According to El Mundo, Kasparov and Ponomarev were to be killed in the United States, and the third victim — in Vilnius, where they planned to stab them or douse them with gasoline and burn them. The newspaper writes that the plan was to “eliminate one or two dissidents and at the same time send a strong signal to the rest”.
The most advanced episode of this network, according to the publication, was the preparation of Ponomarev’s murder. A Venezuelan living in Brooklyn, on the orders of one of the network’s participants, took photos of two objects in Washington linked to the person U.S. prosecutors call “Victim No. 1”, and $40,000 was offered for killing this person.
The man sent several photos and videos, but made it clear that he agreed to take pictures, not “the other thing”, after which he was asked to find someone else to carry out the killing, according to a publication on the U.S. Department of Justice website. Code words were used for each stage: “measure the plot and take measurements” meant preliminary surveillance, and “construction” meant the killing itself.
Among the possible targets in the United States, El Mundo also names Vladimir Kara-Murza. In Lithuania, the possible target was Ivan Tyutrin, who founded the “Free Russia Forum” together with Kasparov; part of 2024 he was under protection, and in recent months police saw signs that he had once again become a target.
At the same time, the case materials do not make it clear whether it was Tyutrin who was the person they planned to kill in Lithuania. El Mundo also includes Bashkir activist Ruslan Gabbasov on the list of possible targets in that country; in 2025 he discovered a tracking device in his car, and in spring 2026 Lithuanian authorities reported preventing an assassination attempt against him.
On September 15, the U.S. Department of Justice charged five alleged members of the network, which investigators link to Russian intelligence services and to killings and sabotage in the United States and Europe. Among the accused were 63-year-old Yuri Khrameev, the former commander of the Northwest OMON, who claims that in his youth he worked with Putin and later received awards from his hands, his son Kirill, Cuba-born men living in Russia Omiis Romanos Durruti and Yaidel Delgado Suarez, as well as Venezuelan Ángel Eduardo Castro.
Durruti, according to El Mundo, appeared in investigations of a series of arsons in Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Lithuania that began no later than 2024 even before the U.S. Department of Justice’s statement.
