The Kremlin has acknowledged that Vadim Krasikov, the assassin freed from Germany in a historic prisoner swap on Thursday, is a serving officer of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), effectively acknowledging that his 2019 killing of a Chechen defector in Berlin was a state-ordered assassination.
It has also been suggested that he has ties to President Vladimir Putin’s personal guard.
“Krashkov is an FSB officer,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, adding that he “worked with several members of the presidential guard.”
Krasikov was one of eight Russians who returned to Moscow on Thursday after being released from Western prisons as part of a complex swap deal that saw 16 people, including American journalist Evan Gershkovich and several Russian opposition politicians, freed from Russian custody.
People involved in the negotiations say Mr. Krasikov has always been the most important piece of the puzzle to Putin, and the Kremlin has insisted that he must be included in any exchange. One Moscow source familiar with the negotiations said Putin was “crazy” about getting Mr. Krasikov back from Germany, and Friday’s admission goes some way to explaining why.
It is the first time the Kremlin has admitted that its agents are behind a murder abroad. Moscow has always denied any involvement in incidents such as the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London, the 2018 attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury and multiple assassinations of Chechen defectors in Istanbul.
When Krasikov killed Chechen defector Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin in 2019, the Kremlin denied all responsibility. “We categorically deny any connection between this incident, this murder and the Russian government,” Peskov said at the time. But in an interview earlier this year, Putin called Krasikov “a patriot who purged bandits.”
Krasikov and the seven others who returned to Russia – all serving prison sentences on espionage and criminal charges – were given a hero’s welcome in Moscow after the exchange in Ankara, complete with a red carpet, a guard of honour and President Putin himself arriving to present them with hugs and flowers as they disembarked from the plane.
Peskov News Agency confirmed that Artem and Anna Durtsev, who posed as an Argentine couple in Slovenia, were in fact Russian “illegal residents” — undercover spies who have posed as foreigners abroad for decades. The couple’s two children, who had been in foster care when their parents were arrested in late 2022, traveled to Russia with the couple.
“The illegal immigrant children who arrived yesterday only found out they were Russian on the flight from Ankara. They don’t speak Russian,” Peskov said. As they disembarked, Putin greeted them in Spanish, saying “Buenas noches.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who personally gave President Joe Biden the go-ahead for Berlin’s side of the deal, defended the prisoner swap as justified by the “obligation to protect human life” as Germany struggles with the high price of Krasikoff’s release.
Countless exchanges of secret agents took place across the Glienicke “spy bridge” during the Cold War, but Thursday’s biggest deal called for Germany to open the prison bars of a man a Berlin court found to have committed a “state-ordered murder” on German soil.
The prisoners’ release was met with joy and relief across Germany, but also lamentation from human rights groups and anger from the families of the murder victims.
Scholz, who interrupted his holiday to greet the 13 former detainees as they emerged from a private plane in Cologne, said he had no other choice given the fact that the lives of at least some of the hostages were at risk. “No one took this decision lightly to deport a convicted murderer serving a life sentence after only a few years in custody,” Scholz said.
After an “emotional” meeting with those released, Scholz said: “Having spoken to them now that they are free, there is no doubt left that it was the right thing to do.”
Michael Roth, a lawmaker from Scholz’s Social Democrat party, said it was sometimes necessary to “make a deal with the devil on humanitarian grounds.”
Liberal Democrat Justice Minister Marco Buschmann said the government had been forced to make “painful concessions” in the form of an order for Krasikov’s release, which he said was the first time it had done so and which he had to sign himself.
Human rights group Amnesty International welcomed the exchange but warned it could set a precedent: “It could embolden the Russian government to carry out further political arrests and human rights violations without fear of the consequences,” said Christian Mihl, deputy executive director of the group’s Germany branch.
Khangoshvili’s family responded angrily, saying they had not been informed of the exchange in advance. “This is devastating news for our family,” they said in a statement through their lawyer, Inga Schultz.
“On the one hand, I’m happy that someone’s life has been saved. At the same time, I’m very disappointed that there is no law in the world, even in countries where the law is supposed to be the highest authority.”
Roderich Kiesewetter, a lawmaker from the opposition Christian Democrats and a former German army officer, said “the risk of Russian sabotage or terrorism could now increase” because Putin had shown his aides that he had no fears.
The news magazine Der Spiegel reported that Putin appeared to have calculated that, given former President Donald Trump’s frosty relationship with the German government, it would be much harder to win Krasnikov’s release if he won the US presidential election in November.
“Putin should have no problem finding allies to hunt down undesirables in the West,” the paper said. “They know their boss will ensure they come home.”
Talks about the release of Western prisoners from Russia and the exchange of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny for Krasikov were taking place as early as 2022, shortly after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
But Berlin resisted at the time, with its hawkish foreign minister, Annalena Baabock, leading the opposition against the more compliant Scholz.
In particular, Barbock expressed concern that swapping Navalny for Krasikov would mean Putin’s nemesis would likely quickly return to Russia and be arrested again, leaving the West with nothing, Die Zeit reported.
But Scholz finally agreed to a major prisoner swap in February, telling Biden, “I’ll do this for you.”
But by the end of the month, Navalny had died in a Russian prison. His fate was widely seen in the West as a warning to other Russian prisoners, and German diplomats and intelligence officials redoubled their efforts to secure a deal.
The tabloid Bild noted that in addition to the Cold War-era spy swap between Moscow and Washington that took place in Berlin, West Germany also “bought” the freedom of thousands of East Germans who had been imprisoned before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The paper quoted a former German intelligence official as saying that by making an agreement with Putin, Western countries risked opening a “Pandora’s box” in which Putin could order the arbitrary arrest of foreigners at any time.
August Hanning, a former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, said that in the past leaders had ensured that such exchanges took place “on an equal footing” and “did not leave the country vulnerable to blackmail”.
