Five people stand accused of participating in a Kremlin-run “global assassination network” that plotted this summer to have a prominent Russian dissident killed in Washington, D.C., according to a new report.
All five defendants remain at large, NBC News reported Wednesday.
In the indictment, unsealed late Tuesday, prosecutors described the broader Russian intelligence operation as “brazen, aggressive, and far-reaching,” aimed at spreading “destruction and mayhem around the world,” according to the report.
The FBI said it disrupted the plot but did not disclose how.
Prosecutors contend the network has paid Americans and foreigners since at least 2024 to conduct surveillance, carry out killings, and attack civilian and military infrastructure in European countries seen as supportive of Ukraine. The Washington target was not named in the indictment.
The defendants are Yuri Khrameev, 63, a former Russian intelligence colonel known as “Colonel Yuri,” and his son Kirill, 27, an FSB officer; Cuban nationals Oemis Romagoza Durruthy and Yaidel Delgado Suarez, known as “Viking,” both 35; and 22-year-old Angel Eduardo Castro of Venezuela, according to the report.
All five face a conspiracy-to-finance-terrorism charge; Yuri Khrameev, Suarez and Castro also face murder-for-hire conspiracy charges.
According to the indictment, the network recruited a Venezuelan man in Brooklyn this summer, paying him roughly $1,000 to $1,500 to photograph two sites tied to the Washington target.
He completed the surveillance but turned down a $40,000 offer from Suarez and Castro to “eliminate” the target himself, and prosecutors alleged the pair then asked if he knew someone else willing to do it.
Prosecutors accuse the conspirators of using the word “construction” as code for murder.
A second scheme allegedly targeted a dissident believed to live in Lithuania, according to the report. A U.S. citizen was paid $200 in 2025 to photograph the target’s home before being offered about $25,000 to kill him, prosecutors contend.
Durruthy is separately accused of coordinating attacks in Prague and Lithuania in 2024, and Lithuanian authorities had already named him wanted in a case involving attempts to burn Ukraine-bound military equipment, according to the report.
Asked to respond, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to address the specifics, telling reporters Russia would not comment “until we have heard or seen any reasonable evidence.”
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg called the alleged plot “a gross violation of our sovereignty and a threat to our national security.”
James Barnacle Jr., head of the FBI’s New York office, said agents “disrupted this operation through relentless work and rock-solid partnership.”
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