theres border control for a reason...if foreign hitmen can get into the country, kill someone, and get away with it, whats the point of border control?
thats what im saying...all those d***heads throwing away my perfectly legal shower gel without even looking, they should be ashamed of themselves this is happening
I went on a business trip to China some decade ago. On the way back, at the Shanghai airport, I forgot that I had an entire unopened tub of yogurt in my carry on. The security screening attendant just waved that through, like they don't give a damn.
All that hoopla about liquids on planes originates from America. 9/11 didn't happen in China, so they probably think it's just some foreign bullshit they have to implement, which they do half-assedly.
Border control is for plebs. Intelligence services can forge passports and use that to get in[1]. The way to stop assassinations is counter-intelligence.
"the West" is normally understood to be a certain collection of governments, people, ideas, and institutions. The police of Spain and Spanish intelligence would be included here. They should've made sure that the defected soldier could, if he wanted, remain totally anonymous.
The Spanish government is optimized to win elections in Spain, not to secure foreign operators who appear to have defected from selected countries. This sort of armchair security policy analysis skips over reams of complexity for the sake of shaking fingers at single events that get published.
The intelligence operations that succeed don't get published. If we decry western incompetence at each apparent Russian assassination, the FSB is achieving its goals.
Also, why do these guys always go to Russian enclave and tourist sea side towns? It is very easy to disappear in Spain, but not in the type of places where he was killed. If you want to flee from something, you go throw a dart somewhere under or above Madrid, far from the sea. No one wants to be there, there are no Russians and the post office cannot find you so you don’t even get mail IF you register there (which you wouldn’t if you are trying to hide).
For some reason people go to Marbella, or other well known mainland coastal places or, of course, Ibiza. Good for vacation (if you enjoy that type of thing), but how is it smart for disappearing of the fsb grasp.
The BRICS is also a well defined group of nations that has little in common besides some investment banker report from how their economies correlated in the early 2000s and bureaucratic plans for mutual currency swap.
Naming groups of things doesn't make them a coherent whole.
Europe is basically open boarders internally. So once you pass an external boarder you almost have free passage. This is a good thing. You won’t be able to stop people like this that are state backed even if you wanted to unless they mess up and do something stupid. There is also a rather large presence of Eastern European organized crime that would happily take a paycheck or other favors from Russia.
You mustn’t have moved from an EU country to another.
Being an EU citizen, I drank the cool-aid about the freedom of move and work in any EU country, but the reality being that there are so many cultural, linguistic, administrative, legislative (and other) differences between a country to another that the overall experience is painful and except for very high incentives (big salary increase) the experience is not great.
I struggled less to relocate from France to China than I did to relocate from France to Germany.
Like everything in Europe, on paper it’s good, in reality, it’s often mediocre. Sad thing.
It sounds like you've had some interesting experiences!
We might want to throw in cross border workers (frontaliers/Grenzgänger). That's a bit different. It can be very interesting financially even on the lower end of salary or qualifications. But that possibility existed before the EU and won't disappear after the EU.
As another anecdote, I found relocating to Germany rather straightforward. There definitely was paperwork to be done, but it was well defined and easy enough to file (even if it was old-fashioned as Germany tends to be with bureaucracy).
I've moved inside the EU twice and have no idea what you're talking about. I literally moved from one capital to another, rented a place, started looking for a job. Literally.
I'm relocating this year from Poland to Germany. I hope it'll be simple enough.
From what I heard, I need to rent apartment, do anmeldung, set up bank account, buy health insurance, pay monthly tv fee, register for taxes and file them every year. Then I hope to live without worries.
I'd say that contentious question of 'posted workers' is enough to make me ask myself if it's worth the sacrifice to have the possibility to live and work anywhere in Schengen/EEA/EU. But the other replies to your message include further valid points.
Remember that legal, economic immigration in Europe is possible without Schengen style free movement. It really wasn't that hard before.
I'm willing to study facts (numbers) that prove the benefit of free movement but they would have to show that legal, economic immigration without Schengen doesn't bring the same benefit. And legal, economic immigration without Schengen seems to have a lot less disadvantages.
I think cases like that show that people aren't killing each other not because it's hard or enforcement and punishment prevents them. They don't do it mostly because they just don't want to. And if they want to, they want to kill people close to them which makes them easy to connect with the crime. Murderers who pick unrelated victims basically roam free. It's good that there's so few of them.
I don’t have any insight on this particular case but I do happen to know a meaningful amount about how things like this tend to happen historically and there’s no reason to think differently here.
He almost certainly tried to get back in touch with friends and family who would have been under surveillance and they were able to pin him down to a specific location from there. From that point onwards the rest of what comes next isn’t particularly difficult to pull off.
Right. When you're on the run, as he should have been:
Step One: You have to absolutely break all contact with your past. That's the first step. Family, friends, bank accounts, old email accounts, everything. (And, needless to say, if you're Russian and are trying to escape Russian agents, the last thing you do is hang out in Russian enclaves. So you break with your culture, as well, to the fullest extent possible.)
Step Two: You have to change your appearance; if you were clean-shaven and had long hair, you go bald and grow as much facial hair as you can comfortably manage; if possible you get some plastic surgery done; if you had tattoos, you remove them or discreetly cover them with new ink, no matter where they are.
Step Three: You go to a big city of 500k+ residents and work cash jobs-- dishwasher, line cook, nightclub bouncer, delivery driver, construction crew, etc. -- the possibilities are vast. If you're sitting on a cash reserve, don't work and try to make some money investing.
Step Four: No heavy drinking, and no drugs that might get you arrested and lead to a paper trail.
Do all that and you might live a normal lifespan. This playbook is how quite a lot of fugitives managed to get away with it, including, until quite recently and famously, this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kirishima
Even if you do this, a state backed intelligence agency is going to eventually find you if they keep trying.
The idea "the west" can protect any single person from a state backed intelligence agency set on eliminating that person is totally delusional.
I would question what is going on in a person's head to believe this is even possible. Maybe if we incarcerated the individual under a fake name then put that individual in solitary confinement for life, this would work!
Oh, I'm not so sure. Check out the Japanese guy at the link I posted. The Japanese equivalent of the FBI were searching for him like crazy -- his "Wanted" poster was seriously in every subway station across the nation -- and he managed to get away with it. Many such cases. There are lots of wanted men on the Interpol red list, and "state backed intelligence agencies" are actively searching for many of them. Some of them have been on the list for many years.
Intel agencies aren't magic, and they're not omniscient. If you're careful, the best tool they have is facial recognition, like Clearview, but that has yet to reach its full dystopian potential.
In OP, you've got a famous Russian defector who retired to a Russian resort town on the Spanish coast. A very boneheaded move, that; ofc he was going to get caught.
Strong disagree on this one, despite their best efforts to seem otherwise the intel folks aren’t magic and they have very real limitations in terms of how many resources they can throw into something like this. Not everyone is going to get the bin laden treatment.
But they have lots of experience in managing defectors as well, it’s almost always a case of poor adherence to security procedures that exposes people because as the person in hiding you actually have the much stronger hand not the people looking for you.
There’s a long history of people successfully doing this with little to no help in groups such as the IRA for example but when you have a government who will actively support you with things like documents, money, housing and training… your chances are actually very good that you will die of natural causes.
When people are being assassinated in beach towns in Spain, society should do something. The people being assassinated, according to the article, are Russians who decided they don’t support Russia. “Running from the problems of their own country” is a time honored tradition of “The West”, according to every American elementary school curriculum explaining the founding of America.
The west claims to be enlightened lands of the free, so people who are part of the west, should be open to sharing that freedom with those who seek it, and protect them from those who seek to shut out freedom.
National pride? What kind of nation allows another nation to spectacularly violate the most fundamental of their laws, deep in the homeland, with laughing impunity?
Russians running away from problems in their country are assets to the west. One of the things that makes the west great is its respect for individual freedom. At some level Russians know this: just compare the numbers of Russians trying to move to the West, compared to the numbers of westerns moving to Russia. We're better, and their population knows it en mass. So from a selfish point of view, it's in our interest to live up to this image. If a Russian says: I refuse to take part in Russia's aggression towards the West, we definitely should treat them extra well.
Also consider that another thing that makes the West great is its respect for rule of law. People who are in the west should have the right to walk down the street without fear of being assassinated, regardless of who they are or where they come from; this is a western value that I prize very much. If you start allowing "I don't care if a person gets illegally killed in Spain because he's a bad guy anyway", you're eroding the power of the West.
And finally, the problem that the west needs to counter act aren't just individuals of specific nationalities: it's an aggressive state and its institutions that have as stated goal to weaken us.
Let me know if you have more questions. As long as they're in good faith I'm happy to continue discussing.
It's disappointing to see a brainless comment like that on HN. You don't need to be versed in geopolitics to understand that Russia is a threat to western Europe and people like this create a counterweight to the insane part of Russian society. You need dissidents and oppositionists to have a chance to build a normal country in Russia.
Embarrassing that the west failed to protect Gonzalo Lira from a similar fate in Ukraine.
It's more embarrassing to become like Russia than to not be able to stop them.
The people who respond that no big deal he ended up dead because he had Bad Views because he voiced propaganda from the other side are not disproving, but rather underscoring this point.
> "Kuzminov opted for the Mediterranean town of Villajoyosa, population 36,000, including more than 800 registered residents from Russia. His home in exile was the ninth floor of a four-tower condominium cluster overlooking the beach, most of its tenants foreigners, the building manager said. A placard by the entrance extended a measure of confidence: “Facilities monitored by video cameras and security personnel.” In smaller print below read doorbell-ringing instructions, written in Spanish, English and Russian.
> "Along the street, Russian expatriates prayed at the nearby Orthodox church and shopped for groceries at a store named Baltica. The coastline had a reputation for Russian organized crime."
This guy wasn't even trying. He obviously didn't think that the threat was real.
Is there anyone Putin won't uselessly kill? If you had told me in the 00's that we'd be right back to this Iron Curtain standoff, I simply wouldn't have believed you. Apparently progress is much more fragile than my younger self had thought, and it only takes one fallacy-of-yesteryear reactionary dipshit to kick a country backwards a generation and a half. What a waste of human potential.
When I was a youngster in the nineties, I read Erich Maria Remarque's books and thought: "Wow! I'm so lucky the World has changed, people became smarter, more tolerant to each other, and none of this shit will even happen!"... And now I'm like in some of Remarque's stories :D
Tactically, sure, it has an effect. But it just reeks of strategic impotence, like targeting all those Ukrainian civilians. Can't take a city? Settle for destroying an apartment building instead.
It's basically another point to the idea that this whole conflict being about Putin reenacting his trauma of the USSR and its collapse. During the cold war, punishing defectors or spending some soldiers lives in slow burn conflicts wasn't a significant waste of resources and it did shore up the lines of national identity. But what were relatively successful tactics back then have now been scaled up despite being completely inapplicable for the current reality.
You gotta question if that person, despite doing something “honorable” would be someone you want in your country. Much easier to find a local who can do it for patriotism.
Also there’s a delicate political balance to not openly trying to kill heads of state. If we lose that balance, we might remember how good the Russians are at that game.
As an American, I’d definitely prefer we NOT spend tax money in this way. We don’t need more direct conflict, nor do we need to enable a new generation of war where heads of state are the target.
68 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadIt tells me that the Russians infiltrated a lot.
Harassment of ordinary people for the sake of security theatre.
All that hoopla about liquids on planes originates from America. 9/11 didn't happen in China, so they probably think it's just some foreign bullshit they have to implement, which they do half-assedly.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/15/ireland-israel...
The intelligence operations that succeed don't get published. If we decry western incompetence at each apparent Russian assassination, the FSB is achieving its goals.
For some reason people go to Marbella, or other well known mainland coastal places or, of course, Ibiza. Good for vacation (if you enjoy that type of thing), but how is it smart for disappearing of the fsb grasp.
What other name would you use for this bunch of people? "The West" has become the normal accepted term over the last few decades.
Naming groups of things doesn't make them a coherent whole.
It makes your serfdom in modern technofeudalism less geographically restricted. Makes you more free for some definitions of "free".
I struggled less to relocate from France to China than I did to relocate from France to Germany.
Like everything in Europe, on paper it’s good, in reality, it’s often mediocre. Sad thing.
We might want to throw in cross border workers (frontaliers/Grenzgänger). That's a bit different. It can be very interesting financially even on the lower end of salary or qualifications. But that possibility existed before the EU and won't disappear after the EU.
From what I heard, I need to rent apartment, do anmeldung, set up bank account, buy health insurance, pay monthly tv fee, register for taxes and file them every year. Then I hope to live without worries.
Remember that legal, economic immigration in Europe is possible without Schengen style free movement. It really wasn't that hard before.
I'm willing to study facts (numbers) that prove the benefit of free movement but they would have to show that legal, economic immigration without Schengen doesn't bring the same benefit. And legal, economic immigration without Schengen seems to have a lot less disadvantages.
He almost certainly tried to get back in touch with friends and family who would have been under surveillance and they were able to pin him down to a specific location from there. From that point onwards the rest of what comes next isn’t particularly difficult to pull off.
Step One: You have to absolutely break all contact with your past. That's the first step. Family, friends, bank accounts, old email accounts, everything. (And, needless to say, if you're Russian and are trying to escape Russian agents, the last thing you do is hang out in Russian enclaves. So you break with your culture, as well, to the fullest extent possible.)
Step Two: You have to change your appearance; if you were clean-shaven and had long hair, you go bald and grow as much facial hair as you can comfortably manage; if possible you get some plastic surgery done; if you had tattoos, you remove them or discreetly cover them with new ink, no matter where they are.
Step Three: You go to a big city of 500k+ residents and work cash jobs-- dishwasher, line cook, nightclub bouncer, delivery driver, construction crew, etc. -- the possibilities are vast. If you're sitting on a cash reserve, don't work and try to make some money investing.
Step Four: No heavy drinking, and no drugs that might get you arrested and lead to a paper trail.
Do all that and you might live a normal lifespan. This playbook is how quite a lot of fugitives managed to get away with it, including, until quite recently and famously, this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kirishima
The idea "the west" can protect any single person from a state backed intelligence agency set on eliminating that person is totally delusional.
I would question what is going on in a person's head to believe this is even possible. Maybe if we incarcerated the individual under a fake name then put that individual in solitary confinement for life, this would work!
Intel agencies aren't magic, and they're not omniscient. If you're careful, the best tool they have is facial recognition, like Clearview, but that has yet to reach its full dystopian potential.
In OP, you've got a famous Russian defector who retired to a Russian resort town on the Spanish coast. A very boneheaded move, that; ofc he was going to get caught.
But they have lots of experience in managing defectors as well, it’s almost always a case of poor adherence to security procedures that exposes people because as the person in hiding you actually have the much stronger hand not the people looking for you.
There’s a long history of people successfully doing this with little to no help in groups such as the IRA for example but when you have a government who will actively support you with things like documents, money, housing and training… your chances are actually very good that you will die of natural causes.
When people are being assassinated in beach towns in Spain, society should do something. The people being assassinated, according to the article, are Russians who decided they don’t support Russia. “Running from the problems of their own country” is a time honored tradition of “The West”, according to every American elementary school curriculum explaining the founding of America.
The west claims to be enlightened lands of the free, so people who are part of the west, should be open to sharing that freedom with those who seek it, and protect them from those who seek to shut out freedom.
Also consider that another thing that makes the West great is its respect for rule of law. People who are in the west should have the right to walk down the street without fear of being assassinated, regardless of who they are or where they come from; this is a western value that I prize very much. If you start allowing "I don't care if a person gets illegally killed in Spain because he's a bad guy anyway", you're eroding the power of the West.
And finally, the problem that the west needs to counter act aren't just individuals of specific nationalities: it's an aggressive state and its institutions that have as stated goal to weaken us.
Let me know if you have more questions. As long as they're in good faith I'm happy to continue discussing.
It's more embarrassing to become like Russia than to not be able to stop them.
The people who respond that no big deal he ended up dead because he had Bad Views because he voiced propaganda from the other side are not disproving, but rather underscoring this point.
> "Along the street, Russian expatriates prayed at the nearby Orthodox church and shopped for groceries at a store named Baltica. The coastline had a reputation for Russian organized crime."
This guy wasn't even trying. He obviously didn't think that the threat was real.
It's basically another point to the idea that this whole conflict being about Putin reenacting his trauma of the USSR and its collapse. During the cold war, punishing defectors or spending some soldiers lives in slow burn conflicts wasn't a significant waste of resources and it did shore up the lines of national identity. But what were relatively successful tactics back then have now been scaled up despite being completely inapplicable for the current reality.
Also there’s a delicate political balance to not openly trying to kill heads of state. If we lose that balance, we might remember how good the Russians are at that game.
As an American, I’d definitely prefer we NOT spend tax money in this way. We don’t need more direct conflict, nor do we need to enable a new generation of war where heads of state are the target.
But, you only hear about all the times people don't keep their mouths shut. It might not be very rare.
Haven't heard mention of that before. What are you basing it on?
> A relative or father-on law or something was bragging in a bar in Spain to other Russians that this guy stole a helicopter.
Ugh. Yeah, that's plausible. Some people are just fucking morons, even when it comes to critically sensitive information. :(
Videos? There are many violent videos on Telegram about draft defectors.
Youtube not so much: https://youtu.be/zog7R83hLRg?t=177
Sorry, maybe misunderstanding. Ukraine is hunting them, sometimes arresting them very violently. But not killing them.
While it wouldn't be weird for the Ukranian side to be looking for draft dodgers, I've not heard of them doing it "very violently".
Totally possible I've just not seen something though.
There are many videos in Russian propaganda channels on telegram. Try aussiecossack Channel. This is NOT an endorsement.
There's literally no reason to believe anything in those channels is factual. That's the point of propaganda. :(
Also, no telegram account personally and no interest at all in having one.
Why not 2014? The first part of the invasion of Ukraine was OK?