Maxim Kuzminov, the Russian deserter who failed to keep a low profile in Spain

On September 22, 2022, a Russian man in his twenties named Maxim Kuzminov uploaded what would be the last photograph to his Instagram profile. Mounted on a horse, he smiles at the camera. He was on vacation and the war his country had embarked on months earlier by invading Ukraine seemed remote to him, despite being a captain in the Russian army. However, on February 13, 2024, a year and five months later, Kuzminov was shot dead in the underground car park of a housing complex in Villajoyosa (Alicante, population 37,500) over an act he had carried out during the conflict: desertion. That photograph remains accessible on Instagram and has nearly 3,700 comments. The vast majority celebrate his death.Moscow has never distanced itself from Kuzminov’s killing. “This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse the moment he planned his dirty and terrible crime,” Sergey Naryshkin, head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), said after hearing news of the deserter’s death. “A dog gets a dog’s death,” added Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and a close ally of Vladimir Putin. Who organized the assassination and who pulled the trigger, however, remains a mystery. Some attribute the operation to Naryshkin’s SVR; others to the Federal Security Service (FSB, successor to the KGB); and some point to the Main Directorate of Intelligence (GRU, the military intelligence service). Proof? None. Suspicions? Plenty.So many guesses and so few certainties led the investigating judge last September to provisionally close the case because it was impossible to “pinpoint the material or intellectual authorship of the shots against the victim.” Makarov casings, ammunition commonly used in former Soviet bloc countries; vague testimony from witnesses who saw a car speed away; and the discovery of that same vehicle after having been set ablaze are the few clues the Spanish Civil Guard has had to work with so far. “There’s nothing to go on,” sources close to the probe admit.Kuzminov became a traitor to Moscow on August 9, 2023. That day he took off in an Mi-8 helicopter from the Kursk military base to transport spare parts to Russian troops on the front. Instead, he changed course, landed in Ukraine and surrendered to the GUR, Kyiv’s military intelligence service, with which he had been in contact for months. He later said he had deserted because he considered the war “a crime.” While a man identified on Russian state television as an intelligence officer predicted the pilot would not “live long enough to be tried,” Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government turned the serviceman into a hero and rewarded him with $500,000. It also provided him with a passport under a false identity, Ihor Shevchenko, and advised him to remain in Ukraine so he could be protected.Kuzminov took the money and the documents but ignored that advice. He bought a Mercedes S-Class and, at the end of October that year, drove to Villajoyosa, a town with a large Ukrainian community but also a Russian one. The ex-serviceman began to live conspicuously. He frequented nightlife venues where many patrons were from his home country; he bought rounds of drinks and often got drunk. He also contacted his former girlfriend in Russia and asked her to come to Spain. “He went where he shouldn’t have gone and did what he shouldn’t have done,” police sources say.On the morning of February 13, 2024, less than four months after arriving in Villajoyosa, two individuals entered the garage of his housing complex in a white car that had been stolen two days earlier in Murcia, in southeastern Spain. They parked in an empty space and waited for hours until, at about 4.40 p.m., they saw Kuzminov arrive in his car. When the deserter got out and walked past them toward the elevator, both, already hooded, climbed out of the vehicle and shouted at him. As he turned, they fired nine shots. Three rounds missed, but six hit him: one struck his left arm and the rest his torso. Mortally wounded, Kuzminov tried to escape up the exit ramp, where he collapsed. As they fled, the killers ran over him with their car. The entire scene was recorded by the building’s cameras.“I heard a car speed away and shortly after a neighbor asked me to call the police because there was someone on the garage floor,” recalls Rubén, more than two years later, who at the time was the building’s doorman. To him, Kuzminov was almost a stranger he had seen only “three or four times.” Nothing suspicious was found in the apartment where he lived alone. The car used by the killers was found burning less than an hour later in the nearby town of Campello. The hitmen had used an accelerant to destroy any evidence that might identify them. They succeeded.On his Instagram profile, in October 2021, Kuzminov posted a photograph in which he poses next to a high-performance car while making the victory sign with his fingers. “If you want to get revenge on someone, just get rich,” he wrote. He achieved the latter by deserting, but he was the victim of a reprisal. The question of who carried it out continues to generate more guesswork than certainty.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition