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 distant 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 parking lot of a residential complex in Villajoyosa (Alicante, 37,500 inhabitants) for an act he had precisely carried out during this conflict: desertion. Today, that photograph remains accessible on Instagram and has accumulated nearly 3,700 comments. The vast majority are to rejoice in his death.
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Moscow has never distanced itself from Kuzminov’s murder. “This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse the moment he planned his dirty and terrible crime,” said Sergei Narishkin, head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), after the defector’s death became known. “A dog receives a dog’s death,” added Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and close to Vladimir Putin. However, who organized the murder and who fired the shots remains a mystery. Some attribute the operation to Narishkin’s SVR; others to the Federal Security Service (FSB, heir to the KGB); and some point to the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU, the military secret service). Evidence of this? None. Suspicions? All.
So many assumptions and so few certainties led the judge investigating the case last September to provisionally close it due to the impossibility of “specifying the material or intellectual authorship of the shots against the victim.” Some Makarov shell casings, common ammunition in the countries of the former Soviet bloc; vague testimonies from those who saw a car fleeing at full speed; and the discovery of that same burned car are the few clues the Civil Guard has had so far. “There’s nothing to go on,” admit sources close to the investigation.
Kuzminov became a traitor to Moscow on August 9, 2023. That day, he took off in a Mi-8 helicopter from the Kursk military base to transport spare parts for Russian troops at the front. However, he changed his route, landed in Ukraine, and surrendered to the HUR, the military secret service of Kiev with which he had been in contact for months. He later explained that he had deserted because he considered the war “a crime.” While on Russian state television a man identified as an intelligence officer predicted that the pilot would not “live long enough to be judged,” Volodymyr Zelensky’s government turned the soldier into a hero and rewarded him with $500,000 (438,700 euros). They also provided him with a passport under a false identity, that of Ihor Shevchenko, and gave him advice: to stay in Ukraine to protect him.
Kuzminov took the money and documents but ignored the recommendation. He bought a Mercedes S-Class vehicle and, at the end of October that year, traveled by road to Villajoyosa, a town with a large Ukrainian community but also Russian. The ex-military started a not very discreet life. He frequented leisure venues where many customers were from his country; he bought rounds and often got drunk. He also contacted his former girlfriend in Russia to ask her to come to Spain. “He went where he shouldn’t have and did what he shouldn’t have done,” police sources say.
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On the morning of February 13, 2024, less than four months after arriving in Villajoyosa, two individuals sneaked into the garage of his residential complex in a white car that had been stolen two days earlier in Murcia. They parked in a free spot and waited for hours until, around 4:40 p.m., they saw Kuzminov arrive in his car. When the deserter got out of the car and passed in front of them on his way to the elevator, both, already hooded, got out of the vehicle and shouted at him. When he turned around, they fired nine times. Three bullets missed him, but six hit: one in the left arm and the rest in the torso. Mortally wounded, Kuzminov tried to escape via the exit ramp, where he collapsed. While fleeing, the killers ran over the body with their car. The entire scene was recorded by the building’s cameras.
“I heard a car speeding 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 was the residential complex’s doorman at the time. To him, Kuzminov was almost a stranger whom 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 a fire accelerant to destroy any evidence that could identify them. They succeeded.
On his Instagram profile, Kuzminov posted in October 2021 a photo posing next to a high-displacement 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 second by deserting, but he suffered the revenge. The question of who carried it out continues to accumulate more assumptions than certainties.