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For years, Russia has been using Brazil as a training ground for its spies, who have been spying on Western countries under false names.
This is stated in an investigation by the New York Times, Ukrinform reports.
As part of Operation East, Brazilian intelligence services have uncovered at least nine Russian spies who were operating undercover, according to hundreds of documents and dozens of interviews conducted by the NYT. At least two of them have been arrested. Others have fled to Russia. According to officials, at least eight countries were involved in the investigation, with intelligence coming from the United States, the Netherlands, other Western intelligence agencies, Israel, and Uruguay.
While many countries are involved in intelligence activities, Russia is very different, the NYT writes. Other intelligence agencies mainly work with local sources to collect information, while Russia has been training agents since Soviet times – illegal immigrants who are sleeper agents for a certain time.
In Brazil, for example, spies first got rid of their Russian past, then started doing business, making friends and families. Then, under the guise of plausible stories, they traveled to the United States, Europe, or the Middle East to conduct espionage operations.
For example, in early April 2022, the US CIA informed the Brazilian Federal Police that an undercover Russian GRU officer had recently appeared in the Netherlands to complete an internship at the International Criminal Court, just as it began investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine. He traveled with a Brazilian passport under the name of Victor Mueller Ferreira. Under this name, he received a master’s degree from an American university. But his real name, according to the CIA, is Sergei Cherkasov. Dutch border guards refused him entry, so upon his return to Brazil, local law enforcement detained him on charges of using fake documents.
During interrogations, Cherkasov claimed to be a Brazilian, and he had a real passport, a Brazilian voter registration card, and a certificate of military service. However, his identity was exposed thanks to his birth certificate, which contained the names of his Brazilian parents. The police found the family of Ferreira’s alleged mother and learned that the woman had never had children, and no one was found by the name of the father.
According to the publication, the Brazilian passport allows visa-free travel to almost as many countries as the American one. And while many countries require confirmation from a hospital before issuing a birth certificate, Brazil makes an exception for those born in rural areas – it is enough to declare in the presence of two witnesses that the child was born to at least one of the Brazilian parents. With a birth certificate in hand, you can get a passport.
After this discovery, federal agents began to look for people with genuine birth certificates who had spent their lives without any records of being in Brazil and then suddenly appeared as adults and received identity documents.
In this way, the Brazilian police exposed other agents, a married couple (their real names are Iryna Antonova and Roman Koval) who managed to flee to Uruguay in 2023. Another spy, Olha Turyova, fled to Namibia. Another “Brazilian” couple with the surname Pereira, but in fact Vladimir and Ekaterina Danilov, fled to Portugal. Another Russian agent was Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich, also known as Artem Shmyrev, who, together with his wife Irina, a spy in Greece, also managed to flee the country.
Of all the spies, only Cherkasov was imprisoned, sentenced to 15 years for falsifying documents, but later reduced to five years. Apparently, in an effort to free him, the Russian government claimed that he was a wanted drug trafficker and filed documents with the court requesting his extradition. But Brazil refused to do so.
The newspaper notes that it is not known why the agents fled Brazil, but the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has triggered a global reaction to Russian spies, even in parts of the world where these agents have long enjoyed a certain amount of impunity. Among these countries was Brazil, which has historically had friendly relations with Russia.
As previously reported, according to a journalistic investigation by Radio Liberty, Russian diplomat Dmitry Iordanidi, who was recalled from Belgium over allegations of espionage, has now been nominated to head the OSCE mission to Serbia.
