In the summer of 2013, a restaurateur was shot in Moscow. A man wearing a hood jumped off a bicycle, shot the victim twice and disappeared. Six years later, the exiled Chechen commander, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, was murdered under similar circumstances in a crowded Berlin park. In broad daylight he was shot by a man on a bicycle with a Glock 26, a small weapon with a silencer.
The perpetrator was arrested after dumping a gun and a wig in the River Spree near the Reichstag, where the German parliament is located. The police found a passport with the name “Vadim Sokolov”. But the bald, heavy-set perpetrator who was arrested ultimately turned out to be Vadim Krasikov, a Russian with ties to the Russian security service and the main suspect in the 2013 murder in Moscow.
Russian President Putin previously announced in an interview with American TV presenter Tucker Carlson that he aims to get the “patriot” released in exchange for American journalist Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested in Russia a year ago. The Wall Street Journal reporter is suspected of espionage, something that he, the newspaper and the American government have always denied.
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Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was murdered in Berlin in 2019. — © facebook / RR
Link met Kremlin
Gershkovich is not the only American in a Russian prison whose fate may be tied to Krasikov’s. Former US Marine Paul Whelan and US-Russian citizen Alsu Kurmasheva are also being held in Russia. And even Navalny may have been part of the deal to free Krasikov before his death.
But why all the interest in that one man? He is said to have close ties to the Kremlin. It turns out that two years after the murder in Moscow in 2013, his arrest warrant was withdrawn. That’s when Vadim Sokolov suddenly appeared. He received a passport in 2015 and a VAT number was also added in 2019. Something that, according to the German judge, could only have been created by the Kremlin. And it would also show that the Kremlin had something to do with the murder in Berlin. “Russian state authorities ordered the suspect to liquidate the victim,” a German judge said after sentencing Krasikov to life in prison.
Also, the fact that Khangoshvili was a Chechen rebel commander between 2000 and 2004, when Chechnya was fighting Russia for independence, could show that Russia had something to do with his death. Something Russia has always denied.
But the fact that Putin called him a “patriot” in the recent interview with Carlson and indicated that he was eliminating a “bandit in Europe” still raises questions.
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© AP
no favors to Russia
Although Biden has promised Gershkovich’s family to do everything he can to get him released, it won’t be that easy. And certainly not if Russia only wants to release him in exchange for Krasikov. Because Germany must agree to the release.
And Ulrich Lechte, whose Free Democratic Party is part of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government, insisted that Germany “must not grant Russia this favor.”
“This is a kind of amnesty and sends the political signal that Russia can commit more murders on our territory, murderers are released and therefore go unpunished,” Lechte told the BBC.