Last August, even as Russia and Ukraine were locked in a death grapple, a Russian pilot Maksim Kuzminov flew his Mi-8 military helicopter into Ukraine and handed over a cache of secret documents to Ukrainian intelligence operatives. In doing so, he committed the one offense President Putin has said time and again he will never forgive, namely, treason. Putin is right. Treason is an unforgivable crime.
The plot behind the defection
The defection was the handiwork of HUR, Ukraine’s military’s intelligence arm. Michael Schwirtz and José Bautista claimed in the New York Times, that HUR operatives have received specialized training from the CIA on operating in hostile environments, where they approach vulnerable soldiers ‘persuading’ them to defect. Kuzminov had taken off from an airfield in the Kursk region for some cargo delivery. There were two other crew members with him.
Shortly after take-off, he turned off the helicopter’s radio communications and dove to a very low altitude, in a bid to evade monitoring by Russian radar. Then he crossed into Ukraine and landed at a pre-arranged rendezvous point in the Kharkiv region, just over 10 miles from the border. What happened to the crew is not clear but either Kuzminov himself or the Ukrainians shot and killed them.
The defection was a slap in the face of Russia. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, announced that it would give confidence to other Russian soldiers to defect.
They even produced a documentary film about the operation to showcase their success. The traitor, on his part, went on a media tour, holding a news conference, giving interviews denouncing Russia’s war and calling on others to follow his example.
Ukraine richly rewarded the traitor as more than the military value of the helicopter or the secret documents, the defection provided them an additional handle to Western propaganda against Russia to the effect that there is so much resentment against the regime that even military pilots are defecting. He was reportedly paid half a million dollars for his treachery, along with a Ukrainian passport and a fake name, Ihor Shevchenko. He left Ukraine in October and settled in a small town of Spain, hoping that Russia would not be able to find him there.
We will hunt you down and kill you
Bloated with the ‘wages of sin’ that he received from the Ukrainians, this traitor was safely ensconced in the seaside resort town of Villajoyosa, Spain. He had been living an ‘indiscreet life’, driving a black Mercedes S-class around the town and splurging in popular bars. But not for long. It needs no explanation, he was not working in Spain and he could not have saved that kind of money from his salary as a military pilot. Eventually, his nemesis caught up with him in a manner straight out of spy thrillers.
As promised by Putin, Russia’s intelligence services have been put on a war footing and have begun operating at a level of aggressiveness at home and abroad reminiscent of the glorious Soviet era. Moreover, Kuzminov was not a trained spy anyway and finally committed a ‘fatal’ mistake. He is believed to have contacted a girlfriend in Russia and asked her to come over to meet him in Spain. That was enough for Russian intelligence.
Last month, as he got down from his Mercedes in the parking lot of his apartment complex, two hooded figures emerged from the shadows. They shot him six times and then quickly disappeared.
The message was loud and clear
Russian foreign intelligence service and before it the Soviet era KGB have had an enviable track record of meting out exemplary punishment to traitors. As always, they assiduously seek to maintain ‘plausible deniability’ and leave few traces that could nail them legally even if their own agents had been used instead of hired help, and yet leave enough traces, which, to a trained observer, carry their ‘signature’ so as to convey a message subtly as to who had done it.
In this case also, the empty cartridge cases were found to be those of the Russian 9mm (9x18mm Makarov) pistol as against the NATO 9mm (9x19mm Parabellum), which is almost universally used in European/Western countries. The killers had not bothered to disable the CCTVs. They had come in a white Hyundai Tucson in the morning itself and had parked in an empty spot between the elevators used by residents and the ramp leading to the street. They had waited there for hours. Their victim came at 4:20 pm only.
As he passed in front of the white Hyundai, the two killers called out to him and opened fire. Though he was struck by six bullets, most of them in the torso, he still managed to stagger a short distance before collapsing on the ramp. The killers then got back into their car and ran it over his body on their way out.
Also Read: Will Russia win the Ukraine war?
They were clearly professionals. They abandoned the car a few miles away and burnt it. Investigators found a special accelerant used to burn the car quickly; yet another clue pointing to Russian intelligence as ordinary criminals would not have it easily. The car was found to have been stolen two days before the killing in Murcia, a town about an hour away.
The message was loud and clear. As a senior official from Guardia Civil, the Spanish police force overseeing the investigation into the killing put it, “I will find you, I will kill you, I will run you over and humiliate you.”
The ‘umbrella murder’ of Georgi Markov with Ricin
The crowning glory of the KGB was the killing of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London where he worked for the BBC World Service, the US-funded Radio Free Europe and West Germany’s Deutsche Welle for conducting a vitriolic campaign against Soviet Union. In 1978, he was walking across the historic Waterloo Bridge spanning the River Thames and waited to take a bus. While waiting, he suddenly felt a little but sharp pain, as if from an insect bite or sting, on the back of his right thigh. He looked behind him and saw a man picking up an umbrella off the ground. Later in the day the spot became a red pimple and then he developed a fever. Four days later, he died in the hospital.
The doctor conducting the post mortem did notice the red pimple. He took tissue samples from that leg as well from the other leg for comparison. They were analysed at the Porton Down Chemical and Biological Weapons Laboratory. They found a tiny (just .067 inches in diameter) hollow pellet in the pimple made of 90% platinum and 10% Iridium with two holes in it, coated with something that dissolved in the body to release the contents.
It was determined that the pellet was injected into his thigh by some spring-loaded mechanism in the umbrella of the killer. The pellet released the toxin called Ricin into his body. Ricin is a highly potent toxin produced in the seeds of the castor oil plant. A toxin is produced by plants or living organisms. For example, the Amanita muscaria mushroom is an iconic toxic mushroom. Ricin works by getting inside the cells of the victim’s body and preventing the cells from making the proteins they need. Without the proteins, cells die and eventually death may occur because the symptoms are so vague that even suspecting use of Ricin is difficult. There is no antidote of Ricin.
Litvinenko’s poisoning by Polonium
The best thing about such slow acting things is that they can be administered in innocuous manner and the killer gets more than enough time to slip to home country quietly.
Yet another novel technique was used to kill Alexander Litvinenko, an officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and its predecessor, the KGB, until he left the service and fled the country, becoming a staunch critic of Putin and Russia and an employee of MI6, the British Secret Service. In November 2006 he was hospitalized and died 22 days later. It was determined that the first confirmed victim of lethal radioactive Polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome. Produced in a nuclear reactor, is probably the most toxic poison known to man when swallowed or inhaled, more than 100 billion times more deadly than hydrogen cyanide. It was brought to London by two Russian businessmen Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun through regular flight. The quantity being too small, it easily passed airport security scans.
According to Luke Harding in his ‘A Very Expensive Poison’, the two arranged a meeting with Litvinenko in a hotel where they joked about the British habit of tea and took several cups of tea. It was in tea that the Polonium (just about 10 micrograms) was slipped in by spray or some other means. Then they went back to Russia and the extradition request was, of course, declined. This novel poisoning was confirmed only after great research.
What punishment you would suggest if your pilot defected
I suggest a hypothetical challenge to all those who criticize Russia for such assassinations. It will expose their double standards in a moment. Imagine a scenario where one of your military pilots takes your latest imported fighters costing an arm and a leg or the latest indigenous fighter developed after decades of research and untold billions upon billions on a regular training sortie and flies to the enemy country. Let us not bother about his motives; they could be money, ideology, whatever. He hands them over the plane and is immediately granted political asylum there.
You can imagine other scenarios also involving intelligence officers, journalists, academicians, or businessmen, anybody. All of them may have their own reasons to betray the motherland and ditch it. Also, let us presume that the process of extradition, if at all legally possible in their cases, would be so cumbersome that they are not likely to be brought to the motherland to face trial in foreseeable future.
What punishment their people and media would demand to be meted out to them? Now, be intellectually honest. Would they be prepared to put up with their outpouring of venom against their countries from foreign shores? Take my word; the clarion call would be ‘kill him’. I assure you, if they are somehow eliminated Russian or CIA style, it would be hailed a heroic deed and filmmakers would rush to make blockbusters on the secret operation.
Then how can you call Russian traitors and defectors inherently innocent, righteous, virtuous, and angelic? This is outright chicanery. One who defects and goes to enemy country is a traitor, not a dissenter. Question is what do you do with traitors sitting abroad, if not get them killed? Speaking of Kuzminov, as Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) said, “This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse at the very moment when he planned his dirty and terrible crime”. I could not agree with him more.
It was bad enough that Judas had betrayed Jesus. However, even more despicable is the fact that he did so in spite of having been a companion of Jesus for three-and-a-half years and loved by him. It is for this reason that even two thousand years later, no one names his son Judas. Then, how could you possibly pardon someone who has betrayed the motherland that bore him, nurtured him for decades, and made him whatever he was. Ideological difference is no excuse at all.
Treachery, as the famous Italian poet, writer, and philosopher Dante had said, is the wickedest of sins and worthy of bringing you closest to the devil. There can be only one punishment for it, namely, execution. Dmitri Medvedev, the former Russian president and now the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said, “A dog gets a dog’s death.”
