The men who killed Maksim Kuzminov wanted to send a message. It didn’t help his cause that he was partying in Spain and messaging an ex-girlfriend back home.
The men who killed Maksim Kuzminov wanted to send a message. This was obvious to Spanish investigators even before they discovered who he was. Not only did the killers shoot him six times in a parking garage in southern Spain; they ran over his body with their car.
His killing in the seaside resort town of Villajoyosa in February has raised fears that Russia’s European spy networks continue to operate and are targeting enemies of the Kremlin, despite concerted efforts to dismantle them after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022. The two hooded killers who appeared on surveillance camera footage from the parking garage of Kuzminov’s apartment complex were clearly professionals who carried out their mission and quickly disappeared, police officials said.
While the unit had been able to persuade individual Russians and sometimes small groups of soldiers to defect, Kuzminov’s daring flight — and the high value of what he delivered — was unprecedented, said a senior Ukrainian official with knowledge of the operation.In the early evening of August 9, 2023, Kuzminov took off in a military helicopter from an airfield in the Kursk region in western Russia for what was supposed to be a simple cargo delivery to another base in the country.
“Our soldiers shot them,” the official said. “Otherwise, they would have killed Kuzminov and could have escaped in that helicopter.”The HUR clearly considered the mission a major success. Shortly afterward, General Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, announced that the operation would give confidence to other Russian soldiers who were considering defection. The intelligence agency even produced a documentary film about the operation to showcase its triumph.
Instead, Kuzminov left Ukraine in October and drove to Villajoyosa, a small town on the Mediterranean coast popular with British and Eastern European tourists. There, he settled on the ninth floor of a modest apartment building about a 10-minute walk from the beach. “Everyone thinks the services took him out,” said Ivan, 31, who fled his home city, Kherson, Ukraine, at the start of the war. “They’re everywhere.”
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