August 3, 2024 - 4:00pm

On 23 August 2019, in Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten park, a man was executed by an assassin who rode a bicycle. The victim was Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a separatist who had battled against Russia during the Second Chechen War and reportedly spied on Russian agents for Georgian intelligence. The suspect was initially identified as “Vadim Sokolov”, a St Petersburg construction engineer who claimed he was merely a tourist.

He was, in fact, a Russian hitman from the country’s state security service, the FSB. A Berlin judge lambasted the execution as “state terrorism” and claimed the order almost certainly came from Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, the case sparking a tit-for-tat of diplomatic expulsions between Berlin and Moscow. Yet, for all the outrage in Germany over a cold-blooded assassination in broad daylight, Vadim Krasikov this week returned to Russia a free man, released as part of the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.

Indeed, the deal could not have happened without him. A White House senior official said this “bad dude” was “obviously considered…a key asset by the Russian side”, while the New York Times claimed that Krasikov’s value was such that Moscow consistently rejected any trades that would exclude him.

Why is Krasikov so valuable? Bellingcat investor Christo Grozev claims Putin and Krasikov are personally close, while the Kremlin confirmed that Krasikov served in the FSB’s elite “Alpha Unit”. There were signs that Krasikov possessed confidential information the Kremlin was eager to prevent falling into the wrong ears — in December 2019, he was moved into a high-security prison wing over concerns that a Russian agent was attempting to assassinate him, lest he turn traitor.

Kremlin sources said that Putin was impressed by Krasikov’s silence — the KGB officer-turned-president was likely eager to reward such loyalty and reassure other Russian agents that the Kremlin would not leave them behind. “The Motherland never forgot about you”, Putin told returnees.

The length of Krasikov’s stretch in prison, then, was no reflection of any reticence on the part of the Russians. Rather, it was the Germans who initially proved reluctant to do a deal. In April 2023, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested a swap involving Alexei Navalny and Krasikov, only for German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock to reject the idea over fears it could lead to more hostage-taking.

So why change their minds? Chancellor Olaf Scholz stressed that he thought of the German national sentenced to die in Belarus and those unjustly imprisoned in Russia. The White House would have you believe that it was thanks to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ own powers of persuasion, with claims that Scholz told Biden: “For you, I will do this”. The White House also emphasised the key role played by Harris, now all but certain to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee, briefing on how her “good working relationship” with Scholz and own meetings with the German Chancellor were instrumental in securing Krasikov’s release.

Berlin’s motivations for giving a boost to the Democrats are obvious. The German government has already formed an informal crisis group to prepare its government in case of Republican victory in November. It is right to be concerned given that the country is particularly vulnerable to some of Donald Trump’s key gripes. His pledge of a 10% tariff on US imports would damage Germany’s export-driven economy and, while Berlin has now reached Trump’s all-important target of 2% of GDP on defence spending, Trump’s camp is now pushing the idea of a 3% target. That is before one turns to the security headache if Trump were to withdraw from Nato and cut arms supplies to Ukraine.

It was, commented the Head of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee, “a deal with the devil” to return Krasikov to Putin. Yet, in this particular Faustian pact, Scholz may have sold his soul for something far greater — the hope he may not have to deal with an entirely different devil after November.


Bethany Elliott is a writer specialising in Russia and Eastern Europe.

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