Putin

 

Together, we have identified the man behind the curtain as Lt. Gen. Dmitry Minaev and can now reveal a trove of fresh details about the unit that he runs: the Department for Counterintelligence Operations. Known as DKRO, it is at the very core of Putin’s opaque wartime regime. The story of how it got there reveals much about how Russia’s autocratic system became entangled in a broiling conflict with the West.

Among our findings:

• DKRO has played an enormous and unreported role in plunging Russia into its biggest wave of repression since the demise of Joseph Stalin, including a purge of the Defense Ministry after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine faltered. 
• The department was ordered to secure the release from Germany of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian hit man convicted in the 2019 assassination of a Putin enemy in a Berlin park.
• DKRO then accelerated a campaign of arresting American citizens on Russian soil, including basketball star Brittney Griner. DKRO used former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and me as trade bait to secure the release of Krasikov.
• Among DKRO’s other missions was to harass and surveil Western diplomats in Russia, even pressuring students in the U.S. Embassy high school to spy on their classmates.

Despite DKRO’s growing importance to the regime, there was almost no mention of the agency anywhere on the internet until the Journal reported last year that it was behind my arrest. It didn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Almost nobody outside of a tight circle of Russia experts and intelligence officers had ever heard of it. [There is now a wiki page for DKRO.]

The more we tugged at this simple question—who in Russia was arresting Americans?—the more we revealed the secret inner machinery that has made it possible for Putin to tighten the screws across Russia’s 11 time zones, creating what a U.N. special rapporteur on human rights called an atmosphere of political persecution “unprecedented in recent history.”