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BERLIN — Germany’s new government had only been in power for a week last December when its mettle was put to the test.
In a wood-panelled hearing room at Berlin’s Supreme Court, 56-year-old Vadim Krasikov was convicted of murder on behalf of Russia, an act the judges denounced as “state terrorism”. The 2019 killing of former Chechen fighter Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, 40, was particularly brazen. He was shot three times in broad daylight in a Berlin park by an assassin riding a bicycle.
In response, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government expelled two Russian “diplomats” who were actually intelligence officers — not from the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency that the court found most likely responsible for ordering the assassination, according to one official, but from the GRU. Russian military intelligence. The hope, German officials said, is that Germany can maintain its intelligence presence in Moscow – much smaller than the number of Russian operatives in Berlin – and avoid major expulsions.
Germany’s timid reaction to the verdict was part of a long-standing pattern of Kremlin appeasement, critics say, a policy that spanned various governments and was designed to protect Germany’s business ties with Russia, particularly its need for Russian oil and natural gas. But some now question whether the reluctance to punish Russian President Vladimir Putin, even in the face of state-sanctioned murder, contributed to the Kremlin’s sense of impunity before the invasion of Ukraine, at a time when the United States warned that Russia was planning an attack.
The reaction was one of the “signals” Russia received that even a new government would not act to rein in Moscow, said Andrii Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin at the time. “There was a lack of political response,” he said. “It was ridiculous. This was the critical period when everyone knew, when the Americans knew that Russia was going to start the war.
The killing took place shortly before noon on August 23, 2019, a mild summer day. Khangoshvili’s then 18-year-old daughter, Amira, returned home from class to find him putting on his shoes. He told her he had some “business” to take care of before going to Friday prayers at a nearby mosque.
“He was in good spirits and smiling,” she recalled. “He said he wouldn’t be long.”
Minutes later, in Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten park, the first shot pierced Khangoshvili’s chest before the killer, wearing a long black wig to hide his identity, shot another in the back of the Chechen’s head, investigators testified. Krasikov then got off his bike and stood over Khangoshvili to deliver a final shot to the head with his Glock 26 9mm pistol equipped with a silencer. Witnesses in the park watched in horror.
The killing sent a double message, said a German security official who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. “To Kremlin opponents, it says, ‘We can kill you no matter where you are,'” the official said. “But also to Germany, the message was: ‘We don’t care and we don’t respect the sovereignty of your country.’
Sergey Nechaev, Russia’s ambassador to Germany, described Krasikov’s conviction and life sentence as a “biased, politically motivated decision” and said allegations of Russian involvement were “absurd”. But the FSB recently offered to include Krasikov in a prisoner swap to secure the release of two Americans detained in Russia, basketball star Brittney Greener and security consultant Paul Whelan, according to US officials. The Biden administration described the FSB offer, which was first reported by CNN, as “frivolous.”
A German government spokesman said authorities in Berlin had been briefed on the US-Russian discussions, but declined to comment further.
Russia’s all-out assault on Ukraine in February marked the beginning of what Scholz called the Zeitenwende, or turning point, in German foreign and defense policy.
“If you take February 24 as a turning point, I’m on the side of those people who say we have to look at a lot of things that happened in the past and think further,” said Constantin von Notz, a green politician and member of the parliamentary committee for the supervision of German intelligence agencies. “That includes this case.”
Germany failed to “read the signs” of Russia’s increasingly criminal actions in Europe, he said. “We didn’t pay enough attention to detail.”
The Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin does not care if he offends his cause
The fact that the killer was caught, allowing the trail to Moscow to be uncovered, was down to luck, Notz added. “If that didn’t happen, we probably wouldn’t know about Russia’s interference.
A failed escape led to the capture of the killer. Two witnesses spotted Krasikov changing in the bushes and throwing his bicycle into the Spree River and called the police. Investigators later retrieved the glock from the water. Krasikov, who was carrying a passport in the name of Vadim Sokolov, claiming to be a tourist, stopped to urinate in the bushes.
But a day after the murder, thousands of kilometers away in South Africa, Christo Grozev, executive director of the investigative publication Bellingcat, was holding a joint training session with the Russian publication Insider for journalists from across the continent.
“It fit perfectly with what I was teaching them, how we go about assessing false identities,” he said. He searched Bellingcat’s set of leaked Russian databases to see if the name Vadim Sokolov existed, but came back with no match. “We have concluded that this is likely a false identity.”
Within a week of the murder, Bellingcat published a piece outlining why Russia’s claims that the killer was not connected to the Russian state were implausible. The passport was issued in Sokolov’s name just 10 days before its holder traveled to Europe and matched a batch of passports issued to Russian intelligence officers.
“This is something we have taken as a mission, to shame governments and prosecutors into doing all their work, not just the easiest work,” Grozev said.
Although the killing was quickly linked to Russian intelligence, it took until December for the case to be referred by Berlin police to federal investigators.
“It was clear that at the political level they had to decide how to deal with this case,” a US official said. “It was very clear that they thought that if we took this step, it was a political step.”
But Bellingcat’s work made the case hard to ignore — Krasikov’s indictment cited Grozev’s statements and work for the investigative publication 159 times. “It was absolutely Bellingcat,” the American official said.
In December 2019, when federal prosecutors first announced that Russian state officials might be behind the killing, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government expelled two Russian diplomats, with Merkel citing Moscow’s failure to cooperate with the investigation.
An ethnic Chechen born in Georgia, Khangoshvili grew up along the fault lines of the troubled post-Soviet North Caucasus. In 2000, at the age of about 20, he took up arms in the Second Chechen War. He commanded a group of about two dozen men from Panki Gorge, a valley in Georgia that was a center for Chechen separatists.
In 2004, according to family members and the German investigation, Khangoshvili was involved in an attack on a police station in Nazran in the Russian republic of Ingushetia that left 58 policemen dead. German investigators said the attack marked him for “retribution”. Asked about the killing in Berlin at a press conference in December 2019, Putin called Khangoshvili a “bloodthirsty” murderer.
After fighting in the war in Chechnya, Khangoshvili returned to Georgia in 2004, where he lived under his mother’s maiden name. He helped Georgian intelligence in identifying Russian spies and negotiating with Islamist militants, the German court said, and became close to the government of Mikheil Saakashvili, the pro-Western former president of Georgia who led the country during its 2008 war with Russia. ..
Within the framework of the war between Russia and Ukraine, a war between Chechens
In a 2012 letter from the FSB office at the Russian Embassy in Berlin to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Service, which was obtained by The Washington Post, the FSB accused Khangoshvili, then based in Georgia, of being a member of the Caucasus Emir, an Islamist insurgency a group that has claimed responsibility for attacks, including one in the Moscow subway in 2010 that killed 39 people. His family says he believed it was part of a Russian effort to tarnish his name, complicate any future asylum procedures and soften the reaction if he were killed.
Five of the 19 alleged members on a list applied by the FSB, including Khangoshvili, died under suspicious circumstances, according to German investigators. One of those named was stabbed and shot by suspected Russian spies in Istanbul in 2015; another was killed in a car bomb in Kyiv in 2017.
Khangoshvili was considered a “high-value target” by Russia, German investigators said. In 2015, there was an assassination attempt on him in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, where he was shot four times while driving his car. For Khangoshvili and his family, there was never much doubt about who was behind the attack.
“I know for sure that I have no enemies in Georgia,” Khangoshvili said in an interview with a Georgian TV channel from his hospital bed.
With Georgia increasingly in Moscow’s orbit and amid warnings about his safety, Khangoshvili decided he and his family must flee. He initially went to Odessa in Ukraine, where Saakashvili was briefly governor. There he met his second wife, 22 years old…
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