How Russia “made” its GRU spy first a Brazilian and then a heroin dealer

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Drug dealer from the Lipetsk organized criminal group

Russia made a request to the Brazilian Minister of Justice to extradite Cherkasov on June 27, 2022, just under three months after his arrest in the Netherlands and a month after he was sentenced in Brazil. There he was accused of forging documents.

Initially, Russia sent a request from the Prosecutor General's Office to the Minister of Justice of Brazil. The document bears the signature of Deputy Prosecutor General Pyotr Gorodov. It asks for the extradition of Cherkasov and reports that he is accused of preparing to sell drugs and participating in a criminal organization. On June 24, 2022 (three days before sending the request), the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow chose a measure of restraint for him in absentia - detention.

The request was accompanied by an indictment signed by the head of the department for combating drugs of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It alleges that Cherkasov controlled the delivery of heroin from Moscow to other members of the group based in Lipetsk.

The indictment, sent to Brazil, describes in detail the details of the crimes and the persons appearing in them in addition to Cherkasov. All these people really exist and they were charged back in 2015, and in 2017 the court found them guilty. But Cherkasov's name does not appear in court decisions in these cases, and none of the lawyers working on this case mentioned Cherkasov.
In addition, at the time of all of the alleged crimes, Cherkasov was working for a travel agency in Brazil and traveling. Over the past 10 years, he has visited Russia several times under his own name and has not been detained. He managed to visit Moscow, Kaliningrad, Belgorod and Samara in 2015, 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021, according to travel data found by Bellingcat employees in the Rozysk-Magistral database.

There are other inconsistencies in the indictment. One fragment of the document states that on August 10, 2013, some of Cherkasov's accomplices were detained, while Cherkasov himself successfully delivered a batch of heroin to Lipetsk at that time. Another fragment claims that Cherkasov was also detained on the same day - and this allegedly prevented him from delivering heroin to Lipetsk.

All detentions are described in detail in the indictment for each of the members of the group: the time, place, circumstances are indicated. At the same time, the details of Cherkasov's detention are unknown.

Cherkasov was required to be put on the international wanted list only on June 23, 2022.

Trainee from Brazil

On June 16, 2022, Dutch intelligence published a press release that described a thwarted attempt by a GRU agent disguised as a trainee to infiltrate the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The agent was sent back to Brazil, informing the authorities that his real name was Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov.

The man who was denied entry had a passport in the name of Victor Müller Ferreira. According to the legend of his biography , since 2011 Ferreira worked in a Brazilian travel agency, and later went to college in Dublin, where he studied political science from 2014 to 2018. After that, in 2020, he received his master's degree from Johns Hopkins University.

In 2017 "Victor Müller Ferreira" started his politics blog "Politics of Us". In it, he talked about strengthening democracy, the importance of public organizations, and also called Putin a "cancer." His Twitter account has many posts in support of Trump. He also once shared a 2017 Bellingcat article about the digital identities of GRU officers.

Victor Müller has a hundred friends from Brazil on his Facebook page: graduates of the college and university where he studied. In the profile photo, he is captured at the time of his graduation, in public documents, Ferreira is indeed listed among the students at the university. Bellingcat spoke to one of the alumni who confirmed that "Victor" was a student. One of the professors tweeted that "Victor Muller" had attended his classes and asked for a letter of recommendation for an internship at the International Criminal Court - and the professor wrote it. The professor notes that Ferreira had a strange accent, but this was due to the fact that he was "Brazilian with Irish roots."

Data on the true identity of "Ferreira", that is, Sergei Vladimirovich Cherkasov, is more difficult to find. They were removed from the live databases, but kept in the merged old databases that Bellingcat kept.

Sergey Cherkasov is most likely the real name of the person whom Russia demands to extradite. Under it, he traveled from his native Kaliningrad when he was 20 years old. Also, under his own name, Cherkasov flew to Russia during the holidays at an Irish college. Cherkasov, under his own name, also allegedly graduated from the Baltic State Academy in Kaliningrad in 2007.
Now Sergei Cherkasov confessed to all crimes. They are listed in the indictment sent from Russia. He knows that under Russian law, these crimes carry a sentence of up to 20 years, while a court in Brazil imposed a sentence of 15 years. Nevertheless, Cherkasov wants extradition to Russia.