He was welcomed as a hero in Ukraine. When in August 2023, Maxim Kouzminov, a pilot for the Russian army, took off aboard his Mi-8 helicopter from a base in the Kursk region, Russia, no one in his crew suspected him. However, the 28-year-old man is carrying out the last operation of his life in the Russian aviation. Because it is towards the region of Kharkiv, in Ukraine, that he will land, fleeing his country and its army because he is opposed to the war. A desertion prepared for many months with the Ukrainian secret services, who promised him a large sum of money as well as protection.
“I flew at an extremely low altitude, in radio silence mode” to avoid being spotted, Maxim Kouzminov said last September openly in a video released by Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR). “I don’t want to be complicit in Russian crimes. The truth is there. There are no fascists or Nazis here. I am truly sorry for what is happening now. The murders, the tears, the blood. […] What is happening now is quite simply a genocide of the Ukrainian people,” the Russian pilot bluntly affirmed.
A false Ukrainian identity
The story was beautiful. But it finally ended abruptly last week. Far from Russia, far from Ukraine, but in Spain, in the town of Villajoyosa, in the south-east of the country, near Alicante. On February 13, a body was found riddled with bullets in an underground parking lot. According to judicial sources from the Spanish daily El Paísthe operation was bloody: after having executed their target, the attackers fled “in their victim’s car, which they also crushed”, before the vehicle in question was found shortly after in a neighboring town, in flames.
But the identity of the victim remained uncertain for several days, despite increasingly insistent rumors from pro-Russian media that it was indeed Maxime Kouzminov, exiled in Spain. Very quickly, the trail of false papers found on the victim – a 33-year-old Ukrainian man – was also considered very serious by Guardia Civil investigators. Before finally being confirmed by fingerprint analysis, confirmed to El País police sources from the Alicante region. This is indeed the former Russian pilot who was assassinated in this small Spanish town of just over 30,000 inhabitants.
Propaganda battle between kyiv and Moscow
Russia obviously did not fail to react to this news, while in October, state television had affirmed that the special services had been tasked with finding the pilot, for a fate that remains unknown. It is difficult to imagine anything else than what happened in Villajoyosa. “This traitor and criminal had become a moral corpse from the moment he planned his despicable and terrible crime,” declared the director of the Russian foreign intelligence service (SVR), Sergei Naryshkin, quoted by the official TASS agency, without confirming or denying Russian involvement in this death.
On the Ukrainian side, the intelligence services also confirmed that the person found dead in Spain was indeed Maxime Kuzminov. “We can confirm the death,” Ukrainian intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov told the newspaper Kyiv Postwithout giving further details.
Already at the time of his defection, the two camps had engaged in a real propaganda battle to spin history in their own way. And this, in particular regarding the fate of the two soldiers accompanying Maxime Kouzminov, who were not aware of his project. The pro-Kremlin Russian media was quick to report that the pilot had shot down the two men, while according to Ukrainian intelligence, the latter were killed by Ukrainian forces while trying to escape, once they arrived in Ukraine.
For kyiv, the death of this pilot remains a new blow, in an already very difficult military context on the front. The Ukrainian authorities had obviously particularly highlighted this defection, which beyond its symbolic weight, had also allowed the Ukrainian army to recover a combat helicopter full of Russian technologies as well as confidential documents. Since the start of the conflict, kyiv’s secret services have increased attempts to attract possible Russian deserters, by promising them money, protection or exile, or even participating in prisoner exchanges with Russia. Not sure that the fate reserved for Maxime Kouzminov will not generate very good publicity.