Agencies Madrid

Madrid

Updated Tuesday, February 20, 2024-12:58

  • Events A Russian pilot who deserted to avoid going to war in Ukraine is found shot dead in Spain

  • Live Last minute of the war in Ukraine

The head of

Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service

,

Sergei Narishkin

, said today that Maxim Kuzminov, the Russian pilot who defected in a helicopter to Ukraine and was murdered in Spain, was a "traitor."

"This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse the moment he planned his dirty and terrible crime," Narishkin said, according to the official Russian agency RIA Novosti. Narishkin added: "In Russia it is often said: either one speaks well about the dead or one does not speak at all."

When Russian public television reported on the desertion in October, the reporter announced that the order to liquidate the pilot had already been given.

The Kremlin spokesman,

Dmitri Peskov

, assured during his daily telephone press conference that he is not aware that the Spanish authorities informed Moscow about what happened. Furthermore, he specified that Kuzminov's death "is not an issue" on the Kremlin's agenda.

Kuzminov was shot to death on February 13 in a garage in an urbanization in

Villajoyosa (Spain)

. Although the documentation found for the deceased does not correspond to that of Kuzminov, because it confirmed that he was a 33-year-old Ukrainian, the sources consulted by Efe clarified that he is the pilot who deserted from the Russian troops.

This Monday the Ukrainian media

Kyiv Post

also reported that the representative of Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR),

Andri Yusov

, confirmed the death of the pilot, although he did not mention the place where the body was found.

A GUR source told another Ukrainian media outlet,

Ukrainska Pravda

, that the pilot was shot dead and that a burned-out car was found near his home that could have been used by the murderers, the latter of which coincides with what happened in Spain because little Later, the vehicle supposedly used by the attackers in their escape was found on fire. According to the GUR, Kuzminov had decided to go live in Spain instead of staying in Ukraine.

The Russian's defection became known in September last year when the Ukrainian GUR published images in which the pilot, who was then 28 years old, explained how he was contacted by enemy military intelligence, which offered him to join the Ukrainian side. money exchange and protection.

Call to the Russian ambassador

The news of Kuzminov's murder was known on the same day that the Spanish Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian ambassador in Madrid,

Yuri Klimenko

, in relation to the death in custody of the opponent Alexei Navalny, which occurred last Friday in circumstances yet to be clarified.

The summons of an ambassador is the diplomatic instrument to convey to another country the discomfort with a certain issue and is usually the previous step to the call for consultations of the own ambassador, a much more forceful step.

Already on Friday, after learning of Navalny's death in custody, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares asked Russia for "clarification of the circumstances of his death, which occurred during his unjust imprisonment for political reasons."

Spain thus emulates the gesture that both Germany

and

Finland

have also adopted

, where the Russian ambassadors were summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.