Entrepreneur with jewels, researcher, married couple, student or blue -eyed model. All these people have lived in Brazil for years, and none of them has attracted the attention of the authorities or their loved ones. They found a job, friends, partners and gradually built a new life.
However, as it turned out, everyone worked as secret agents sent from Russia and until now they have managed to escape justice.
Until recently, Russia used Brazil as a “factory” to produce new and credible spies for years.
There are more reasons why the Russians chose Brazil, with whom he has been relatively lively and good relationships for a long time. For example, the Brazilian passport is one of the most useful in the world – it allows visa -free travel throughout the world, and is therefore almost as demanded as the American one.
Moreover, there are a large number of nationalities in Brazil, and therefore it was easy for Russian citizens to fit here. An unusual accent could be attributed to childhood in Europe or parents with different citizens.
This is exactly how the investigatives in Brazil proceeded by several Russians. Apparently, no one would notice their presence, if in 2022, only a few months after Russian troops entered Ukraine, the future trainee of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Sergei Cherkas did not appear on the American CIA radar.
Internship at the time of investigating Russian war crimes
Čerkasov was supposed to become a trainee in court just at a time when the court began to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine. However, he did not try to get to Europe with the Russian passport. This official Brazilian citizen under the name Victor Muller Ferreira traveled from Brazil. And besides the information from the CIA, there was no indication that it should not be a true Brazilian citizen.
The CIA therefore urgently contacted Brazil, and after the Dutch border officials refused to enter the country, tensely expected his arrival in São Paul. However, the Brazilian police did not know how to detain Cherkas. Cherkasov arrogantly urged that he was a valid Brazilian citizen. At first glance, everything sat – he had a right passport, a birth certificate, a voter card and a certificate of completion of compulsory military service.
There was no official connection between him and Russia, and therefore no real reason to limit it to freedom.
The police could not do so immediately. She first watched Cherkasova for a few days. Everything changed only when she took a closer look at the birth certificate of Victor Muller Ferreira. As The New York Times writes, it was once common for spies that identities were stolen, for example, to dead people, especially children. However, at a time when most of the things can be found online, the identity theft made it difficult. Moreover, Victor’s birth certificate was true – he didn’t steal the identity to anyone.
How did he do it?
The police first began to search for a woman, his mother, whose name stood in his birth certificate. She was supposed to give birth in 1989 in Rio de Janeiro. She was a real woman, but she was dead in 2022 for decades. Nevertheless, the police decided to address the woman’s family. And they found that she had never had a child.
Moreover, there was no person with the name of the father from the birth certificate. Thus, although they still did not have a link to Russia, the Brazilian police could arrest Cherkasova at least for using false documents. The Russian’s birth certificate was helped by the fact that the Brazilian authorities allow special issuing of birth certificates for people born in rural areas.
If documents were not issued after birth, for example because of the lack of offices in the area, they had the opportunity to apply for them in adulthood. It is enough to presence two witnesses who declare that the child was born at least one Brazilian parent.
The police, however, still could not understand how Čerkas managed to live in this way a double life. This man simply appeared in Brazil one day in 2015, asked for documents, and no one saw him out of anything. The question was therefore how many other people did something similar. The authorities therefore decided to focus on the records of people in which any suspicious context and formulas could discover – for example, that, like Cherkas, one day, they appeared without any past.
And the suspects gradually began to emerge one by one.
They found it too late
Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich was a successful entrepreneur in Rio de Janeiro. Today, a 34-year-old man lived in the city with his girlfriend and their cat. In fact, however, he was born in Russia under the name Artem Šmyrev, was married and lived in Brazil as a secret agent anticipating instructions to travel – to the US, Western Europe or the Middle East. His wife worked in a similar situation in Greece.
“No one wants to feel the defeated,” wrote Irine Smyrev in 2021. “That’s why I continue to work and hope.” Smyrev believed that his sacrifice – the beginning of a new life in South America – would be more important than he would become an entrepreneur in the area of 3D printers.
“No real work success,” Irine wrote. “I haven’t been where I have to be for two years.” But she had no understanding of him: “If you wanted a normal family life, you made a fundamentally wrong decision,” she wrote to him.
Cameras and cameras have always upset it
Despite his strange accent, none of his loved ones knew that skid was not the one he was married to. Although he did not like to take pictures, it was not so suspicious. The bad feeling of his surroundings only after he traveled on a trip to Malaysia, and almost immediately cut off contact.
He left just a few days before the federal police revealed his identity. The guards were ready to hold him back immediately after his plane landed back in Brazil. Even though Šmyrev had already bought a return ticket, he probably learned about revealing his false identity in Brazil while traveling. So, even though he was supposed to return in a month, none of his loved ones had ever seen him again.
Despite being married, sherev was last spoken to his Brazilian girlfriend before he completely disappeared. “You’ll hear different things about me, but you have to know that I have never done anything so bad. For example, I never killed anyone or anything like that,” he told her in a phone call. “My past has caught me,” he added.
The ground was felling after them
As it turned out, Skmyrev and Cherkas were not the only Russian secret in Brazil. But the police have always managed to detect Russian spies too late, so they always managed to escape the country. Among them was, for example, a married couple living under the name Pereirovci, who actually consisted of Vladimir Danilov and Yekaterina Danilov. They suddenly went to Portugal in 2018 and then the Earth fell after them. And they weren’t the only ones.
The Brazilian police decided to intervene against the most important thing a foreign agent had – and the secret identity. As one Brazilian investigator said, “What is worse than being arrested than a spy? Is it revealing that you are a spy.”
The list of Brazilian citizens who appeared as unexpectedly as they later disappeared has proved to be really extensive. Cooperation with Interol helped with the Brazilian police. He sent out information to all 196 Member States. With news information from the United States, Israel, the Netherlands or Uruguay, at least nine Russian officers operating under Brazilian identities have been revealed.
Only on the basis of confirmation from Interpol was the Brazilian police were able to accuse and subsequently condemn Sergei Cerkasov for several years in prison. In an effort to get him home, the Russian government said it was a sought -after drug dealer. However, despite the application for its issue, she did not succeed.
The Brazilians responded quickly. If Cherkas was a dealership of drugs, it was necessary, according to prosecutors, to be in custody even longer than five years. The police had to investigate the case. Cherkas, as the only detainee Russian with Brazilian secret identity, remains in Brazilian custody.
After the Russian secret operation in the South American country collapsed and their identities revealed not only in Brazil, but all over the world, the Russian secret agent has left nothing but return to the native land. And knowing that abroad as spies will probably never be able to work.
