On Thursday, Krasikov was freed as part of a wide-ranging prisoner swap between Russia and the United States and its allies. The deal also saw several Americans held by Russia freed, including Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who had been held in Russia since March 2023.
Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said Moscow has been so intent on securing Krasikov’s release because it would send a firm message that the Kremlin will go far to protect its loyal footmen.
“It’s a very high-profile case,” Bergmann said in an interview conducted before the news of the prisoner swap, adding that the case displayed Russia’s global reach in its pursuit of dissidents. “What it signals is if you’re a dissident of Russia and living in the West, that Russia can get to you.”
He was convicted of ‘state-sponsored murder’
Krasikov, German authorities have alleged, is a former colonel in the FSB.
The 58-year-old was born in Kazakhstan before moving to Siberia with his family in the 1980s, according to an investigation by Bellingcat, the Insider and Der Spiegel.
Russian authorities previously connected him to a 2013 murder, according to Bellingcat, an online investigative site. But an Interpol search warrant was dropped in 2015. He moved to Moscow in 2019, according to Bellingcat, whose investigations fueled the prosecution of the Berlin murder.
On Aug. 23, 2019, in Kleiner Tiergarten, a small park in central Berlin, Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen and ethnic Chechen, was shot three times in broad daylight by someone who had tailed him on a bicycle.
A German court later concluded the assassin was Krasikov. Witnesses said Krasikov approached Khangoshvili from behind, shooting him twice in the body and firing another shot to Khangoshvili’s head once he had fallen to the ground.
Krasikov was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in a Berlin court in 2021; the severity of the crime was, under German law, likely to disqualify him from an early release.
The killing, German prosecutors said, was a political murder ordered by the Kremlin. The “state-sponsored murder,” Germany said, was a “serious violation of German law and Germany’s sovereignty.”
Krasikov’s lawyers argued that their client was not Krasikov nor a hit man but rather an engineer named Vadim Sokolov with no ties to the Russian government.
Bellingcat, the investigative site, matched “Sokolov” to Krasikov’s identity by distinctive tattoos on his arms.
Putin appeared to reference him as a ‘patriot’
Many convicted Russian agents are held globally, but Moscow appears to have a special interest in sending a message with Krasikov’s release.
“There is this example that is set that if you’re a Russian assassin and you murder someone in broad daylight in a major European city, Russia will try and make sure you get home and will do whatever it takes to free you, including taking innocent people hostage,” Bergmann said.
In public, Russian authorities hinted that they wanted to recover Krasikov. In private, Moscow officials had expressed in direct terms a desire to repatriate him as part of a prisoner swap, those involved in negotiations previously told The Washington Post.
In an apparent reference to Krasikov in February, Putin highlighted the case of an unnamed “patriot” who was “serving a sentence in an allied country of the U.S.,” in response to a question from Tucker Carlson about Gershkovich. “That person, due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals,” Putin said, appearing to tie Krasikov’s case to that of Gershkovich.
It follows the Kremlin expressing a clear interest in recovering Krasikov in earlier negotiations, two senior European security officials told The Post this year.
An aide to the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny also said negotiators had named Krasikov in talks this year aimed at securing the release of Gershkovich, former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and Navalny. Those negotiations were in their final stages when Navalny died in a Russian prison colony in February, said the aide, Maria Pevchikh.
There was opposition to his release in Germany
Before the release, German authorities had not commented publicly on whether they were considering releasing Krasikov as part of an exchange, and they declined to respond to a request for comment from The Post before the exchange.
When asked at a news conference in June, Foreign Office spokesman Sebastian Fischer refused to say whether Germany was engaged in prisoner swap negotiations, repeating Berlin’s call for Russia to release Gershkovich immediately and unconditionally.
When Krasikov’s name was initially floated in 2022 as part of a potential exchange, German lawmakers from across the political spectrum bristled. Many pointed to the fact that Krasikov, having served a fraction of his lifetime sentence, was convicted of a brazen assassination executed in the heart of the German capital at the behest of a hostile state.
In private, however, Germany’s position on the prospect of releasing Krasikov appears to have shifted over time — at least insofar as a means of securing Navalny’s release. The European security officials said that as Navalny’s health deteriorated, Berlin dropped some of its earlier reluctance at the prospect of releasing Krasikov. It is unclear whether Navalny’s subsequent death has since shifted Berlin’s calculus.
In a February press briefing, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller refused to comment when asked whether Krasikov had been named as part of any U.S.-backed proposal to secure the release of Gershkovich.
Bergmann, who previously worked in the State Department under President Barack Obama, said such a swap was probably necessary to free Gershkovich. “There is a deep desire to see Gershkovich free, and it’s clear he’s being held hostage.” he said. “The challenge is how you weigh that deep sense of wanting to free an individual that’s being wrongly held versus freeing someone who is justly held.”
Robyn Dixon and Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting.
