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Kuzminov, a Russian deserter, died violently in Spain.
In the context of Navalny's death, attention turns to Russia.
Villajoyosa/Moscow - The body of a man riddled with bullets and run over by a vehicle in Spain last week has been identified as that of Russian military pilot Maksim Kuzminov.
Kuzminov flew his Mi-8 helicopter into Ukraine in a dramatic move in August, according to Ukrainian officials.
His apparent killing - following a public death threat on Russian state television last year - has raised questions about whether it was a Russian-ordered assassination attempt on European soil.
Shortly after Alexei Navalny's death: Russian deserter dead
News of Kuzminov's violent demise came just days after Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's sudden death in prison.
European and US authorities viewed Navalny's death as evidence of the Russian government's uncontrolled brutality.
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Ukrainian intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov confirmed to the
Washington Post
on Tuesday (February 20) that the body found at the entrance to a residential complex in Villajoyosa, Alicante, was that of Kuzminov.
Russian authorities have not claimed responsibility for the murder.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the case on Tuesday, saying it was "not on the Kremlin's agenda."
Russian television threatened punishment – deserter Kuzminov “was already a moral corpse”:
However, Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service, told Russian journalists that Kuzminov was dead the moment he began planning his defection.
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“In Russia it is customary to speak well of the dead or to say nothing at all.
This traitor and criminal was already a moral corpse when he planned his dirty and terrible crime,” Naryshkin said, according to reports from Russian state news agencies
Tass
and
Ria
.
In October, Dmitry Kiselyov, host of the state television program Vesti Nedeli, broadcast a report about Kuzminov's defection.
The report ended by quoting three masked men in camouflage clothing, identified as members of Russian military intelligence special forces, saying they had been tasked with eliminating Kuzminov.
“We will find the man and punish him for treason under the laws of our state,” one said.
“We have long guns.” “He won't live to see the trial,” said another.
Renegade Russian Mi-8 helicopter pilot, Capt. Maksim Kuzminov, attended a press conference in Kiev on September 5, 2023.
© Ukrinform/Imago
Russian propagandists celebrate – Ukrainian voices warn
Russian propagandists now celebrated the pilot's alleged death.
Pro-Kremlin blogger Sergei Markov wrote on Telegram that Kuzminov had been “eliminated.”
“We will not rejoice over the death of anyone.
But this message can save many lives because it reminds everyone: save your lives and never cooperate with the Ukrainian neo-fascist regime,” he said.
Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, warned that Kuzminov's killing could encourage the Russians to carry out more such actions.
“If the Russians feel so powerful within the European Union that they start killing people, the question becomes very complex.
This is not the first case of Russians behaving like this,” he told the
Ukrainska Pravda
newspaper late Monday.
Russian assassination attempt would not be an isolated case: actions against Putin opponents in Europe
In one of Europe's most brazen cases, Russian agent Vadim Krasikov is serving a life sentence in Germany for shooting former Chechen rebel Zelimkhan Changoshvili in Berlin's Kleiner Tiergarten in 2019.
German prosecutors said during his trial that Krasikov likely acted on orders from Russia's state security service.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement, but Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to undermine those denials with an off-color remark in his interview with former
Fox News
host Tucker Carlson this month.
Putin hinted that he might be open to an exchange in which Evan Gerschkowitsch – a
Wall Street Journal
correspondent who is being held on espionage charges that he and the US State Department vehemently deny – in exchange for “a person who is a “sentence served in a country allied with the USA” would be released.
Putin described Krasikov as “a person who, out of patriotic feelings, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals.”
“Whether he did this of his own accord or not is another question,” Putin added.
British authorities also blamed Russian security services for the fatal poisoning of former Federal Security Service and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 and for the poisoning of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, in 2018.
The Skripals survived, but a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, died after handling the discarded perfume bottle that contained the nerve agent.
Deserter Kuzminow dead – perpetrators fled after murder
The Spanish Interior Ministry on Tuesday did not want to confirm the identity of the body found in Villajoyosa.
The investigators initially assumed that the dead man was a Ukrainian with a different name.
“During the course of the ongoing investigation, it has come to our attention that the identity of this person may be incorrect and he may be someone else.
The Guardia Civil is in the process of verifying this, but we cannot provide any further information at this time,” the ministry said in a statement.
Spanish media cited sources within the Guardia Civil confirming that the body was that of Kuzminov.
Witnesses told local media that the gunmen shot him several times, then ran him over and fled in a car.
Ukraine's secret service guided Kuzminov across the border
Ukraine announced with great fanfare in August an intelligence operation that led Kuzminov to fly his Mi-8 helicopter loaded with aircraft parts into Ukraine to defect.
The two crew members who accompanied him were unaware of the plan and were shot dead by Ukrainian forces when they refused to surrender, according to official sources.
The Ukrainian government later announced that the pilot had received a reward of $500,000 in local currency and encouraged other Russian military personnel to do the same.
In an interview published by Ukraine's Defense Intelligence Service in September, Kuzminov explained how his defection came about.
"I contacted representatives of the Ukrainian intelligence service, explained my situation to them and they offered me the following option: 'Come, we guarantee your safety, we guarantee new documents, we guarantee financial compensation, a reward'", he said.
Kuzminov left the protective Ukraine despite instructions
According to a Ukrainian intelligence official, Kuzminov ignored instructions from the Ukrainian government not to leave the country, where security services could have offered him some protection.
Kuzminov did not want to stay in Ukraine, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal discussions.
The Russian pilot “broke protocol” by leaving for Spain, the official said.
Shane Harris in Washington and Paul Schemm in London contributed to this report.
To the authors
Robyn Dixon
is a foreign correspondent on her third visit to Russia after reporting there for nearly a decade since the early 1990s.
In November 2019, she became the Washington Post's Moscow bureau chief.
Natalia Abbakumova
is a research fellow in the Moscow bureau of The Washington Post.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on February 21, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.