The Story of Vadim Krasikov: The Kremlin's Favorite Assassin

Recently I did something that  could earn me the Darwin Award:

I helped free a murderer who  has now vowed to kill me next.

Hi, I'm Christo Grozev, an  investigative journalist.

On August 1st, 2024, a massive prisoner  swap took place between Russia and the West.

As I've explained in earlier episodes  of this series, it was the largest

multilateral prisoner swap since the  Cold War, involving 24 people in total.

16 were released back to the West, including  American journalists and famous Russian

dissidents who had opposed Putin's regime and  will now have to live their life in exile.

On the other side, eight Russian  prisoners were returned to Moscow.

Among them were several spies,  a bunch of convicted hackers,

and, most outrageously for many, an assassin.

My team's reporting helped put many of these  characters in prison in the first place.

This is the story of Vadim  Krasikov, Putin's favorite assassin.

Krasikov first came onto my radar in August 2019.

At that time, I was working for the open  source investigative platform Bellingcat.

I remember that day very clearly. We were doing

OSINT training for African  journalists in Johannesburg.

Right in the middle of my  presentation, the news came

that a murder had taken place in Berlin's  popular Tiergarten Park in broad daylight.

I involved the whole training class  in trying to solve the whodunnit.

The murdered man was Zelimkhan  Khangoshvili, a Georgian who

fought alongside Chechen militias in  the second Chechen war against Russia.

He had relocated his family to Germany after

several prior attempts on his  life in Georgia and Ukraine.

On the morning of the assassination, witnesses  at the park said that Khangoshvili had been

walking through the wooded park, likely on  his way back home from the nearby mosque.

A man on a bike went up to him, pulled out a  suppressed glock 26 ,and shot him three times,

once in the shoulder and twice in  the head, killing him instantly.

Then he ditched his bike, pistol, and  disguise into the nearest Spree river.

He then mingled with a crowd of tourists  on his way to pick up an electric scooter

conveniently pre-parked for him nearby,  when he was picked up by the police.

A couple of teenagers had spotted him as he was

shedding his disguise in the  bushes and called in a tip.

As you might expect from a trained Russian  assassin, the murderer didn't admit to his crime.

Instead, he insisted that he had nothing  to do with the murdered man in the park.

He said his name was Vadim Sokolov and he was  simply a Russian tourist traveling around Europe.

The passport he had on him when he  was arrested suggested the same thing.

A quick check by German police with the Russian  authorities produced a glowing reference.

Yes, this is indeed Vadim Sokolov, a law-abiding  citizen with a clean criminal record.

So what was happening here? Was it  just the wrong tourist in the wrong

bushes? A case of a seriously mistaken identity?

We were going to find out.

Now, what was certain by this time was  that this had not been just a random act

of violence or an organized crime revenge killing.

This murder bore many of the  hallmark characteristics of

a state-sponsored assassination.

The murder was carried out in  broad daylight with precision.

It was execution-style, with two control  shots in the head at close range,

a method consistent with  professional assassinations.

The killer had made the shots while riding a bike,  a stunt much harder to achieve than it sounds.

And the victim, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, had  long been a target of the Russian State.

He had been on Russia's most wanted list  for years and had fled Georgia with his

family to seek asylum in Germany because  of the previous attempts on his life.

So from the onset, it looked and certainly felt  a lot like a hit job ordered by the Kremlin.

But in the world of data journalism,

we don't operate on hunches. We  had to find the data to prove it.

We had to figure out who this man was, only  then could we figure out who had sent him.

As often happens in these investigations,  first, we had to figure out who this man wasn't.

The name on the Russian tourist passport  was Vadim Sokolov, born in 1970.

My team, at that time a joint group  from Bellingcat, The Insider in Russia,

and Der Spiegel in Germany, began looking  into whether such a man even existed.

On paper, his identity seemed almost flawless.

He had a clean passport and a valid French visa.

When applying for his visa, he had shown  employment records as a civil engineer,

a tax record and a registered address in Russia.

But, when we dug deeper, certain  digital cracks began appearing.

First we analyzed leaked  Russian government databases.

Indeed, Sokolov existed there,  but only on the surface.

You scratch the surface and  Sokolov becomes a digital ghost.

You see, all of his records in the  Russian databases were implausibly fresh.

His first passport had been issued a couple  of months before the trip to Germany.

His personal tax number had been created  just a week before he applied for a visa.

And the company that had issued his  employment letter was in liquidation.

At his registered address in Bryansk, neighbors  said they had never seen seen this man.

Online we also couldn't find a digital  footprint - no social media pages,

no email accounts, no photographs.

It was as if he had materialized overnight,

just entering the digital world of  government databases at the mature age of 49.

Every real person leaves digital  traces of the life they live,

especially in the modern era where we  live our lives online more and more.

This is especially true in Russia,

where the government obsessively records  nearly every step their citizens take.

Every flight or train ride, every  hotel stay, every doctor's appointment.

They're all logged and logged and logged.

And often, these logs are leaked  or sold in the black market,

which gives data journalists  unbeatable points of reference.

So when somebody appears in fresh government  databases but doesn't exist in any of the older

previously leaked databases, there can be only  one conclusion: he or she is a fake persona,

a contrived identity created by the Russian  government made to look like they exist.

The man arrested in Berlin  was very much Vadim Sokolov.

But who was he?

Finding the real identity behind a fake name  is often the hardest part of any investigation.

Professional spies and government  assassins usually don't have their

face plastered all over social media, thus  a reverse face search - which works to

track down most civilians - usually  yields empty results for the spies.

So we had to start looking from  something else. How about the name?

Russian spies prefer retaining their real  first name under the fake identity. Why?

Well first, because it's easier  to remember. But more importantly,

because you really don't want to  be yelled at with the wrong name

by an ex-classmate spotting you  around the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

So Vadim is often really Vadim.

Another thing Russian spies also try to  maintain between their real and fake identities

is their birth date, so they don't forget it.

But that's not a hard rule. Sometimes they're  smart enough to memorize a different birth date.

But one thing almost never ever  changes. That's their zodiac sign.

In Russia zodiac signs are a big thing.

Everyone knows what sign they are and sometimes  people even ask one another when they meet.

I know this because when I was  running radio stations in Russia,

the daily horoscope was a  must-have feature on the air.

So Russian spies always default to their  real zodiac sign in the cover identity,

for fear of being asked what's  your sign by a border official in

a foreign country and not being  able to respond instinctively.

I'm sure no border official outside Russia  would ever think of asking this stupid question.

Armed with the first name and a zodiac sign,

I started searching through Russian databases  for all the Vadims who were also a Leo and

were born within a few years of 1970, the  year of birth of the fake Vadim Sokolov.

There were literally hundreds of  those though, so my eyes were glazing

and I was losing hope and planning to call  it a night when something caught my eye.

One of the Vadim Leos had a criminal  record on suspicion of murder.

More than that, he had been placed on  the Interpol Red Notice list in 2013.

More than that, Russia had recalled that Interpol  notice within a couple of months of issuing it.

"Nothing to see here."

And even more than that, in the  summary of the alleged crime,

there was the description: "assassin  approached the victim on a bicycle"

The story of this assassination had even made  it into the evening news on Russian television

and we found a TV report showing security  camera footage of the assassin approaching

the victim on a bicycle and shooting into him,  diligently picking up the shells after the murder.

This finding gave our team a strong  hypothesis that the person who had

been briefly wanted for the murder in 2013,

Vadim Krasikov, might be the real person  behind the fake persona, Vadim Sokolov.

Both were bicycle killers.

Who else does that?

Krasikov's murder had been white-washed  and his arrest warrant had been recalled,

a telltale sign of a government coverup.

One was born on August 20th, 1970. The other -  the real one - on August 10th, 5 years earlier.

But, who would resist the lure of being  younger on their fake identity? I wouldn't.

All of this made perfect sense, but we couldn't

be sure unless we had a photograph of  Vadim Krasikov. Easier said than done.

All government records of Vadim Krasikov

that contained a photograph  had been mysteriously purged.

No driver's license existed for him,

despite the fact that a few cars  had been registered in his name.

And his passport file was locked for  access so no one could get his picture.

Finally we tracked somebody who had  bought a car from Vadim Krasikov

and had a scanned copy of his driver's  license as part of the documentation.

A very blurry photo indeed, but it allowed us to

do a forensic comparison with the  mugshot from the German police.

And bingo. That was definitely the same person.

So we were sure now that Krasikov  was the murderer from Berlin,

and that he had killed at  least one more person before.

But how could we be sure that he had done  both of these murders on behalf of the

Russian state and not say as a contract  killer paid for by unknown criminals?

We had to do some more sleuthing  -- but it all paid off.

First we discovered that Krasikov  had been involved with yet another

murder in Russia, a third one, back in 2010.

Court records showed that his accomplices, who,

unlike Krasikov, had been arrested,  were both senior former FSB officers.

And one of them had received a personal  glock from the president of Kyrgyzstan

for quote unquote: "contributions  to the country's National Security".

The accused had mentioned that  award as a character reference,

in order to get released on bale.

We then checked the flight records of that  FSB officer and discovered that he indeed

had flown once to the capital of Kyrgyzstan -  and guess who else had been on the same flight?

Vadim Krasikov.

Thus it was almost certain that Krasikov  was also an FSB officer and had also likely

received a glock from that mysterious job the  FSB had done for the Kyrgyzstan president.

But the Smoking Gun, or should I say the  Smoking Glock, came from another data source.

We were able to get the call records  and telecoms metadata Vadim Krasikov's

phone for the period prior to the trip to Berlin.

For the months leading up to this trip,

Krasikov had been in regular contact with over  a dozen current and former FSB operatives,

most of them from a secretive elite  unit of killers called Vympel.

But he wasn't just talking to them. His  cell phone metadata showed that days

before the undercover trip to Berlin,  he had visited the FSB headquarters

and spent several days at a top secret  compound belonging to the Vympel unit.

According to Russian State media  reports, this compound is used

to train operatives in shooting under  quote unquote "extreme circumstances"

Such as shooting while hanging upside down,

Tom Cruise style, shooting underwater,  and shooting while riding a bicycle.

All this evidence combined  felt pretty damning to us.

Our research had found a known serial murderer  with clear ties to the Kremlin and the security

apparatus and he had the same face  and personal details as our suspect.

I felt completely confident that  Sokolov was actually Krasikov.

And German prosecutors agreed.

Their 67 page indictment heavily cited  Bellingcat's findings and my own testimony

a total of 149 times, using our work to prove that  the man in their courtroom wasn't just a killer.

He was an FSB-trained assassin,

acting on direct orders from the Russian  government to execute Khangoshvili.

During the trial, I was actually  brought in to to testify

about our findings and I was  given my own cover identity.

I was "Witness G"

Now at this point, I had published  a number of investigations about the

Kremlin that revealed their crimes and put  me on the official personal non grata list.

But testifying against Krasikov was the  first time I had to sit in a courtroom,

facing a known killer, and reveal the  truth that would put him away for life.

Or so I thought.

Krasikov stared me down the entire time I spoke.

And even even though the German court  didn't reveal my name to the public,

I knew Krasikov wouldn't forget Witness G.

And now he's free. So how did that happen?

Against all odds, I also played a part in  that and I'm not sure how to feel about it.

In the years after Krasikov's arrest  in Germany, Russia started arresting a

number of political activists and journalists  and imprisoned them on fraudulent charges.

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny was one  of these, and so was American Evan Gershkovich.

Dozens of Russian activists were also imprisoned  for protesting against the war on Ukraine.

As a result, I started looking for  ways to get these prisoners released.

One way was to convince Putin to release Navalny,

in exchange for Russians that he wanted to  see freed from prisons in other countries.

Putin actually explicitly hinted in  an interview with Tucker Carlson that

he would release journalist Evan  Gershkovich, if he was given back

"a person serving a sentence in a  country that is an ally of the US"

I knew immediately that he was specifically  talking about Krasikov, who we had since

discovered had actually been quite personally  close to Putin during his time at the FSB.

It is possible he was even  Putin's personal bodyguard,

but almost certainly he was his personal assassin.

Putin wanted him free and he  was willing to trade for it.

So as painful as it was to help release a  murderer on whose hands was the blood of many,

and as dangerous as it seemed to my own safety, I  then ended up advocating for Krasikov's release.

I thought, in the bigger scheme  of things, saving the lives of

innocent people languishing in Russian  prisons, is a higher moral imperative.

Unfortunately though, it was  too late for Alexey Navalny.

By the time we got all the  governments to agree on the

multilateral complicated swap, Alexey was dead.

He was killed in his Russian  prison in February 2024.

Despite Putin publicly stating that he had  agreed to let him go, most likely the the

Kremlin's vengeful dictator could never afford  to let this political arch enemy live freely.

But 16 other men and women were freed back to  the West in the historic swap that took place.

It's a morally challenging case, one that  has kept me up at night for many many nights.

Khangoshvili's family deserves Krasikov  to serve out the sentence in jail.

They deserved justice.

Instead he's now free in  Moscow, probably getting awards.

And Russian nationalists are  urging him to to kill again.

Apparently I'm near the top of that new kill list.

But then again, our investigative  work over the years has made overseas

operations by Russian assassins  much more difficult than before,

hopefully protecting many  more lives in the future.

That's the true story of Putin's favorite assassin

and why he was hugged by Putin as a  close friend upon arrival in Moscow.

If you want to know more about the  background of other spies who were

exchanged this momentous swap,  check out the other videos below.

And if you want to find out more about  my investigations subscribe and like.