Putin’s Defector Obsession

The day after Russia’s presidential election in March, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a surprising speech. Having eliminated all viable political opposition, he had just sailed to victory by the highest margin in post-Soviet Russian history, garnering 88 percent of the vote. Yet rather than embracing his triumph—and his fresh mandate for a fifth term in office—he warned of an apparently grave threat facing the country: Russian defectors who have been joining the enemy in Russia’s two-year-old war in Ukraine.

Although their forces remain small, these Ukrainian-based Russian rebels have recently claimed responsibility for several attacks on Russian soil. In a speech delivered at his campaign headquarters, Putin compared these fighters to vlasovstsy, the name given to the Soviet soldiers who defected to the Nazi side during World War II—part of a movement that was considered one of the worst episodes of treason in Soviet history. (The name derives from Soviet General Andrei Vlasov, who, after being captured by the Germans in 1942, agreed to serve the Nazis and founded the Russian Liberation Army to fight against the Soviets.)

Now, Putin has launched a sweeping new crackdown against Russians who fight with Ukraine. Following his speech, he met with the heads of the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service, and called on the agency to hunt down these turncoats. He also made clear that he considers Russians who fight on the Ukrainian side to be not only traitors but also defectors—since, as Russian nationals, they are legally subject to military service for Russia itself. Putin reminded his audience what had happened to the vlasovstsy under Stalin—most of them were killed. Putin told the FSB to identify any Russians fighting against Russia, vowing, “We will punish them without a statute of limitations, wherever they are.” In fact, Putin announced the crackdown a month and a half after a prominent defector, the Russian helicopter pilot Maxim Kuzminov, was assassinated in a parking garage in Spain.

It has been hard to determine how serious the defector threat actually is. So far, the attacks inside Russia seem more symbolic than militarily significant. Indeed, Putin’s fixation on defectors may seem irrational in view of the far more lethal terrorist attack by the Islamic State (or ISIS) near Moscow on March 22, in which 137 Russians were gunned down at a concert venue. But Putin’s preoccupation with Russians who join the other side is not an emotional act of vengeance or a reflexive response to the attacks against Russia. It is a strategic decision informed by a long history of Soviet and Russian paranoia about threats from within—and a further symptom of the regime’s emulation of its totalitarian twentieth-century predecessors.

RUSSIANS AGAINST PUTIN

The Kremlin’s concerns about defectors began in the months after the failure of the initial full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In the summer of that year, the Russian parliament adopted an amendment to the Russian criminal code that designated any act of “switching to the enemy’s side during the military operations” as high treason subject to a prison sentence of up to 20 years. By 2023, Moscow was particularly worried about the increased activities of two rebel groups, the Ukrainian-based Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion, a unit of Russian volunteers and defectors from the Russian army. The Kremlin labeled both groups as terrorist organizations.

The RVC was initially established by Russian nationals living in Ukraine. Its ideology is complicated: a right-wing movement, it promotes a nonimperialist but an ethnonationalist agenda, opposing Russia’s aggression in Ukraine but favoring a Russian national state on Russian territories that are exclusively populated by ethnic Russians. In October 2022, the group published a manifesto declaring it to be “part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” but effectively supervised by Ukraine’s military intelligence. The Freedom of Russia Legion had been formed even earlier, a few weeks after the war began, by several dozen Russian soldiers who had defected from the Russian army. It is also supported by Ukraine’s military intelligence.

The Russian volunteer units in Ukraine have limited military capabilities.

Estimates on the current numbers of fighters in the RVC and the legion vary. Putin has claimed that they have 2,500 soldiers overall, although Ukrainian sources place the figure closer to a few hundred fighters in each. The two units have tanks and armored vehicles provided by Ukraine. (Recent reports also suggest that the RVC may also be recruiting from Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine.)

During the first year of the war, these units did not appear to pose a significant threat to Moscow. Their main activity seemed to be producing posts and videos for social media, posing in military uniforms with claims that they were fighting side by side with the Ukrainians against the Russian aggressors, including in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine. Beginning in the spring of 2023, however, the RVC started conducting diversionary raids into Russian territory—first in the Bryansk region, then in the Belgorod region. The brief intrusions, filmed on social media, aimed to take the war to Russian territory; the videos included a call to the Russians to join in the liberation of Putin’s regime. Further raids took place in March 2024, just days before Russia’s presidential election, heightening concerns at the Kremlin.

In those raids, the RVC units may have been joined by Freedom of Russia Legion fighters. The legion has been supported and promoted by Ilya Ponomarev, the only member of the Russian State Duma who had voted against the annexation of Crimea. Ponomarev has been living in exile in Ukraine since 2016. In February, Russian authorities charged Ponomarev with high treason and terrorism for his involvement with the legion. Russian authorities also claim that the RVC and the legion have been joined by Ukrainian troops and Western mercenaries. (The Russian pro-Kremlin bloggers have released videos allegedly taken from the cellphones of Americans killed in the fighting, although there is no way to identify these combatants as Americans.) In the March raid on Russian territory, the units were also joined by a third rebel group calling itself the Siberian Battalion, which may consist of several dozen fighters, many of them from ethnic minorities in Russia.

MOSCOW’S HIT MEN

Although the volunteer units’ military capabilities may be limited, the Kremlin’s response has been intense. Over the past year, the Russian security services have launched dozens of criminal cases against anyone suspected of having connections with the RVC or the Freedom of Russia Legion. Court proceedings in these cases are not usually open to the public, and much of what is known comes from FSB reports about the arrests of RVC members or agents whom authorities have accused of various plans to sabotage Russian railways, gather intelligence on Russian forces, or prepare terrorist attacks in Russian cities. For instance, in March of this year, the FSB detained four men in St. Petersburg, accusing them of attempting to poison food that was bound for Russian soldiers on the battlefield.

Denis Kapustin, a founder and leader of the RVC, is a former football hooligan who is known for far-right and neo-Nazi activism and has in the past been denied entry to Europe for his extremist views. By his own account, he is fighting for Ukraine because he believes Putin is a danger to Russia, and he wants to overthrow the Putin regime. Kapustin drew widespread media attention in March 2023, when the RVC crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border and raided villages in the Bryansk region. In November, Kapustin was convicted in Russia on five charges, including terrorism and high treason, and sentenced in absentia to life in prison.

The case of Kuzminov, the Russian military helicopter pilot, drew an even stronger response from the Kremlin. In August 2023, Kuzminov decided to defect from Russia, flying his Mi-8 helicopter to Ukraine. Two members of his crew, who were unaware of his decision, were gunned down by the Ukrainian military when they landed on the Ukrainian side. The Russian military leadership expressed extraordinary anger at Kuzminov’s defection, and a few months later, masked officers of Russia’s GRU special forces recorded a video promising to find and kill Kuzminov, openly admitting that an assassination order had been given.

As is now clear, they kept their word, ultimately finding him in Spain and killing him with six bullets from a Russian Makarov pistol—an unmistakable signature of the Russian security services. In assassinating Kuzminov, the GRU also set out to compromise Ukraine’s military intelligence by demonstrating that Ukrainian agents were unable to protect a defector. The GRU was sending a message: You can’t keep the people who trusted you safe.

STALIN’S GREATEST FEAR

Like many fellow KGB veterans who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin retains a keen sense of the fragility of the Russian state. For Soviet leaders, an obsession with rooting out any potential challenges to their power was fueled by the leaders’ lack of trust in the country’s military and security services, a preoccupation that haunted the Kremlin from the first days of the Bolshevik Revolution all the way through 1991. There was some logic in the paranoia: the Russian postrevolutionary army and secret police were filled with adventurous people with mixed or uncertain loyalties who were always ready to take chances.

Stalin came to believe that this represented an existential threat to his rule. His paranoid response was to trust no one, launching vicious purges of scores of spies and army generals and placing the rest under continual surveillance. But that recipe—to compel loyalty via repression—didn’t work as he intended.

When Russia went to war with Nazi Germany in 1941, thousands of members of the Red Army defected, forming the Russian volunteer troops that fought for the Germans, the units that became known as the vlasovstsy. Many of the vlasovstsy wanted to overthrow the Stalinist regime and believed that the Germans could help them. Alongside defectors from the military, there had long been a steady stream of defectors from the Soviet intelligence and security agencies. The very people put in place to protect the regime often proved to be the most susceptible to joining the enemy.

Stalin believed that defectors posed an existential threat.

During and after the war, Stalin’s security services mercilessly hunted down the vlasovstsy: once captured, they were publicly executed; Vlasov himself was hanged in Moscow in 1946. The brutality of the response was prompted not by any actual military danger but because the defectors threatened to open up a gap, in wartime, between the country and the regime that ruled it.

During the Cold War, the ruthless approach to defectors continued under Stalin’s successors. And yet KGB and military intelligence agents kept defecting. In one of the CIA’s founding documents, the Central Intelligence Act of 1949, the U.S. government decreed that it could take in as many as a hundred defectors every year. Of course, at the time, defectors primarily meant people fleeing the Soviet Union. The United States also viewed the Soviet army as a possible force to be exploited if things went south for the Kremlin. In 1951, George Fischer, a young protégé of the U.S. diplomat George Kennan, wrote a short book called Russian Émigré Politics. Citing the large number of Red Army defectors during World War II, Fischer argued that if war broke out between the Soviet Union and the West, the Soviet army would likely become a hotbed of dissent. Senior members of the CIA praised his ideas.

In reality, the opportunity to test Fischer’s theory in an actual war between the superpowers never presented itself, and until the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the threat of mass defections remained largely a memory of World War II. As Soviet forces struggled against the American-backed mujahideen in Afghanistan, the Kremlin came to see the flight of even small numbers of soldiers as an existential threat. The KGB was given orders to hunt down Russian defectors in the West and bring them back—at all costs. Two defectors who went public in 1984 were eventually lured by the KGB from London to the Soviet Union and promptly sent to prison camps. In the wake of that episode, the hunt for defectors from the security and intelligence agencies never really stopped—even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Compared with these late Soviet precedents, however, Putin’s campaign against defectors looks far more harsh. After Stalin’s death, there were just a few killings or assassination attempts against defectors—for instance, a KGB assassin, Nikolay Khokhlov, who had defected, survived a poisoning attack in 1957; a former Russian naval officer and defector, Nikolai Artamonov, was lured from the United States to Austria and poisoned by the KGB in 1975. (The KGB later claimed that it had intended only to drug and kidnap him and that it had mistakenly given him an overdose.) By contrast, Putin’s open use and threat of assassination is far closer to the approach taken by Stalin, who always sought to hunt down and kill those from inside his regime who fled abroad.

MORE SPIES, MORE ASSASSINS

Although Putin’s obsession with defectors may appear to be a direct result of the war in Ukraine, it is hardly an issue that the Kremlin sees as limited to that conflict. Indeed, for the Putin regime, targeting defectors may likely emerge as one of the key prongs of a Russian counterattack against what is now seen as the CIA’s increasingly aggressive stance toward Russia.

Since the war began, the CIA has stepped up its efforts to recruit Russian agents, developing an overt public recruitment campaign and issuing videos aimed directly at Russian audiences. In response, Russia’s security agencies are now placing a greater emphasis on counterintelligence activities. After the initial setbacks at the start of the war, Russia’s spy services appear to be back in force and undertaking new operations in several countries in Europe.

The Kremlin’s ruthless response to defectors is unlikely to help Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. Creating more fear within the military and intelligence services will certainly not raise morale. And it will do little to prevent the kind of devastating terrorist attack that killed scores of Russians at the concert hall in March. But fueled by a century of paranoia in Moscow—and an emboldened group of volunteer units in Ukraine—Putin’s new campaign seems likely to lead to further assassination operations abroad and more crackdowns at home.