U.S. prosecutors have unsealed a federal indictment accusing five men tied to Russian intelligence of orchestrating a murder-for-hire plot against a Kremlin critic living in Washington, D.C., a brazen operation allegedly run from Moscow's spy apparatus.
The indictment, made public Tuesday, lays out what federal authorities describe as a sprawling network directed by Russian intelligence that recruited operatives inside the United States and abroad to surveil, stalk, and ultimately kill critics of the Kremlin. Three of the five defendants face conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire charges. All five remain at large, the Justice Department confirmed.
The alleged ringleader is Yuri Khrameev, a former Russian intelligence colonel known as "Colonel Yuri." His son, Kirill Khrameev, is an officer in Russia's Federal Security Service, the FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB. Both are named defendants. The remaining three, Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, a Cuban national living in Russia whom prosecutors describe as a coordinator of attacks; Yaidel Delgado Suarez, known as "Viking"; and Angel Eduardo Castro, round out the accused network.
Prosecutors labeled the group the Russian Intelligence Services Network, or RIS. They allege it financed terrorism and coordinated violent operations across multiple countries, operating since at least 2024.
The Washington plot followed a chilling sequence. In late August, according to the indictment, suspected Russian intelligence operatives directed a Venezuelan citizen living in the United States to secretly film two locations in the Washington area tied to an unnamed Kremlin critic. The recruit received detailed surveillance instructions: keep the phone in airplane mode, begin recording before entering the neighborhood, slow down near the target's home, and delete all messages afterward.
The operative completed the surveillance. Then the network allegedly offered $40,000 to carry out the killing.
The recruit refused.
That refusal did not end the operation. The network sought other U.S.-based recruits and, according to the indictment, noted it also had "people in Mexico" available for the job. The coded language the conspirators used tells its own story: they referred to the planned assassination as "construction" and the surveillance as "measuring a plot of land."
Washington has seen no shortage of political shockwaves tied to foreign intelligence operations in recent years, but a murder-for-hire plot directed at a dissident on American soil marks a different category of threat entirely.
The Washington conspiracy was not an isolated operation. The indictment describes a parallel plot in Lithuania, where the network recruited a U.S. citizen to surveil yet another Kremlin critic. That operative was allegedly offered roughly $25,000 to kill the target.
That recruit also refused.
After both recruits declined to carry out the killings, prosecutors say the network pivoted. It shifted its focus toward soliciting sabotage attacks against civilian and military infrastructure in countries aligned, or perceived to be aligned, with Ukraine. Targets allegedly included electrical substations, warehouses, and transportation hubs across Europe.
The pivot tracks with warnings Western governments have issued since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Officials across Europe and the United States have accused Moscow of expanding its use of covert operations, sabotage, and assassination plots well beyond the battlefield. The indictment describes a network that moved fluidly between assassination, espionage, and infrastructure sabotage depending on what opportunities presented themselves.
The nation's capital has absorbed one jolt after another in recent months, from the sudden death of a sitting senator to high-profile legal battles involving politically connected figures. A foreign intelligence service allegedly directing contract killings on American soil adds a security dimension that dwarfs the usual partisan drama.
The indictment lands against a backdrop of well-documented Russian operations against Kremlin critics living overseas. The most notorious case remains the 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer, and his daughter in Salisbury, England. British authorities determined that Russian military intelligence deployed the military-grade nerve agent Novichok in the attack. Moscow denied responsibility.
U.S. officials have separately accused Russia of orchestrating killings of Kremlin critics overseas and conducting covert influence and espionage operations inside the United States. The new indictment suggests the threat has grown more operationally aggressive, moving from poisonings and influence campaigns to actively recruiting contract killers on American soil and offering five-figure bounties.
The fact that both recruited operatives refused to carry out the murders may have prevented bloodshed, but it did not stop the network from continuing to seek willing participants. Prosecutors allege the group kept looking for someone who would say yes. The indictment does not indicate whether any subsequent recruit accepted.
Meanwhile, the broader landscape of legal and political battles in Washington continues to churn. But few of those disputes carry the life-and-death stakes outlined in this federal filing.
Every one of the five defendants remains at large. The Justice Department has not publicly detailed any extradition requests or international arrest warrants. The indictment does not name the Kremlin critics who were targeted in Washington or Lithuania, nor does it identify the Venezuelan citizen or the U.S. citizen in Lithuania who were recruited as operatives.
Several key questions remain unanswered. Which federal court received the filing? What specific charges do the two defendants not facing murder-for-hire conspiracy counts face? And most critically: did the network find someone willing to carry out what the two initial recruits would not?
The indictment also does not specify which European countries or infrastructure targets were singled out for sabotage, beyond the general categories of electrical substations, warehouses, and transportation hubs. The scope of the alleged plotting, spanning the United States, Lithuania, Mexico, and multiple European nations, suggests a network with reach that far exceeded its roster of five named defendants.
D.C. has seen its share of scandals involving politically connected figures and questionable dealings. An alleged state-sponsored assassination ring operating in the American capital is something else altogether.
When a hostile foreign intelligence service can recruit operatives inside the United States, hand them a camera and a $40,000 bounty, and send them into a Washington neighborhood to case a target for murder, and the only thing that stopped it was one person's conscience, the question is not whether the system worked. The question is how many times it has to get lucky before it doesn't.