Comment BERLIN — Germany’s new government had been in power for just a week last December when it was presented with a test of its mettle. In a wood-paneled courtroom at Berlin’s highest court, Vadim Krasikov, 56, was convicted of killing on behalf of Russia – an act judges condemned as “state terrorism”. The killing of former Chechen fighter Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, 40, in 2019 was particularly brazen. He was shot three times in broad daylight in a Berlin park by a killer on a bicycle. In response, Chancellor Olaf Solz’s government expelled two Russian “diplomats” who were actually intelligence officers — not from the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency that the court found likely responsible for ordering the killing, according to one official, but from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency; The hope, German officials said, was that Germany could maintain its intelligence presence in Moscow – far smaller than the number of Russian agents 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 different governments and was designed to protect Germany’s business ties with Russia, particularly its need for Russian oil and natural gas. gas. But some now question whether the reluctance to punish Russian President Vladimir Putin, even in the face of state-sanctioned assassination, added 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 was not going to act to rein in Moscow, said Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin at the time. “The political reaction was absent,” he said. “It was ridiculous. It was the critical period, when everybody 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 balmy summer day. Khangoshvili’s then 18-year-old daughter, Amira, came home from class to find him wearing his shoes. He told her he had some “business” to attend to before going to Friday prayers at a nearby mosque. “He was in a good mood, he was smiling,” she recalls. “He said it won’t be long.” Minutes later, in Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten park, the first shot tore through Khangoshvili’s chest before the killer, wearing a long black wig to conceal his identity, delivered another to the back of the Chechen’s neck, investigators testified. Krasikov then got off his bike and stood over Khangoshvili to deliver a final shot to the head with his silenced Glock 26 9mm pistol. Witnesses in the park looked on 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. “It says to Kremlin opponents, ‘We can kill you wherever you are,’” the official said. “But even in Germany, the message was: ‘We don’t care about or respect your country’s sovereignty.’ Sergei Nechayev, Russia’s ambassador to Germany, described Krashikov’s verdict and life sentence as “a biased, politically motivated decision” and said allegations of Russian involvement were “absurd”. However, the FSB recently proposed that Krasikov be included in a prisoner swap to secure the release of two Americans held in Russia, basketball star Brittney Griner and security adviser Paul Whelan, according to US officials. The Biden administration described the FSB offer, first reported by CNN, as “not serious.” A German government spokesman said authorities in Berlin had been briefed on the US-Russia talks, but declined to comment further. Russia’s all-out attack on Ukraine in February has begun what Scholz called a 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 Konstantin von Notz, a Greens politician and member of the parliamentary oversight committee for Germany’s intelligence services. “That includes this case.” Germany did not “read the signs” of Russia’s increasingly nefarious actions in Europe, he said. “We didn’t pay enough attention to detail.” The Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin does not care if it offends his cause The fact that the killer was caught, allowing the trail to Moscow to be uncovered, was by chance, Notz added. “If that didn’t happen, we probably wouldn’t know … about Russia’s involvement.” A fortuitous escape led to the arrest of the murderer. Two witnesses spotted Krasikov changing clothes in bushes and throwing his bicycle into the river Spree and called the police. Investigators later pulled the Glock from the water. Krasikov, who had a passport in the name of Vadim Sokolov, claimed he was a tourist who had stopped to urinate in the bushes. But a day after the assassination, thousands of miles away in South Africa, Christo Grozev, executive director of investigative agency Bellingcat, was holding a joint training session with the Russian publication The Insider for journalists from across the continent. “It fit perfectly with what I was teaching them, how we evaluate fake IDs,” he said. He searched Bellingcat’s vault of leaked Russian databases to see if the name Vadim Sokolov existed, but came back with no matches. “We came to the conclusion that it was probably a case of false identity.” Within a week of the assassination, Bellingcat published an article outlining why Russia’s claims that the killer was not connected to the Russian state were unfounded. The passport had been issued in Sokolov’s name just 10 days before the holder traveled to Europe and matched a batch of passports issued to Russian intelligence officers. “It’s something we’ve accepted as a mission, to shame governments and prosecutions into doing the full job, not just the easiest job,” Groszeff said. Although the killing was quickly linked to Russian intelligence, it took until December for Berlin police to refer the case to federal investigators. “It was clear that at the political level they had to decide how to deal with this case,” said one US official. “It was very clear that they were thinking, if we take this step, it’s a political step.” But Bellingcat’s work made the case hard to ignore — Krasikov’s indictment cited Grozev’s statements and work on the investigative medium 159 times. “It was definitely a Bellingcat,” the American official said. In December 2019, when federal prosecutors first announced that Russian state authorities might be behind the assassination, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government expelled two Russian diplomats, with Merkel citing the fact that Moscow had no cooperate in the investigation. A Chechen, born in Georgia, Khangoshvili had grown up in the rifts of the restive 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 a dozen men from Pankisi Gorge, a valley in Georgia that was a hub 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 resulted in the deaths of 58 police officers. German investigators said the raid marked him for “retaliation”. When asked about the killing in Berlin at a press conference in December 2019, Putin called Khangoshvili a “bloodthirsty” killer. After fighting in the Chechen war, Khangoshvili returned to Georgia in 2004, where he lived under his mother’s maiden name. He helped Georgian intelligence by tracking down Russian spies and negotiating with Islamist militants, the German court said, and became close to the government of Mikheil Saakashvili, the western-leaning former president of Georgia who led the country during its war with Russia in 2008. Inside the war between Russia and Ukraine, war between Chechens In a 2012 letter from the FSB office at the Russian Embassy in Berlin to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Service, obtained by the Washington Post, the FSB accused Khangoshvili, then based in Georgia, of being a member of the Emirate of Caucasian, fighter. Islamist group that has claimed responsibility for attacks, including one on the Moscow subway in 2010 that killed 39 people. His family says they believed it was part of a Russian effort to discredit his name, complicate future asylum procedures and dampen the reaction should he be killed. Five of the 19 alleged members on a list compiled by the FSB, including Khangoshvili, have since 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 attack in Kyiv in 2017. Khangoshvili was considered a “high-value target” by Russia, German investigators said. In 2015, there was an attempt on his life 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 who was behind the attack. “I know for sure that I have no enemies in Georgia,” Khangoshvili said in an interview with a Georgian television channel from his hospital bed. With Georgia slipping further into Moscow’s orbit and amid warnings about his security, Khangoshvili decided he and his family had to leave. He first left for Odessa in Ukraine, where Saakashvili was briefly governor. There he met his second wife, a 22-year-old…
