The Man Putin Couldn’t Kill

 

Opinion

M. Gessen

The Man Putin

Couldn’t Kill

 

M. Gessen

By M. Gessen

Opinion Columnist

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/opinion/russia-putin-christo-grozev.html

 

Interpol had been looking for a disgraced finance executive for weeks when Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist, found him, hiding in Belarus. Grozev had become expert at following all but invisible digital trails — black-market cellphone data, passenger manifests, immigration records — in order to unmask Russian spies. These were the sleeper cells living in Western countries and passing as natives, or the people dispatched to hunt down dissidents around the world.

 

He identified the secret police agents behind one of the most high-profile assassination plots of all: the 2020 poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. That revelation put Grozev in President Vladimir Putin’s cross hairs. He wanted Grozev killed, and to make it happen the Kremlin turned to none other than the fugitive financier, who had been recruited by Russian intelligence. Now the man that Grozev had been tracking began tracking him. The fugitive enlisted a team to begin the surveillance.

 

The members of that team are behind bars now. The financier lives in Moscow, where several times a week he makes visits to the headquarters of the Russian secret police. Grozev — still very much alive — imagines the man trying to explain to his supervisors why he failed in his mission. This gives Grozev a small measure of satisfaction.

 

On May 12, after a lengthy trial, Justice Nicholas Hilliard of the Central Criminal Court in London sentenced six people, all of them Bulgarian nationals, to prison terms between five and almost 11 years for their involvement in the plot to kill Grozev, among other operations. The group had spent more than two years working out of England, where the ringleader maintained rooms full of false identity documents and what the prosecution called law-enforcement-grade surveillance equipment. In addition to spying on Grozev and his writing partner, the Russian journalist Roman Dobrokhotov, the Bulgarians spied on a U.S. military base in Germany where Ukrainian soldiers were being trained; they trailed a former Russian law enforcement officer who had fled to Europe; and most embarrassingly for Moscow, they planned a false flag operation against Kazakhstan, a Russian ally.

 

In the past two decades England has been the site of at least two high-profile deadly operations and more than a dozen other suspicious deaths that have been linked to Russia. Yet the trial of this six-person cell appears to be the first time in recent history that the authorities have successfully investigated and prosecuted Russian agents operating on British soil. The trial and its outcome, then, are victories. They are small ones, however, relative to the scope of the threat. The Bulgarians seem to be only one part of a multiyear, multicountry operation to kill Grozev. That in turn is only a small part of what appears to be an ever-broadening campaign by the Kremlin, including kidnappings, poisonings, arson and terrorist attacks, to silence its opponents and sow fear abroad.

 

The story of the resources that were marshaled to silence a single inconvenient voice is a terrifying reminder of what Putin, and beyond him the rising generation of autocratic rulers, is capable of. The story of how that single voice refused to be silenced — in fact redoubled his determination to tell the truth, regardless of the very real consequences — serves as a reminder that it’s possible to continue to speak and act in the face of mortal danger. But the damage that was done to Grozev’s own life and the lives of the people around him is a warning of how vulnerable we are in the face of unchecked, murderous power.

 

A decade ago, Grozev, like much of the world, was stunned when a Malaysian passenger plane was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people onboard. Russia and Ukraine immediately blamed each other, Russia unleashed a torrent of disinformation, and the West seemed confused. At the time, Grozev was living in Vienna and helping run a company that owned a string of radio stations. But he had always been afflicted with an insatiable hunger for information. Back when the Communist government of Bulgaria fell, he broke into one of his country’s embassies and spent two weeks reading through piles of documents marked “burn after reading.” (“Everyone in the embassy was snitching on everyone else,” he later told me.) He stopped only when the police showed up.

 

When the Malaysian plane went down in July 2014, he started looking at Flightradar24, an online service that tracks the movement of aircraft around the world, and he quickly fell down a rabbit hole.

 

His fascination with Flightradar24 set Grozev’s second career in motion. He joined Bellingcat, an innovative outlet that was practicing a new kind of open-source investigation. Using geolocation data and a trove of variously sourced videos and photographs, the Bellingcat team pinpointed the missile launcher used to shoot down the airplane, traced its route from Russia to eastern Ukraine, identified senior Russian military intelligence officers who were involved, and ultimately determined that Russia was responsible for downing the Malaysian plane, a finding later confirmed by professional investigators and the United Nations.

 

In later investigations, Grozev expanded his tool kit to include black-market databases such as Russian passport data and cellphone logs, which allowed him to name the Russian military intelligence officers who most likely poisoned the defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England in 2018. The following year, when a former Chechen rebel leader was gunned down in broad daylight in a park in Berlin, Grozev used passport and travel data, as well as a deep analysis of Russian government records, to identify the assassin, Vadim Krasikov, a Russian national who was later convicted of the crime in Germany. And in 2020, when Navalny, the Russian opposition hero, was nearly killed by poisoning, Grozev used a massive data set of airline bookings to identify a group of men who had been trailing Navalny for at least three years, and then traced them to a chemical weapons research lab run by the secret police in Moscow.

 

Most great ventures of Grozev’s life involve Karl von Habsburg, his best friend, who, in a narrative detail not out of keeping with the novelistic sweep of Grozev’s life, is the grandson of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, Charles I. Together Grozev and von Habsburg once rode into Timbuktu, Mali, with troops that liberated the city from Islamist rebels. At another time they started the first all-Ukrainian-language radio station in Ukraine. Around 2020 von Habsburg had become connected with a group of filmmakers. Grozev’s hunt for Navalny’s would-be assassins seemed as if it would make a great documentary, so the team drove to Germany, where Navalny was undergoing rehabilitation.

 

On Dec. 14, 2020, Bellingcat co-published Grozev’s findings about the people behind the Navalny attack.

 

The same day, the disgraced finance executive who had been recruited by Russian intelligence hired a team to follow Grozev. That financier was Jan Marsalek, who had gained international notoriety when his fintech company, Wirecard, was consumed by one of the biggest financial scandals in European history. Roughly $2 billion was missing. The company’s chief executive was arrested. Marsalek, a clean-cut 40-year-old who had served as the company’s chief operating officer, disappeared.

 

He was a logical choice for the Kremlin’s assignment. As a fugitive of the West, he had a strong incentive to stay in Putin’s good graces, whatever it took. And as a Vienna-born Austrian, Marsalek knew well the city where his target, Grozev, was living.

 

The first time I met Grozev in person was in 2023, at a New York City screening of “Navalny,” the documentary that started with his investigation. He appears in it prominently: all 6-foot-3, 200-odd pounds of enthusiastic nerdiness. It was later that night that law enforcement informed Grozev his life was in danger and he should not return home to Vienna. By this point, the Bulgarians had been tracking him for more than two years. A friend put Grozev up in a Manhattan townhouse, and he began his life in exile.

 

A few weeks later, the producer Geralyn Dreyfous brought him to an event for Amal and George Clooney’s charitable foundation. As they were walking in, Grozev glanced at his phone. His sister, who lives in Bulgaria, had texted that she had been unable to reach their father, who lived in Vienna. “He went pale,” Dreyfous told me. “And just then George Clooney was there to greet us. Christo stepped away, I told George Clooney what had happened and he immediately went to Christo: ‘You can’t go back there. It’s just a ruse to get you to go back there.’”

 

The police found Grozev’s father dead in his house. Two days later, the Metropolitan Police in London arrested five Bulgarian nationals who, they said, had been conducting surveillance of Grozev and his writing partner, Dobrokhotov. Despite the movie star’s wise advice and law enforcement authorities’ stern warning, Grozev did in fact return to Vienna — “on a cargo plane to a neighboring country, to not leave a trace,” he texted me. The Austrian authorities did not conclude that Grozev’s father had been the victim of foul play. The family was not given access to his body.

 

Back when he lived in Russia, Dobrokhotov had lost a couple of journalism jobs apparently for being too outspoken, one time shouting at Dmitri Medvedev, who was then Russia’s president, about censorship and “shameful” policies. So in 2013 Dobrokhotov launched his own publication, The Insider, which has grown into a remarkably comprehensive mix of analysis and investigative stories, many of them written by Dobrokhotov and Grozev. “They are joined at the hip,” Dreyfous, the producer, said. They seem to think in unison.

 

In the summer of 2021, Russia cracked down on independent journalists in what in retrospect looks like clearing the deck before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The police seized Dobrokhotov’s electronics and passport. So he left Russia — on foot, walking through the woods to Ukraine, carrying only a small backpack with some clothes, an academic book and a bottle of Hennessy Cognac. His family later joined him and they settled in the Britain.

 

Around that time, one of the team of Bulgarians, Vanya Gaberova, a young woman with long brown hair, added Dobrokhotov as a friend on Facebook. “Roman is very easy to befriend if you are pretty,” Grozev noted. When the same woman sent Grozev a friend request, he saw that she had a few connections to people in his network, so he accepted the request, too.

 

Orlin Roussev, the head of the spy cell, and his Moscow-based handler, Marsalek, discussed using the new Facebook connection to seduce Grozev and perhaps make a compromising video. “We can definitely record something for Pornhub too,” Roussev texted. Marsalek advised proceeding with caution. “I hope she does not fall in love with him. I had that problem before with a honeytrap.” (According to Grozev’s investigations, Marsalek’s work for Russian intelligence began when he himself was honey-trapped.)

 

If Gaberova did make any attempts to seduce Grozev, he didn’t notice. His son, Chris, a medical student, casually diagnoses him as both “an A.D.H.D. kid” and “definitely autistic.” Grozev’s friends describe his uncanny ability to see connections. “He looks at an Excel table with 300 rows and 90 columns and immediately spots a pattern that it would take me three hours to identify,” Maria Pevchikh, who was a close associate of Navalny’s, told me. “He can see structures that others cannot see,” von Habsburg said. “He is like a truffle hunter.” But he is often oblivious to the actions and feelings of women, including his own wife of three decades.

 

Grozev had the good sense to marry a woman who is, by all accounts, his temperamental opposite. (His wife, Stefka Grozeva, declined to talk to me for this story.) In contrast with her impulsive, risk-loving, restless husband, she is stable, fond of rules, an introvert. She has worked as an accountant for most of her adult life.

 

In the film “Navalny,” Grozev confesses that he has spent more than $150,000 on black-market databases and says that if his wife knew, “she wouldn’t be my wife.” He didn’t seem to consider that she would eventually see the film. And when the time came for both of them to attend the premiere in Copenhagen, he neglected to warn her.

 

At the end of the screening, she booked a separate cab back to the hotel. Months later, Grozev told me that his wife was not speaking to him, though she occasionally agreed to attend events with him. He seemed mystified.

 

It was more than a year after that premiere that Grozev told me, excitedly, that he had figured out what bothered Stefka: That line in the movie had turned her into the butt of a joke. He started telling interviewers that there was nothing funny about having deceived his wife. “I figured it out, and I fixed it!” he told me.

 

In the summer of 2023, Grozev made a breakthrough in his own case.

 

Grozev works by analyzing massive amounts of data. He might start by trawling through cellphone records, to draw a picture of a suspected spy’s life: Never starts work before 10, always calls his parents on a Sunday. Then he can focus on anomalous phone events, such as a weekend work call, to reconstruct the chronology of the person’s travels and actions.

 

As part of his ongoing project of identifying Russian spies, Grozev had long been looking at a man named Stanislav Petlinsky. Now in his early 60s, Petlinsky appears to have been groomed for his job since childhood, like the characters in the television series “The Americans.” He had spent most of his adult life outside of Russia, but Grozev noticed that he still had a Russian cellphone number, and that a person who had access to that number — Petlinsky’s assistant, perhaps? — was using it to schedule appointments for someone at a medical lab in Moscow.

 

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Using a massive leak of Russian medical data, Grozev located the lab’s records and found several patients who were connected to the number. One of them was Alexander Ivanovich Schmidt — a conspicuously Germanic surname, he noted. Schmidt’s record listed a birth date one week away from that of Marsalek, the fugitive financier. Russian intelligence covers, Grozev had long observed, tend to use a falsified birth date that falls under the same Zodiac sign as the person’s real birth date. It was a clue.

 

According to the Moscow lab’s records, which he analyzed with the help of his son, Chris, the patient named Schmidt had been having his blood glucose levels checked. Another clue: Colleagues at Der Spiegel, the German magazine with which Grozev frequently collaborates, had confirmed that Marsalek had diabetes.

 

Grozev also checked airline logs. An Alexander Schmidt, born on the day listed in the lab’s medical record, had been using a French passport to travel on Russian airlines — including, a source told Grozev, on trips to Libya, where Marsalek has invested in a cement factory.

 

Grozev knew he had found Marsalek. And the best part, he told me, was that he had done it the way he had imagined, as a child, that Sherlock Holmes would have found someone.

 

Starting in winter 2022, Grozev used his many behind-the-scenes connections to help negotiate what would become the biggest East-West prisoner exchange since the Cold War: the swap that would free the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and 15 others from prisons in Russia and Belarus. Grozev’s primary goal was to free Navalny, who had been behind bars for a year. Grozev wished for this outcome so dearly that, for all his analytic brain power, he had even allowed himself to believe Petlinsky, the superspy, when he said he could help make it happen. But that was a lie.

 

In February 2024, Navalny died in a Russian prison.

 

Grozev and I met up a couple of days later, in the most depressing of all the odd places we’d had lunch over the preceding year: the food court in Brookfield Place, an upscale shopping mall in Lower Manhattan. It was as sterile as the apartment Grozev was then renting, one of those furnished hotel alternatives.

 

He was toggling between two different explanations for what we both assumed had been a murder. Was Navalny killed to prevent Western negotiators from insisting on his release? And if so, was Grozev somehow culpable? Or was the murder part of an escalation of Putin’s attack on dissidents, a sign that he no longer cared about even a semblance of deniability? “If it’s the beginning of a new wave, that’s really scary,” he said, “because it will affect people like us.”

 

He didn’t have to explain what he meant. My connection to Grozev is more than just journalistic. We share a bond, along with hundreds of other people, of being persona non grata in Putin’s Russia. Across the globe, members of this club live with the suspicion that they could be targeted by Russia for surveillance, kidnapping or assassination. Around this time, female Russian opposition journalists and activists living in exile were falling ill, apparent victims of a series of poisonings. These weren’t fatal, but they produced alarming effects, including signs of psychosis.

 

Every time Putin’s exiles hear about incidents like that, we look for all the ways in which we are different, all the reasons we’ll be spared: We are not so well known as to draw attention, or we are too well known to be attacked. We haven’t been as harsh or as political in our statements, or it’s been long enough since we left, or we had the good sense to settle in a safe country.

 

It’s always a fool’s errand. Investigative journalists work by finding patterns, and terror works by being random. When two women we knew received confirmation that they had been poisoned and others experienced alarming symptoms, it started to feel as if anyone could be a target and everyone was. When other acquaintances seemed angry, impulsive, not themselves, both Grozev and I wondered if they had been poisoned, too — as though living in exile with a target on your back weren’t reason enough to act erratically.

 

Sitting there in the shopping mall, Grozev told me that police officers had recently found text messages in which the Bulgarian spies described breaking into his Vienna apartment two years earlier. Perhaps to lighten the mood, he read me some of the texts.

 

“‘We entered the apartment, headed straight for the safe.’”

 

“Wait,” I interrupted him. “You have a safe?”

 

“Of course not.” He did not have a safe. He was forever losing things — his laptop, his driver’s license.

 

Grozev heard about the break-in more than a year after the fact, but when he told his family about it, his daughter, Sophia, remembered that right around that time they had seen a man taking photos of the two of them at an Indian restaurant. They both remembered what he looked like, and Grozev was able to connect him, through photos on Facebook, to the Bulgarian woman who’d made the friend request. Sophia picked the man out of a photo lineup, and the police confirmed that he had indeed been in Vienna the day of the break-in. Thus a sixth suspect was arrested, and Sophia started thinking about following her father into investigative journalism.

 

Grozev was shaken. “The whole time, my son was playing video games in his room. If he had just gotten up to pee, they would have killed him.” Beyond that, he was struck by the extent of the surveillance footage that the police showed him, and the fact that it included his father’s apartment. “I now think it was 50-50 that he was killed.”

 

When he visited his family, Grozev was now under extremely tight security — “sentries 24/7” was how he described it — and this wasn’t helping his marriage. “Weeks under house arrest with police on the premises probably showed how unsustainable it is,” he told me when he returned.

 

Grozev was becoming a person without a past. He lived in exile. His parents were both dead. His adventures with von Habsburg were suspended indefinitely. His marriage was floundering. His access to the physical objects from his life before January 2023 was uncertain. All he had was a small black backpack with his laptop, when he could remember where he left it.

 

With little choice in the matter, Grozev started getting used to New York. He developed a work routine and started shaving again. Marsalek, the former high-flying finance executive, was settling into an unglamorous life in Russia. Grozev tracked him to a vacation in a sad tourist trap in the North Caucasus. “And we are sitting here,” Grozev said to me. It was one of those summer days when all of New York looks like the setting for a rom-com. We were seated outdoors, having good food. “Little moments of revenge,” he said.

 

The trial of Grozev’s would-be assassins began at the end of November last year at the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court building in London. The plot against Grozev was deadly serious, but the details, as they emerged in more than 70,000 archived text messages, hours of video and an entire binder of charts illustrating the timing of operations and the flow of money, were at times ridiculous. The leaders of the group used the aliases Jean-Claude Van Damme and Jackie Chan; they referred to the lower-ranking members of the spy ring as the “minions,” a term to which they were apparently so committed that among the objects entered into evidence — and passed around to the members of the jury — was a surveillance camera that had been hidden in the flower of a Minion toy from the “Despicable Me” movies. The second in command conscripted both his live-in girlfriend and his mistress into the espionage operation, concealed the existence of each of them from the other and lied to both about having cancer, at one point sending a photo of himself with toilet paper wrapped around his head to convince one of them he was recovering from surgery. She believed him.

 

He had told the women that they were working for Interpol, and said the same thing to his mistress’s ex-boyfriend, when the Bulgarians recruited him. In a police interview played for the jury, the ex-boyfriend was asked, “Who are Interpol to you?” “From the movies,” he said. “Just, uh, chasing criminals.” He added, “Right now, the dumbest thing I have ever done in my life.”

 

Half the group pleaded guilty to espionage charges, so in the end only those three — the two women and the ex-boyfriend, the man whom Grozev’s daughter identified — stood trial. Gaberova, the youngest defendant, and Bizer Dzhambazov, the second in command, were arrested when they were in bed together. Gaberova screamed at her lover, “What have you done?” Her defense attorney pointed to this as evidence that she herself never considered that she might be doing something wrong. Gaberova told the court that she thought that Grozev was “a bad journalist.” All three defendants, it seemed, had been fools for love.

 

Watching the trial unfold was a surreal experience for the spies’ targets. On at least one occasion the group had been able to book an airline ticket for one of their members in the seat next to Dobrokhotov; using a hidden camera, she captured a long video of him and noted his phone passcode. Dobrokhotov learned that he had been under surveillance almost from the moment he walked out of Russia in 2021. In Vienna, he had rented a room on Grozev’s street. The spies, too, were renting on that street — directly across from Grozev, a couple of doors down from a new, remarkably good espresso bar. “We always wondered how it stayed in business, given that Christo was always the only customer,” Dobrokhotov told me. The espresso bar closed after Grozev left Austria and the spy ring was busted.

 

There is something profoundly insulting about having your life turned upside down by people who call themselves Jackie Chan and Van Damme and can be convinced that toilet paper wrapped around someone’s head is proof of cancer surgery. Even the amount of money involved, at least in this part of the operation, was comparatively modest: just a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

 

The trial seemed to have an improvised, make-believe quality. Even the usual British court garb — the lawyers’ black gowns and white wigs, and the judge’s red robe with white fur cuffs — rather than elevating the proceedings, made it feel that everyone might just be pretending. Except for the fact that Putin clearly wanted these two journalists hunted down and killed.

 

In March, a jury handed down its verdict: Like the three who offered earlier pleas, Gaberova, Katrin Ivanova and Tihomir Ivanchev were guilty of espionage. Before the sentencing, Grozev submitted a two-page victim impact statement. With none of his usual humor and with little elaboration, he enumerated the devastating consequences of the Kremlin’s campaign against him: separation from his family, hypervigilance, anxiety, disrupted sleep, the expense of maintaining two homes.

 

The sentencing was televised. Grozev watched from a prosecutor’s office in a European capital with a group of law enforcement officers. It was, as he has become fond of saying, surreal. “I loved the delivery,” he said. “The judge made it clear that he didn’t buy their bullshit that they didn’t know” that they were working for Russia. The sentences, of five to 11 years, sounded longer than they were: Under British guidelines, the convicted spies might spend only half of their nominal sentences behind bars. Gaberova, for example, will probably be released on parole in a couple of years.

 

The London press covered the case as a breakthrough. No longer would Britain look away while Russian billionaires used the country as their playground and Russian agents as their killing field. “In the U.K., this is the biggest spy case they’ve prosecuted since the Cold War,” Grozev said. “They see it as a slap in the face for Putin. In Russia, it is seen as an embarrassment — the six Bulgarians were disposable. They even have a term for it: ‘dropy,’ from the English ‘to drop.’” Nor was the operation a complete failure, from the Kremlin’s point of view: A trove of surveillance data on Grozev and Dobrokhotov had been delivered to Russian intelligence. “There will be new attempts,” Grozev predicted. “Other units will be eager to prove that they can do better. That’s how they work.”

 

Before he left New York for the sentencing, we met up for coffee. He was frustrated that he did not have access to all the evidence assembled by the Metropolitan Police. He was certain that he could find information its officers had missed, clues that would help find others who were involved, enabling him to solve the biggest case of his life — the case his life may depend on.

 

It is clear to Grozev that he, and perhaps even more so Dobrokhotov, who is Russian, face a risk to their lives wherever they go in Europe. The United States used to be safe. But even under the Biden administration there were many Russian dissidents in ICE detention. The Trump administration has threatened to deport at least one dissident back to Russia, where she would almost certainly be imprisoned. The F.B.I.’s foreign influence task force, which used to protect foreign dissidents in the United States, has been disbanded. What if the Trump administration decided to do something nice for Putin?

 

Grozev reminded me that I too could be a nice gift, since Russia has a warrant out for my arrest. I pointed out that he was even more “wanted.” But where could he go? “I am disturbed by not knowing where my home is,” Grozev said.

 

His daughter is about to graduate from high school and his son is finishing medical school. For a long time, both had assumed they could join their father in the United States, but this no longer appeared obvious. Nothing did.

 

“Is your wife still your wife?” I asked.

 

“I believe so,” Grozev said. “We don’t see each other, but we are very friendly.”

 

By any measure, Grozev won this round. He is alive. Marsalek is stuck in Russia, and his minions are in prison in England. But here was the price Grozev had paid for surviving: his family, his home and the ability to feel safe anywhere in the world.