The killers of the Russian deserter in Spain left a trail leading to Moscow

This pilot fled from Russia to Ukraine in a military helicopter last August.

The US newspaper provided detailed information about the murder of M. Kuzminov. February 13 in the morning, a white Hyundai Tucson drove into the garage under M. Kuzminov’s residence and stopped between the elevators used by the residents and the ramp leading to the street. According to a senior Civil Guard official, the two men waited in the car for several hours.

Around 4:20 p.m. M. Kuzminovas entered the garage, parked the car and went to the elevators. As he passed a white Hyundai, two men called out to him and opened fire. Although he was hit by six bullets, M. Kuzminov managed to escape from the killers, and then he collapsed on the ramp.

The attackers returned to the car and drove off, hitting M. Kuzminov. The car was found a few kilometers from the crime scene, burned with a special solution that accelerated the burning of the car. It took experts a week to determine the make and model of the car and determine that it had been stolen two days before the murder in a town about an hour away from the town where Kuzminov lived.

Senior Spanish police officials believe the killing had similar characteristics to Kremlin-linked attacks, including the killing of former Chechen warlord Zelimkhan Changoshvili in Berlin and the poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in 2019.

The two killers, whose faces were obscured by hoods in the CCTV footage, were clearly professionals, completed their mission and quickly disappeared, police officials said. “Here in Spain, it’s not common to shoot a person with a large number of bullets,” said Pepe Alvarez, chief of the Villajojos Police Department. “This is a sign that points to organized crime, to professionals.”

According to a study conducted by The New York Times, in October Mr. Kuzminov left Ukraine and moved to Villajos, a small town on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. In Spain, he lived indecently, a senior Spanish law enforcement official said. He frequented bars popular with Russian and Ukrainian customers and spent money received from Ukrainian authorities. He drove a black S-class Mercedes car after Villajoyosa.

It is not clear exactly how the killers found him, although two senior Ukrainian officials said he contacted an ex-girlfriend still in Russia and invited her to come to him in Spain. “It was a serious mistake,” said one of the newspaper’s sources.

The operation to transfer the Russian Mi-8 helicopter to Ukraine took place in August. The head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, said two crew members, who did not know what was happening, died trying to escape.

October month. TV channel “Rossiya 1” showed a report stating that the security services had received an order to liquidate M. Kuzminov.

Russian officials actively commented on the death of M. Kuzminov. The head of the foreign intelligence service called him a “traitor” and a “moral corpse”. “A dog’s death is a dog’s death!” commented Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of the Russian Security Council.