Words: Kurt Bayer
Editor: Stuart Dye
Design and Illustration: Paul Slater

He was a former KGB agent, operating behind the Iron Curtain in the final throes of the Cold War. But Boris Karpichkov quarrelled with his Moscow spymasters and switched sides, selling secrets against the Russian state, implicating politicians, the wealthy elite and mafia bosses. Fearing for his life, he fled and in 2006 arrived in Auckland on a forged passport. New Zealand spy bosses knew he was here — but who was tailing him? And did foreign hitmen attempt to assassinate him on Queen St? KURT BAYER reports on the mystery of a spy who came in from the cold.

Boris Karpichkov was tired, deeply tired. The former KGB spy’s hand trembled placing the key in the lock of his Auckland bolthole. Flat 507 of Cambridge Apartments, 43 Anzac Ave, named as a nod to the Gallipoli dead, was cramped and basic. He could afford it and had suffered worse. A notorious Moscow jail which once housed Third Reich war criminals and other enemies of the Soviet Union still gave him shivers.

White with fatigue, Karpichkov just wanted to rest. The watchers had been out again. Teams on foot and by car, he saw them everywhere. His notebook was scrawled with times, dates, registration plates, the same cars, the same shadowy figures.

Maybe he was being paranoid. It felt more than the “obligatory paranoia”, as it was known in his murky trade. And he had foundations for feeling persecuted. Although he hadn’t been an active spy for some years, it was something he couldn’t turn off. The instincts. Seeing what everyone else misses.

Shutting the front door and the world behind him, Karpichkov entered his poky flat and thought of his wife back in London. He missed her. They had always managed. What would she make of him now, slumping in a chair, skin and bones. He had lost 25kg in just a few months. He was falling apart. His jacket hung like the hanger was left inside.

Waiting for the kettle to boil, something wasn’t right. He was alert again. The internal radar was pinging. Yes, it was over the floor, directly behind the entrance door. A strange, dark-violet crystal-like substance. He sniffed the carpet cautiously . . . it emitted a nasty chemical smell.

Puzzled, Karpichkov thought maybe a cleaner had splashed washing liquid attending to the communal corridor. He used cloths to try to wipe the dark crystals, which shone in the sunlight, from the carpet.. It took a lot of effort but he thought he had managed to move it.

The defector took a shower. While washing his face, he suddenly started to feel an extreme burning pain inside his eyes. He tried rinsing them with clean water but they only became more swollen and irritated.

Eventually his eyes returned to normal but that night he suffered severe dizziness, accompanied by pain in his internal organs. It felt like his face and body was on fire.

It was a long, feverish night. Nightmarish visions ravaged him. He was certain he was being stalked by murderous enemies.

In the morning, feeling deep-fried, eyes still watering, he wasn’t sure he had been dreaming at all.

They were trying to kill him.

Stalinist hardliners were purging Communist Party officials branded with Latvian nationalism when Boris Karpichkov was born in the historical capital Riga on February 12, 1959.

Life was grey, tough, and grim growing up behind the Iron Curtain. The constant threat of nuclear war with the Americans loomed large and Karpichkov, of Russian ancestry, was committed to the Soviet cause under Leonid Brezhnev’s hard-line rule.

After finishing secondary school in 1976, he spent five years at Riga Polytechnic Institute, graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering.

For three years, the bright and diligent Karpichkov worked at a manufacturing plant producing microchips and other electronic devices. Every day was the same and he thought this would be his life. That was when the spooks came knocking.

It was July 1984. US President Ronald Reagan was pushing the “Star Wars programme” missile defence system and the Soviets were boycotting the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Karpichkov didn’t need much convincing. He was recruited as an active staff field operative officer of the Central Apparatus of the Latvian KGB — the main state security services of the USSR, which then included his motherland, Latvia.

Given the special military rank of lieutenant, he began scouting for secret informants from inside police ranks and fighting corruption in the highest echelons of society including judges, police brass, politicians and businessmen. He was also tasked with clandestine operative work against organised crime bosses.

The cloak-and-dagger man shapeshifted under a number of assumed identities, using passports, KGB and police identity cards under false names and living in the shadows.

In the summer of 1989, with feelings that the Cold War was finally beginning to thaw across Eastern Europe, Karpichkov was transferred into another branch of the Latvian KGB, working for the Second Department. His role was to train and instruct insiders to infiltrate American intelligence — particularly the main enemy, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

What Karpichkov didn’t know at the time, was that one day, he too would feed them intel.

One of his espionage targets, Karpichkov says in documents obtained by the Herald, was John Sipher — an undercover CIA officer operating in the region at the time.

“Sipher was one of the prime subjects of such spy-game field operations which I operated, and was someone whom I directly targeted at that time,” says Karpichkov.

The Herald tracked down Sipher. Now living in the Washington DC area, he retired from the agency in 2014 after a distinguished 28-year career.

Sipher doesn’t recall the name Karpichkov. When told that he had been directly mentioned as a top target in the early 1990s, he found it “kinda creepy and odd”. He was eager to know more.

“It sounds real or plausible to me,” says Sipher. “It was a time when the Russians were running lots of spy games against us.

"The Soviet Union was starting to fall apart and we had a lot of what we called Russian walk-ins or volunteers, and some came from the Baltic areas. The Russian services sometimes sent people in to see if we’ll believe they are real and accept them and run them as double-agents or something. It’s a game that intelligence services play. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that is what [Karpichkov] is talking about.”

Karpichkov quickly rose through the ranks and by 1991, with Latvia regaining independence, he had become its spy-ring leader for Russia, feeding intel back to Moscow, and spreading disinformation against top political figures of the new Latvian state who had been backed into power by the Americans.

Top-secret documents were hidden inside suitcases and sneaked across the border to the yellow-brick heart of darkness Lubyanka Building in inner Moscow, the fabled KGB headquarters built where Catherine the Great had based her secret police.

Karpichkov set up a commercial information security business as “cover of a respectable entrepreneur” and used it to personally infiltrate some of the most notorious Russian organised crime circles in the country.

Death threats from underworld thugs were routine. And his job got messier.

Around 1993, his superiors, now the FSB (Federal Security Service) of Russia, ordered him to carry out a hit. The targets: an ex-Latvian KGB officer and one of his secret informants. They were considered treasonous and had threatened to expose Karpichkov as a Russian spy. The FSB handlers suggested using some sort of “immaculate working substance” which he took to mean a sophisticated poison.

Karpichkov refused.

“I told my bosses that I would resolve the problem of my potential exposure as their spy in Latvia in a peaceful manner, without killing anyone and without damaging my position as their top spy in there,” he says.

His bosses were unimpressed. They warned that if he was exposed, he would face being “liquidated” himself. Karpichkov took the threats seriously.

He continued working undercover and although he was told his work was frequently reported directly to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, he was becoming disenchanted with the FSB and what he thought they stood for. He started questioning his work and just what Russia was doing in his homeland.

“My beliefs as to the reality and values of the ‘democratic’ changes in Russia were mistaken,” Karpichkov says, looking back.

With Russia bombing Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, in early 1995, he couldn’t go on. He told his FSB spymasters he was quitting.

After they tried to talk him round, and failed, the apparatus’ sights zeroed in on him.

In April 1995, Karpichkov was arrested in Riga for possession of a firearm. After seven days inside a maximum-security prison, and two intense interrogations, he was released. It was a warning.

Soon afterwards, Latvian Security Police (LSP) officers came with an offer. They wanted dirt on links between crime figures and corrupt state officials and politicians. Knowing that the FSB had orchestrated his arrest, he agreed.

Now, Karpichkov was a double agent. He uncovered intelligence that implicated a number of senior politicians in corruption and bribery, including a former prime minister. He also tipped French intelligence off to a liquor smuggling ring.

His work didn’t go unnoticed.

In June 1996, he was in serious trouble. He was arrested again — this time on allegations that he had embezzled hundreds of thousands from collapsed Latvian commercial bank, Olympia.

Later, he spent two months inside the infamous Moscow maximum-security prison, Matrosskaya Tishina, or Sailor’s Silence, without charge. None of his family knew where he was.

He simply vanished.

He feared for his life — and for his wife and two sons. They had to flee and thought Australia or New Zealand would be safe options, away from the deadly reach of revenge squads.

For the next two years, Karpichkov played a high-stakes game of cat and mouse. Feeling deceived and betrayed, he funnelled intelligence linking Russian organised crime and its security services to the West, including, he says, the CIA, meeting their agents in secret rendezvous across Europe, in exchange for witness protection assurances.

Finally, in May 1998, with risks escalating, Karpichkov made a run for it.

With his wife on a forged Latvian passport, they sneaked out by bus, abandoning almost everything they owned.

Britain seemed the easiest place to reach without detection, and through a Lithuanian tour company, they made it by ferry to Stockholm, before travelling to Gothenburg, and finally, another ferry to Harwich — the English port that the Mayflower’s captain left for the New World in 1620.

Karpichkov had finally made it in from the cold. At least, that’s what he hoped.

It was a nervy trans-global flight. Although Karpichkov had gone to extreme lengths to create a convincing operative legend, posing as a London-based academic and expert in the field of studying Russian organised crime activities worldwide, he still suspected trouble at the border.

The forged Republic of Lithuania passport looked real enough. It had cost him £2200 from a Russian crook. The photo was him but the identity wasn’t: Vladimir Abramov. He never did find out who the real Abramov was.

Ready with a faked invitation from a renowned Auckland professor in criminology — a real person with whom he had never corresponded — Karpichkov sailed through New Zealand immigration. Nobody looked twice at his papers. In fact, border security even helped carry his heavy suitcase, filled with hundreds of documents relating to his KGB secrets, to the taxi rank.

He had made it. It was June 18, 2006.

For the previous eight years, Karpichkov had been living in Britain and making a nuisance of himself. Instead of lying low, he had made a series of public leaks to Latvian media that exposed organised Russian crime and their inter-connections with financial and business elites along with corrupt state officials.

Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5, Karpichkov says, advised that he needed to go: they couldn’t assure his safety.

The day after he arrived in New Zealand, he walked into a lawyer’s downtown Auckland office and began his bid for political asylum. He had unsuccessfully sought refuge in the UK and batted away Latvia’s first extradition request. He hoped that New Zealand would be more welcoming.

Karpichkov had, however, not flown in under the radar The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS) knew they had an ex-Russian KGB agent in their midst.

Kiwi espionage bosses probably got a heads-up from Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, believes former NZSIS intelligence officer Dr Rhys Ball, who left the spook world in 2001.

“You would expect your counterparts to let you know that someone might be heading your way, just as a courtesy call, but also to give you an assessment of the potential risk or threat that they may pose, or whether they were being protected by those agencies,” he says.

Within a fortnight of landing in Auckland, Karpichkov surrendered his passport to immigration authorities and revealed it was fake. Two months later, however, it was returned to him — complete with a six-month work permit stuck inside. It was under the alias, Vladimir Abramov.

Bemused, but glad to be making progress, he moved from a noisy flat above a nightclub to Cambridge Apartments on Anzac Ave and concentrated on his asylum application. He was receiving a state benefit but was only just scraping by and took a few jobs: a print business near Eden Park and yoghurt factory gatekeeper but nothing permanent.

It was a quiet, isolated life. He avoided crowds, bars and restaurants, and had no friends. He missed his family and emailed home daily. Advised by his lawyer that it would help his case, he handed immigration officials a nine-page dossier on “corrupted diplomatic personnel” inside the New Zealand Embassy in Moscow, alleging that New Zealand entry visas were being issued in exchange for cash bribes.

On the morning of November 20, 2006, after his now ritualistic daily internet cafe visit, the most stunning aspect of Karpichkov’s remarkable story is said to have happened.

Wandering Auckland’s bustling Queen St, stopping to gaze in occasional shop windows and check if he was still being tailed, Karpichkov says he was suddenly attacked by a beggar. He had noticed that he was being watched earlier in the day, by men both on foot and in cars, something that he had recently become aware of, but he didn’t know what was happening now. The vagrant was trying for Karpichkov’s bag, which contained his laptop computer. They struggled. The ex-spy was kicked before his attacker shaped as if to punch his face. But instead of being struck, there was “some kind of dust-like substance coming out of his hand towards my face”.

The beggar, unable to grab the bag, gave up and walked away calmly.

Karpichkov staggered on. He believes he saw one man who had been following him that morning. After walking 50m-200m, he suddenly felt dizzy and almost lost consciousness.

“The earth started spinning around under my feet very quickly, as if I was heavily drunk, and vertigo developed,” he says.

Sweating, he sat and tried to compose himself. His upper body was sore. Around 20 minutes later, shaken and dazed, Karpichkov managed to walk home. He typed a letter to his lawyer describing the attack but that night went downhill again. Cold, feverish, shivering, acute upset stomach.

“I recall I felt myself completely squeezed and empty from inside,” he says.

The symptoms persisted for the next few days before his gut stabilised. Karpichkov was more concerned about the strange men watching his every move. His lawyer warned him off making a report of assault to New Zealand Police, fearing it could affect his political asylum claim.

But a strange red rash soon spread across his chest. The dizzy spells returned. He started rapidly losing weight — between 25kg-30kg over the next two months. His body hair was falling out. Karpichkov was growing increasingly concerned, and although a GP visit that week offered no explanations, other than the doctor suggesting a “typical stomach flu” and not ordering any blood tests, the old spy started to suspect he had been poisoned.

Three days after the Queen St incident, former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, who defected to the West, died in hospital in England. His cup of tea had been poisoned with the incredibly rare and untraceable radioactive compound polonium-210 by two Russian agents during a clandestine meeting at the Pine Bar of the upmarket Millennium Hotel in the heart of London’s Mayfair on November 1, 2006 — nearly three weeks before Karpichkov says he was attacked.

On his deathbed, Litvinenko, who worked with MI6 and Spanish intelligence to probe Russian mafia links in Spain, publicly accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering his hit.

Karpichkov’s asylum application was rejected on December 20, 2006. He immediately appealed the decision. He started getting online death threats about him “quietly dying” and over the Christmas holidays was sure he spotted a former Latvian KGB colleague standing at a ticket kiosk near Auckland Harbour.

His paranoia was peaking. The human surveillance squad continued to stalk his everyday movements. Then, there was what he calls the “second alleged poisoning attempt on my life”, with the strange crystals on his apartment’s carpet that left him feeling like he was “deep-frying from inside”.

On March 16, 2007, Karpichkov couldn’t take any more. He walked into Auckland City Hospital and was seen by a clinician in the department of emergency medicine. He complained of chest and groin pains, weight loss, a metallic taste in his mouth, hair loss, and fevers.

“No obvious cause for the pain found,” says the clinician’s signed notes, obtained by the Herald.

A later medical investigation at St Mary Hospital in London — the same unit where Litvinenko was initially treated — concluded that Karpichkov might have suffered “potential toxic exposure in November 2006 and March 2007” but found no evidence of ongoing toxicological effects or symptoms.

In the September 2020 Westminster Magistrates Court ruling in his second extradition case, the presiding judge mentioned his poisoning claims and concluded: “I accept that the evidence that he was poisoned is not strong but remains a possibility that sits in the background of this case.”

Former intelligence officers spoken to by the Herald all took a similar view: while it all sounds highly-improbable, that a foreign superpower staged a poison attack on New Zealand soil, it could have been possible.

“It’s absolutely in the realm of possibility,” says Dr Paul G. Buchanan, a former intelligence analyst who worked for the CIA in Latin America.

“He had a lot of secrets, information about a lot of people. And given that part of the world had a lot of corruption in the 1990s as people took advantage of the collapse of the Soviet empire, maybe he’s got dirt on people who are now legit?”

Ball says the Litvinenko assassination and attempted hit on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and double agent for British intelligence, and his daughter Yulia in the English cathedral city of Salisbury showed what Russia is capable of.

“If they can do it in the UK, they can do it anywhere,” says Ball, now senior lecturer at Massey University’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies.

“The Russians have this thing of getting these defectors because they need to send a message to other intelligence officers that becoming a traitor is not an option, and if you do it, be prepared for the consequences. It’s signalling to anyone else who might be contemplating working for the British or the Americans or anyone else, no matter how long it takes, or where you are, we’ll get you.”

Karpichkov’s old nemesis Sipher also believes, “as strange as it sounds, it sounds plausible”.

“The Russians do come after people, as we know,” Sipher says. “It’s a way for the leadership and Putin, who grew up in the KGB, to send a signal to anybody who works for the security services, that if you are a traitor, they will find you and kill you at some point. You’re never safe.”

Rouben Azizian, director of Massey University’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies, served in the Soviet Union and Russia’s foreign ministry for more than 20 years before leaving in the early 1990s.

Karpichkov’s claims of knowledge linking organised crime to the FSB, and therefore the business activities of Russia’s oligarchs, would be more dangerous than revealing secrets about the intelligence service’s inner-workings and activities, Azizian says.
And if he was in the business of identifying and sharing details about those figures, that would be a “very scary, risky job” and could well result in him being targeted.

“These guys not only have the wealth and money to subsidise assassinations, they also know how to do that. They can do these kinds of things anywhere.”

The watchers were back. Mysterious men parked down the street. Karpichkov took notes and photographs.

A silver Mazda 6. Around the corner on Short St, another Mazda 6, different rego. Down by the High Court library, a Mitsubishi Lancer and BMW.

In all, there were more than a dozen vehicles that the veteran Latvian agent recorded as following him. A search of number plates via public records added to the mystery. They were all registered to people who were either not on the electoral roll or in the phone book, and which led to physical addresses that didn’t exist, or Post Office boxes — often the same PO boxes.

Men in suits walked behind him, at a distance. But not far enough away not to be noticed. Karpichkov, a spy to his bones, sneered at their “clumsy, amateur” surveillance attempts.

But it was grinding him down. He was out of the spy game and just wanted a quiet life. He did not know who the agents were but assumed they were NZSIS.

By winter 2007, he’d had enough. Late morning, July 11, as he returned to Cambridge Apartments and saw a familiar, blue undercover car, he sighed. Karpichkov approached the vehicle and motioned for the watcher wind to down his window.

“Please give me best regards to your shift chief — I am not going to leave my apartment for the rest of the day,” he said, while clicking a photo.

The bold action sparked a furious response. The watcher leapt from the car and lunged at Karpichkov, yelling, “I will smash your f***ing phone against your f***ing head!”

The assault stopped as quick as it had started and the watcher sped off.

Fearing his knowledge of the covert ops was blown, and worried that he could be “gunned down or killed using any other way”, Karpichkov walked to the central Auckland police station and made an assault complaint. He gave the car’s number plate and a description of his assailant: white male, aged 45-55, medium build, about 1.8m.

What happened next is one of the more intriguing aspects of Karpichkov’s tale.

A senior member of the Diplomatic Protection Squad branch of New Zealand Police was assigned to investigate what looked like, on the face of it, a standard common assault.

At first, the police officer tried to play down the assault, Karpichkov says. But in a later telephone conversation, which the ex-KGB agent secretly recorded, the detective said his assailant had been identified and was apologetic for losing his temper.

“He is not with the SIS but he was with a surveillance group,” the police officer reveals during the taped conversation, adding that Karpichkov was not the target. Just who was the intended mark was unclear.

The man was a police officer and would be disciplined internally. Police said they didn’t know who was tailing Karpichkov but said maybe it was the SIS.

A Herald request under the Official Information Act (OIA) to New Zealand Police this year for any information on file relating to Karpichkov was withheld on two grounds: privacy and maintenance of the law, including the prevention, investigation, and detection of offences.

“Police considers the interests requiring protection by withholding the information are not outweighed by any public interest in release of the information,” says the OIA response.

The NZSIS similarly does not usually comment on individuals, citing security reasons. But after a separate Herald OIA request, they confirmed some aspects of the Karpichkov case.

Through former Director-General of Security, Dr Warren Tucker, they confirmed that the NZSIS knew Karpichkov was in New Zealand in 2008 and that they had been “aware of his background as a KGB officer”.

But they also denied having him under surveillance.

New Zealand’s other intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) gave a classic spy’s response by saying they can “neither confirm nor deny” whether they held any information about Karpichkov.

“To do so would be likely to prejudice the interest protected by section 6(a) of the OIA, namely the security or defence of New Zealand or the international relations of the Government of New Zealand,” they told the Herald.

Ball says NZSIS, or “The Service” as he calls it, isn’t the only agency in New Zealand with surveillance capabilities.

He suspects that Karpichkov could have unwittingly stumbled across an ongoing police surveillance job.

“Any trained intelligence officer is surveillance sensitive and their sets of skills are never forgotten and become second nature. And so you’ve got a former Soviet intelligence officer who has obviously been playing a number of sides over the years . . . who is obviously paranoid [and] going to see things as well.”

There was a short lull after the street altercation but then the surveillance teams resurfaced. If anything, it became more intense, Karpichkov says. A black Mercedes van with dark-tinted windows sat outside his apartment block.

“I became extremely concerned and alarmed by this vehicle, as I did not know what should and can I expect next,” he says.

“From my own previous KGB special training and my personal experience, I was well-aware that foot surveillance is always used, along with other purposes, when there is an unofficial order — sanction — someone to be taken out of circulation, to be exterminated, killed extra-judicially and when murder would be made looking like some natural incident.”

Frustrated that New Zealand didn’t appear to want to protect him, and instead of feeling safe from Russia on the other side of the world, while missing his family back in London, his health declining, he decided again that he had no choice but to return to Britain.

Using the same forged Lithuanian passport, under the alias Vladimir Abramov, Karpichkov booked an Air New Zealand flight to Hong Kong. His final destination was Heathrow.

Again, there were no issues at the border. As quietly and mysteriously as he slipped into the country, he had slipped out. He was gone.

The death threats never stopped. “Traitors like you have no place on earth. Death is on the way. You are already a half-corpse,” said the latest sinister letter, in January this year.

Sealed in a bubble-wrap envelope, it was addressed to Vadim Petrovich Kravchenko — a false name Karpichkov operated under for the Latvian KGB in the early 1990s. Only his ex-spymasters would know that name. The sender’s address was a local graveyard.

He became ill soon after opening it. The package was passed to a counter-terrorist police unit that Karpichkov says identified traces of mercury — a heavy metal highly-toxic to humans.

The Herald also tracked down Karpichkov.

The 63-year-old espionage old hand is now living with his wife in a two-bedroom London flat and still fearing for his life. He believes it’s only a matter of time. The extradition judgement which ruled in his favour also concluded that he is a “threat to the Russian intelligence services”. The judge found “evidence to support Mr Karpichkov’s claims he has dangerous enemies in Russia who would wish for his silence” and that the death threats should be considered credible and serious.

“I really feel myself as ‘dead man walking’,” he tells the Herald via email. He refuses to use phones. “Like the convict sentenced to wait sitting on a death row who expects to be executed every single day and, particularly, night — the time when I am exceptionally vulnerable and unable absolutely to protect myself with my bare hands.”

Karpichkov feels let down by the British authorities, who have failed to protect him and other Russian dissidents, defectors, and critics.

The UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) put his life at greater risk when they revealed in 2018 during Latvia’s unsuccessful extradition proceedings his British alias and address.

And then he doesn’t help himself by speaking out against Putin and, most recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In January as Russian troops started to mobilise, Karpichkov told the Sun newspaper that the Western powers wouldn’t step in.

“The West has no balls to withstand Putin,” he said.

Former KGB major Yuri Shvets, a former colleague of murdered defector Litvenenko, puts the risk of Karpichkov being assassinated — even after all these years — as “high with probability of risk as very likely”.

“I believe the Russians badly want to silence him, and it appears this might be more important for them than it was to silence Litvinenko or Skripal,” Shvets said during Karpichkov’s extradition hearing.

“The Russians never tried to get Litvinenko or Skripal extradited, while in Mr Karpichkov [sic] case they have done two failed attempts. For me, this is a clear indication that the Russians want to silence Mr Karpichkov at least as much as they wanted to silence Litvinenko and/or Skripal.”

Karpichkov hasn’t given up hope on one day returning to New Zealand. During his 15-month stay, although isolating and eventful, he found Kiwis polite, compassionate and “generally more human”. He would like to live here.

He still, however, takes issue with 2018 comments by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and then Foreign Minister Winston Peters that he had failed to provide any evidence of his Queen St poisoning.

In the meantime, he will continue to make the world aware that Russian security services are trying to kill him. If they ever do, Karpichkov says it will result in Putin paying a high political cost.

“I am just now trying to survive, to stay alive as much [as] it would be possible. I live in constant fear thinking every day will be my last,” he says.

“I am an ordinary old bloke who just wants to live his life as much as I am given by God and be treated and respected as normal human being, and that is only my wish.”