‘The rules have changed’: has Russia begun to order assassinations on US soil?

Exiled dissidents and an unsealed indictment suggest Kremlin may have abandoned longstanding taboo on attacks on its rival’s territory

R oman Dobrokhotov had been content enough for his appearance at a conference in Washington DC this week to be publicised, although it was not something he would normally risk in Europe. The dissident Russian journalist was named during a trial in London last year as one of the targets of a Russian spy ring that appeared to have murderous intent.

“Maybe burn him alive on the street, spray him with some super-strong acid, VX, like the North Koreans, or the ricin,” a Russian-hired operative had texted of the plans for Dobrokhotov in Britain.

American soil, though, has traditionally been regarded as something of a safe place for those speaking out against the Kremlin, whether it has been under the red flag of the Soviet Union or the tricolour of Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation. It might be possible for Kremlin agents to get away with deploying poison-tipped umbrellas on people crossing London’s Waterloo Bridge, as was the fate of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978 , but risking such colourful assassinations on the Brooklyn Bridge or indeed anywhere on US territory would be a different matter entirely.

If not part of the so-called Moscow rules, the fabled operating guidelines for western and Russian spies, then there was certainly an adjunct, a gentleman’s agreement of sorts, that neither side would kill on each other’s soil. That had been the understanding of many of the other dissidents as they prepared to appear at the Washington Dialogue conference on Russian affairs being held in the high-rise office of the National Endowment for Democracy, a short walk from the White House.

This week the kaleidoscope was shaken. “It looks like starting from today, the rules have changed in America,” Dobrokhotov, 43, said. “We will have to change how we behave there. Nowhere is safe.”

The game changer overshadowing the Washington conference was an announcement on Tuesday that the US Department of Justice was unsealing indictments in absentia against five individuals allegedly working for Russia’s intelligence services who were said to have conspired to “conduct attacks and murders around the world, including in the United States”.

The most eye-catching claim was that of an audacious plot to recruit unnamed US residents to “eliminate” a prominent Russian dissident living in the US capital. Those named as part of the spy network were a serving officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), Kirill Khrameev, 27, and his father, Yuri Khrameev, 63, who is a former FSB colonel, along with two 35-year-old Cubans, Oemis Romagoza Durruthy and Yaidel Delgado Suarez, nicknamed “the Viking”, and a 22-year-old Venezuelan, Angel Eduardo Castro.