The Spanish intelligence services have no doubt that the long hand of the Kremlin is behind an unprecedented crime in Spain: the murder in Alicante of Maxim Kuzminov, the Russian captain who defected last August and went to Ukraine with his helicopter. Mi8
combat
.
Publicly, the Spanish Government has been very cautious about possible authorship.
“We must let the Civil Guard do their job and the investigation progress,” said Government spokesperson Pilar Alegría, after the Council of Ministers on Tuesday.
However, diplomatic sources acknowledge that, although they are still waiting to gather enough information, this is a “very serious” matter.
If the involvement of the Russian authorities is confirmed, they add, Spain will give a “strong response.”
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The mouth of the wolf into which the Russian deserter murdered in Alicante entered
It is not the first time that envoys from Moscow have killed a dissident in Western Europe (the most famous case is that of Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with plutonium in 2006 in the United Kingdom), but they have done so on Spanish soil.
Unlike on other occasions, Moscow has not gone into hiding.
He has expressed his satisfaction.
When his identity had not yet been confirmed, Russian media were the first to report the death of Kuzminov, to whom they attributed problems with alcohol and drugs, adding that he had become an “uncomfortable and dangerous witness” for kyiv. .
After the news was ratified by Ukraine, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergei Narishkin, declared this Tuesday that the victim was “a criminal traitor” and “a moral corpse” since he defected from his country. .
Moscow has publicized his murder because it is exemplary, according to the sources consulted: it is not only a warning for those tempted to imitate him (Kiev rewarded the deserter with $500,000), but also to avenge the pilot's two companions. , two lieutenants who were not aware of his escape plan and were killed 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 a case for treason was opened against the pilot.
Last October, Russian public television claimed, showing three alleged GRU members, that they had received orders to eliminate the deserter.
“He will not live long enough to be judged,” said one of them.
Maxim Kuzminov in an archive image.
The only doubt that experts have is whether the operation was the work of the foreign intelligence service (SVR), whose head justified the murder;
of the federal security service (FSB), heir to the KGB;
or the military intelligence service (GRU), since Kuzminov was a captain and, therefore, fell under his jurisdiction.
Sources from 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 hitmen) who arrived from outside Spain and who by now will be abroad: the body, with half a dozen bullet wounds, was found on the 13th in the garage of the urbanization where he lived, in Villajoyosa (Alicante), although his death was not revealed until this Monday.
After shooting him, the murderers ran him over with his own car, which was found burned in the nearby town of El Campello.
At first, the Civil Guard believed that it was a settling of accounts between criminal gangs.
Intelligence experts believe that it is most likely that the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Spain was kept out of the operation to avoid being exposed.
Although around twenty SVR or GRU agents were stationed in the Russian legation in Madrid with diplomatic status - most were expelled in April 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine - the consulted sources do not believe that they had direct participation and attribute crime to professional hired gunmen.
Beyond the perpetrators, the crime required a prior surveillance operation: the Russian agents had to verify the identity of the victim and monitor them to find out their schedules and habits.
Insiders of Moscow's secret services assure that they frequently resort, to achieve their objectives, to the collaboration of Russian citizens residing in Spain (there are more than 80,000) and mafia organizations, to which they offer favored treatment.
The decision to settle in an urbanization whose neighborhood is mostly 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 that he could go unnoticed among the 600 Russians and more than 300 Ukrainians registered in Villajoyosa (according to the 2022 census), these were the ones who could most easily recognize him or suspect that he was Russian.
He had false documentation, in the name of a 33-year-old Ukrainian citizen, but no protection, despite the threat that weighed on him.
Government sources explain that the more than 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers who have received training in Spain and the dozens of wounded treated at the Zaragoza Military Hospital are under the protection of the Spanish authorities, but this was not the case of Kuzminov, who decided to settle on his own. on the Alicante coast.
The Spanish secret services were not officially informed of his arrival, they add.
The behavior of the young captain—he was 28 years old when he deserted—was not characterized by his discretion either.
According to some sources, the clue that led the Russian secret services to him was a call to her former girlfriend, who remains in Russia, inviting her to visit him.
“He decided to move to Spain instead of staying here [in Ukraine]. From what we know, he invited his ex-partner to the place where he was and was later found shot dead,” Ukrainian intelligence sources told
Ukrainska Pravda
website .
In any case, the sources consulted emphasize that Spain cannot look the other way in the face of an event of unprecedented severity.
In February 2019, the North Korean Embassy in Madrid was attacked, an operation that was attributed to an alleged North Korean dissident group behind which the CIA was hiding, as the National Intelligence Center (CNI) concluded at the time.
On that occasion, there was no diplomatic protest, but no deaths either.
On the other hand, the Russian secret services already have a long history of murders 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 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 (United Kingdom) in 2018. For their part, 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 murdered in Austria in 2009 and 2020.
Until now, Moscow's extrajudicial executions had left Spain on the sidelines.
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