A Russian spy at the International Criminal Court unmasked

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The spy in question had posed as a 33-year-old lawyer. Assumed name: Viktor Muller Ferreira. Nationality: Brazilian. He had just been admitted to a junior analyst internship at the International Criminal Court, in the preliminary examinations department. A job that consists of studying, dissecting all the files that arrive at the prosecutor’s office – including therefore those relating to possible war crimes committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine – to check whether it is necessary to open investigation. The ICC offers 200 internships of this type each year to students and graduates in law or social psychology…

But when he first landed at Amsterdam airport in April, he was picked up by the Dutch secret service and sent back to Brazil where he is in jail awaiting trial. Erik Akerboom, the director general of the Dutch intelligence agency, said: “This clearly shows us what the Russians are up to, trying to gain illegal access to information within the ICC. We classify this as a high level threat.“

Behind this assumed name, a 36-year-old Russian from Kaliningrad: Sergey Vladimorovich Cherkasov, who had been working on his cover for more than 10 years – like the Russian spies of the Cold War era – the “illegal” program relaunched by Vladimir Cheese fries.

He did a lot with the identity of Viktor Muller Ferreira. A degree in political science in Dublin, a master’s degree with a specialization in “foreign policy” at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “I feel mad, I feel stupid, I feel naive…I got screwed“, said today one of his teachers, Eugene Finkel, who still can’t get over having written him a letter of recommendation for his internship at the ICC.

In his “legend”, the synopsis of his fictional life that he had memorized – and oddly written down without any coding – the spy had invented a whole host of very specific (and somewhat fanciful) anecdotes: the fact that he hated fish, that at school he had fallen in love with his geography teacher or that we called him “Gringo”, because with his fair skin and his blond hair pulling on the red, he “looked more like a German” than to a Brazilian.

In this fabricated story, he also claims to have returned to Brazil in August 2010 to find his father there. After this meeting, he would have decided to stay in the country “to learn the language and re-establish citizenship“. Other details intended to give credence to his version: in a garage where he worked, there was a poster of “the young Verónica Castro, replaced by a poster by Pamela Anderson“. Viktor-Sergey regularly went to “the only nightclub that plays trance musicof the capital.

According to the Dutch services, Sergey Vladimorovich Cherkasov worked for the GRU, the general directorate of Russian military intelligence. A service with a formidable reputation. Several of its members have been indicted for hacking into Democratic Party computer systems around the time of the 2016 US presidential election; he is suspected of having organized several targeted assassinations of enemies of the state abroad.

If he had entered the ICC, he could have done great damage: by having access to computers he could have collected a whole lot of information, altered or even destroyed documents or evidence of war crimes committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, war crimes under investigation by the ICC. It is not the first time that the Netherlands has unmasked Russian intelligence agents on its soil, but with the war in Ukraine experts believe that Russia has revived its large-scale espionage operations.


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