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Dutch officials say they have prevented a Russian spy from infiltrating the International Criminal Court, which is investigating alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine and Georgia. The suspected operative of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service posed as a 33-year-old Brazilian named Victor Muller Ferreira, who successfully applied for an internship at the ICC in The Hague, According to Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD). He was actually Sergei Vladimirovich Cherkasov, a 36-year-old Russian intelligence officer who was flagged as a “potentially very high” threat when he arrived in the Netherlands from Brazil in April. Washington Post,
According to Brazilian police, he was denied entry and returned to Brazil where he was placed “subject to criminal action for fifteen uses of false documents”, which it claims the man had previously used in the US and Ireland for his surname. lived under. A Johns Hopkins University official confirmed that “Victor Muller Ferreira” enrolled at its School of Advanced International Studies in Washington in 2018 to earn a master’s degree in US foreign policy and graduate in 2020. Post, In fact, Johns Hopkins associate professor of international affairs Eugene Finkel tweeted That he wrote a “robust” letter of recommendation to the alleged operative for an ICC internship, “I will never get over this fact.”
AIVD said that Cherkasov – who arrived in Brazil in 2010, Peru Reuters— “Received a long and extensive training” and made a 4 page backstory For his surname that included deceased parents, including a mother who collected butterflies, a job history including work in a garage that smelled of “lubricant and vulcanized rubber” and that of Pamela Anderson Had a crush on a poster and an imaginary geography teacher, CNN Report. “He hid all his ties with Russia in general and the GRU in particular,” the AIVD said. The agency said that if it had gained access to the ICC, it could have recruited sources for recruitment, gained access to the ICC’s digital systems and “might also have been able to influence criminal proceedings.” ” (Read more Russian spy stories.)