There’s a basic distinction among spy services worldwide: those that conduct assassinations and those that don’t. America’s spy outfits, led by the Central Intelligence Agency, are in the former category. Today, the CIA tends to assassinate people with missile-armed drones and similar high-tech stand-off methods.
Not all countries do it from a distance, however. Some countries still conduct assassinations the old-fashioned way, up close with guns, bombs, and even poisons. No country today is more notorious for carrying out such hits abroad than Russia, where this dark art is termed “wetwork.” Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s spy agencies, what Moscow terms its “special services,” have witnessed a wetwork renaissance. One that has seen enemies of the Kremlin meeting unnatural ends in numerous countries over the last two decades.
Some of the most notorious examples of Putin-era wetwork have occurred in the United Kingdom, including the fatal 2006 poisoning in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a regime critic and former officer of the Federal Security Service, who succumbed to a lethal dose of radioactive polonium-210. In 2018, Moscow assassins nearly killed Sergei Skripal, a former officer with Russian military intelligence, and his daughter in Salisbury with the nerve agent Novichok. The Skripals barely survived their poisoning, while an innocent British bystander did not. Until now, however, it was generally assumed that Moscow demurred from executing such hazardous, high-profile operations on American soil.
Not anymore. The Department of Justice last week released a previously sealed indictment against five individuals who were working for Moscow with the aim of assassinating a U.S.-based critic of the Putin regime. All the accused are outside the United States and beyond the reach of American justice.
This nefarious group, termed the “RIS Network,” or “Russian Intelligence Service Network, by the Justice Department, had as its ringleader 63-year-old Yuri Khrameev, a special services veteran known as “Colonel Yuri.” He was backed by his 27-year-old son Kirill Khrameev, an FSB officer, as well as 35-year-old Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, a dual Russian-Cuban national living in Russia. A dance teacher in northern Russia, Romagoza Durruthy, was previously involved in a GRU sabotage network operating in Europe, including planned terrorism against Latvia. Two lesser network members, Yaidel Delgado Suarez, a 35-year-old Cuban, who goes by “Viking,” and Angel Eduardo Castro, a 22-year-old Venezuelan national, allegedly served as recruiters for the group, giving its three core members a degree of protection from exposure — at least in theory.
Although the RIS Network never assassinated its target (who isn’t named but is known to live around Washington, D.C.), there was considerable planning involved here. In the summer of 2026, the network attempted to spy on its target, but finding the right assassin was more complicated. An offer of $40,000 to conduct the hit on the dissident failed to find an eager killer. The Cuban Suarez claimed to have “people in Mexico” who could perform the hit, but the hit was delayed. His efforts to find a suitable hitman didn’t bear fruit before the unsealed indictment blew the whistle on the network’s planned wetwork.
The good news in this case is that this network never got particularly close to assassinating anyone. The network’s planning had evil intent but appears rather amateurish on the whole, as is so often the case with the Putin regime’s wetwork and related sabotage these days. In particular, the GRU has become notably aggressive in recent years in its often-indiscriminate violent plans against the West. This involves hiring disposable murderers and saboteurs online. These tend to be amateurs who fail to perform as Moscow wants, yet are deniable when things go wrong, as they often do. This then allows Moscow to pretend, however absurdly, that it had nothing to do with the murderous plotting.
There’s no room for complacency, however, since although this particular Russian wetwork plot was compromised by its own amateurishness, the next Moscow hit team may prove more proficient.
One major problem is that U.S. counterintelligence remains unacceptably underfunded and poorly organized. The American spy-hunting business remains the intelligence community’s red-headed stepchild, as it’s been since the 1970s, when liberal muckrakers smeared counterintelligence as somehow nefarious and un-American. There are important counterintelligence reform ideas in Congress, particularly among wise Republicans, but nothing has happened yet. Until it does, we will be catching Moscow’s assassins as much by luck as by skill. Per the hoary cliché, the good guys have to get lucky every time, while the bad guys need only get lucky once.
Moreover, gloating by some Democrats about this plot having something to do with President Donald Trump’s accommodating relationship with Putin lands wide of the mark. The Left’s advocacy that this new plot reflects newfound Muscovite adventurism and “the rules have changed” is simply untrue.
Over a decade ago, in the heart of Washington, a close ally of Vladimir Putin died under mysterious circumstances. That was Mikhail Lesin, the 57-year-old founder of Russia Today (now RT), a true Kremlin insider, who got on Putin’s bad side and fled to the U.S. for protection. Instead, in early November 2015, Lesin was found dead in his Washington, D.C., Dupont Circle hotel room, little more than a mile from the White House. He was supposedly under FBI guard. None dispute that Lesin was engaged in a multiday alcohol bender, but his fatal injuries, supposedly caused by the dead man’s falling multiple times in his hotel room, were difficult to explain.
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However, President Barack Obama was president then, and the media, with very few exceptions, expended minimal effort digging into what really happened to Misha Lesin. Virtually everybody in intelligence circles acquainted with Putin and his regime believed that Lesin’s strange demise was caused by the Kremlin. The main debate, never resolved, was whether the killing was performed by the FSB or by cutouts hired to do the dirty work. Regardless, Obama’s Justice Department closed its investigation as soon as possible, asserting that Lesin died by accident. The media was generally content to ask no follow-up questions.
But pretending that Moscow doesn’t conduct wetwork, including on American soil, amounts to institutionalized escapism. It offers a guarantee that Putin will keep trying to assassinate his enemies living in the West, even in our nation’s capital. Let this recent case of thwarted wetwork remind Americans, especially Congress, that Putin’s threat disrespects even American borders.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
