On a Tuesday afternoon last month, Maksim Kuzminov drove up to his new condo overlooking a palm-lined Spanish beach, unaware that an assassin was waiting for him by the parking garage.
Local police stationed less than 500 feet away needed only minutes to respond, but witnesses said it was too late for the former Russian helicopter pilot. The killer had vanished, driving out over the 28-year-old victim’s bullet-ridden body. A medic who sliced through his shirt with bandage shears noted the accuracy of the five small-caliber shots, one directly piercing his heart.
Six months earlier, Kuzminov, a native of a town near Russia’s North Korean border, had defected to Ukraine, his Mi-8 attack helicopter taking small-arms fire as he flew barely 20 feet above the ground. After turning over the gunship, he collected a $500,000 reward and encouraged his countrymen to follow his example.
...
Businessmen have been found hanged in London and drowned in Puerto Rico. A ruling-party boss fell from the roof of an Indian hotel and a 46-year-old deputy science minister died of an unexplained illness on a return flight from Cuba. Spanish police are still investigating the 2022 deaths of Sergey Protosenya, the former deputy chairman at gas producer Novatek JSC, and his wife and daughter in their home near Barcelona.
Last month, Russian independent media reported that the 35-year old son of Igor Sechin, Putin’s confidant and chief executive of oil giant Rosneft, died at his Moscow luxury apartment complex, known as “Putin’s Friend’s House.”
There are no obvious Kremlin fingerprints on these deaths. Not so for another cohort, murdered in spectacular operations planned like theater productions scripted for maximum public impact. Two months after launching an aborted mutiny, the rogue commander of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was blown up at 28,000 feet. His jet crashed into a patch of meadow about 40 miles from Putin’s lakeside residence.
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the easily detectable nerve agent Novichok in 2020, then died suddenly in an Arctic prison colony last month, just as a deal to free him was coming together.
