gruzdev who made several payments to him, according to police.

The Americans maintain that Cherkasov was born in Kaliningrad in 1985, that he arrived in Brazil for the first time in 2010 and that already during that stay he obtained the false documents that opened the door to a new identity: a birth certificate, an identity card and one to drive.

With time, he obtained a passport and, having become a Brazilian, he went to study in the US capital.

About the second spy, little is known about his true identity and much more about his cover.

He lived in Rio and introduced himself as Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich.

His girlfriend from Rio, with whom he lived, launched a campaign when she stopped sending him messages after he left on a business trip to Malaysia.

He evaporated.

's reconstruction

, Wittich is a Russian surnamed Shmyrev who, Greek police suspect, was married to another Russian illegal agent operating under the identity of Maria Tsalla, a Greek-Mexican artist.

Shmyrev had a company that did 3D printing and even sold a shipment of key chains to the Brazilian Armed Forces.

Little information has also come out about Mikushin, the man arrested in Norway and accused of collecting intelligence linked to state secrets.

The Brazilians have discovered that the CPF, the tax identification document, essential to navigate the local bureaucracy, was obtained at the age of 22;

suspicious sign.

Months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mikushin settled in Tromso, to the north, in the Arctic Circle, specifically in the Peace Studies Center of the University of the same name, which is dedicated to researching security and conflicts.

Once Norway accused him of being a spy, his Norwegian acquaintances told

details that did not attract their attention until his arrest: he seemed not to speak Portuguese, he said little about the object of his investigation and, instead of having a Scholarship, like the rest of the researchers, he paid his stay out of pocket;

or, according to the Norwegian authorities, from the pocket of Russia's coffers.

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