Russian Vadim Krassikov, released this Thursday, August 1, as part of a large prisoner exchange, was at the heart of the Kremlin’s demands: convicted of the murder in Berlin of a former Chechen separatist commander on behalf of the FSB, he pleaded misunderstanding.
Remaining enigmatic until the end, his name had been mentioned for months as a potential prisoner to be exchanged between Russia and Western countries. Several times, the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin himself have, at least indirectly, taken up his defense. The man was sentenced on December 15, 2021 in Berlin to life imprisonment for the murder of a Georgian from the Chechen minority who had fought against Russian forces between 2000 and 2004. Reinforcing the aura of mystery around him, he entered the courtroom after the photographers and cameras had left.
Murder in a park
His victim, Zelimkhan Khangochvili by his real name, called himself Tornike Kavtarachvili in Germany, the country in which he had lived since 2016 with his family and where he had requested asylum, after surviving two assassination attempts in his home country.
On August 23, 2019, around noon, in a Berlin park, Vadim Krassikov, traveling by bicycle, approached his victim from behind and fired a first shot from a distance with a silencer, before finishing him off with two point-blank shots to the head. Before committing his crime, he had “traveled as a tourist” to Paris and Warsaw, before returning to Berlin, according to the German justice system.
At the opening of his trial on October 7, 2020, Vadim Krassikov, with short brown hair, had one of his lawyers say that his name was Vadim Sokolov, that he was born in 1970 and that he was “Russian, single, a construction engineer.” He has not changed his position since and has always remained silent. But according to the German justice system, he is indeed Vadim Krassikov, born in 1965, and was the commander of a special unit of the Russian secret service FSB. According to the online investigative site Bellingcathe is said to have been born in southern Kazakhstan, a Central Asian country that was a Soviet republic at the time.
“Patriot”
During the trial, several clues came to reinforce the prosecution’s conviction about the identity of the accused. First, a private photo of Krassikov with two tattoos identical to those of the suspect. Then, the testimony of his brother-in-law, a Ukrainian, who identified him in court after having said the first time that he did not recognize him for fear of possible reprisals.
Moscow has always denied any involvement in this murder and denounced a “political verdict” on December 15, 2021. But on February 9, 2024, in an interview with the American conservative journalist Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin had suggested that Moscow could exchange the American journalist Evan Gershkovich imprisoned in Russia for a “person who killed for patriotic reasons a bandit in a European capital.”
A fairly clear allusion to Vadim Krassikov, twice married and father of three children according to the Bellingcat website. Krassikov’s name had already been mentioned to be exchanged for two American citizens and the Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, who died in prison on February 16, 2024. According to the Bellingcat website, Krassikov is suspected of another murder, this time in Moscow, in 2013, against the entrepreneur Albert Nazarov. The modus operandi appears very similar to that of Berlin: the assassin approached the victim on a bicycle before shooting him several times.