Thread by @bellingcat

Breaking:
Earlier this week, we identified the Berlin assassin "Vadim Sokolov" as Vadim Krasikov. Today, we can reveal that this same man was involved in a 2007 assassination in Karelia.
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

In 2007, city councilman Yuri Kozlov was killed in the small town of Kostomuksha, in Russia's northwestern region of Karelia. Krasikov's passport file showed that he was a person of interest in this murder. His police case file has been manually purged from Karelian records.

The Kozlov murder case ( №18200712003) went cold after a while.

However, in 2014, the case was reopened after Moscow police received confessions from men who were involved in another murder. Krasikov assassinated a man in Moscow in 2013, and had a warrant out for him in 2014.

Shortly after this 2014 detention, Krasikov's Interpol and national arrest warrants were mysteriously taken down by Russian authorities. Soon after this action, the false identity of "Vadim Sokolov" -- who killed Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin -- was created for Vadim Krasikov.

This timeline details the recent activity of Vadim Krasikov / "Sokolov", from the Karelian murder to his travel in Europe this year.

We spoke with Alexander Kozlov, the brother of the murdered city councilman Yury Kozlov. He told us police had three suspects in his brother's murder case: Oleg Ivanov, Vladimir Fomenko, and Vadim Krasikov, all of whom stayed in a hotel in Kostomuksha the day of Yury's murder.

All three suspects, including Krasikov, were taken to Kostomuksha for the investigation. Much like Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, the three suspects claimed that they were only tourists in the small Karelian town and had no connection to the murder of Yury Kozlov.

Only Ivanov and Fomenko were charged with the murder of Kozlov, though Krasikov was already known to be involved in the murder of a businessman in Moscow from the year prior. Alexander Kozlov told us that he does not understand why Krasikov was not formally charged.

Russia's central investigative committee took up the case, and later dropped it. The defense noted that Fomenko and Ivanov were both highly decorated veterans of the FSB's Vympel spetsnaz team.

In fact, a court decision noted that Fomenko received a Glock-100 "personally awarded by" Kyrgyzstan's president. Additionally, veterans of the elite Vympel FSB unit came to court in Karelia to provide character testimonies for Ivanov and Fomenko.

To sum up how bizarre this case is: A Karelian businessman and city council member was murdered, with the three suspects (who admit to being in town the day of the murder) all apparently from an elite FSB unit; one of whom later went on to assassinate a Chechen man in Berlin.

This pattern of "catch and release" is common practice for Russia's security services.

In 2019, a police officer criminally charged with accepting bribes botched an assassination attempt in Kyiv of an SBU officer. He had a fake passport and was working with the GRU.

With Krasikov, we have a man who also received a fake identity after being named a suspect for two murders (Karelia in 2007, Moscow in 2013). His arrest warrants disappeared and he was no longer involved with the Karelian case after he received his fake identity of Vadim Sokolov.

Whether Krasikov is actually guilty of the Karelian murder is up in the air, but it is clear that he was named as a suspect (along two veterans of an elite FSB unit) shortly before assuming the fake identity of the future Berlin assassin. It's hard not to see the two as connected

Alexander Kozlov, the brother of the murdered Karelian city councilman, plans to write to the head of Russia's central investigative committee, SledCom, to reopen the murder case.