Defected Russian pilot shot five times near police station: WSJ

• Maxim Kuzminov is a Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine in August.
• Kuzminov lived in Spain under a false identity until he was murdered in February.
• Officials investigating the murder said the Kremlin may have been involved in the killing, the WSJ reported.

Maksim Kuzminov, a 28-year-old Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine in August and later moved to Spain, was shot and killed less than 500 feet from a local police station, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Shots were fired.

Kuzminov met a tragic fate in February when he was murdered in the small coastal town of Villajoyosa, where he was living under a false identity.

In conversations with Kuzminov’s neighbors, witnesses and authorities, the Journal reported new details about the Russian pilot’s defection last year and death on February 13.

Kuzminov’s body was found less than 500 feet from a police station, and authorities could have responded within minutes, the report said. However, witnesses told the newspaper that Kuzminov was likely already dead by then.

“When we called the emergency number, we already knew that the man was dead,” the building manager of the apartment complex where Kuzminov was staying told the newspaper.

The report said medics found five small-caliber bullets, one of which hit Kuzminov directly in the heart, making it clear how precisely the gunman killed Kuzminov.

No suspects have yet been identified, but investigators told the Journal that investigators believe the Kremlin was involved in the pilot’s killing.

Kuzminov’s fate was widely seen as part of a series of mysterious Russian deaths that have raised suspicions over the Kremlin’s efforts to eliminate critics of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Evgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group that rebelled against the Russian military leadership, died in a plane crash outside a Moscow airport in August.

A Western intelligence official and a former Russian intelligence officer told the Journal last year that Putin’s close aide Nikolai Patrushev orchestrated Putin’s death.

In early February, Alexei Navalny, one of Putin’s most vocal political opponents, was found dead in an Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence. Medical reports indicate that Navalny died of natural causes, but that hasn’t stopped many people, including Navalny’s family and the Biden administration, from thinking foul play may have been involved.

“Make no mistake about it: President Putin is responsible for Mr. Navalny’s death,” President Joe Biden said at a Feb. 16 press conference.

Following reports of Kuzminov’s death, Moscow’s foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin appeared to support the Russian pilot’s fate.

“This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse the moment he planned his dirty and horrible crime,” Naryshkin told Russia’s state-run TASS news agency about a week after Kuzminov’s death.