On August 23, 2019, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent who had sought asylum in Germany, was killed in the center of Berlin. Police arrested a Russian man within hours. He carried a passport in the name Vadim Sokolov, and for the whole of his trial he insisted that this was who he was. More than two years later, on December 15, 2021, the Berlin Kammergericht convicted him of murder under that name, sentenced him to life imprisonment and found that his guilt was of particular gravity. The court rejected the identity he gave. It found that "Vadim Sokolov" was a cover story prepared by the Russian state, that the man in the dock was Vadim Krasikov, and that he had received his order to kill from a state body within the government of the Russian Federation.
The finding made the case far larger than a single murder trial. Germany expelled Russian diplomats twice over it, once while the investigation was still running and again on the day of the verdict, and the German Foreign Minister called the killing a grave violation of German law and of German sovereignty. Moscow denied any part in it throughout. Neither side appealed, and the judgment became final within two weeks. On August 1, 2024, Germany ended enforcement of the sentence and handed Krasikov to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange, and on his arrival in Moscow the Kremlin confirmed that he was an officer of the Federal Security Service, the FSB.
Vadim Nikolayevich Krasikov was born on August 10, 1965, in Kenes-Tobe, in the far south of what was then Soviet Kazakhstan. His family moved to Buryatia, in eastern Siberia, during the 1980s, and he later lived in the city of Irkutsk. In 2009 he settled in the Moscow region, where he lived until he traveled west in the summer of 2019. He had no criminal convictions anywhere before the Berlin case.
That was not the same as an untroubled record. In January 2014 Russian police placed Krasikov on the federal wanted list in connection with the killing of a businessman in Moscow in 2013, and the Moscow office of Interpol circulated a warrant abroad. On June 26, 2015, the federal warrant was terminated, and the Interpol notice was withdrawn the same year. In September 2015, three months after the warrant was lifted, a man named Vadim Andreyevich Sokolov, said to have been born on August 20, 1970, received his first Russian domestic passport. That identity later acquired a tax number, in July 2019, and a Schengen visa, the same month. Investigators in Germany would conclude that Sokolov and Krasikov were the same person.
In the trial, the federal prosecutors described Krasikov as an officer of the FSB, and the court found that he belonged to the Russian state security apparatus. The Kremlin denied that for almost five years. On August 2, 2024, its spokesman said that Krasikov had served in the FSB's Alpha special forces unit, alongside men who later joined the president's security detail.
The victim was a Georgian citizen of Chechen ethnicity who was known to many people by a second, Georgian name, Tornike. During the Second Chechen War he spent several years leading a militia against Russian forces, beginning in 2001. Russia regarded him as a terrorist.
He survived an earlier attempt on his life in Georgia. He then moved to Ukraine and, in 2016, to Germany, where he applied for asylum. The German authorities refused the application, and an appeal against the refusal failed in 2018. When the Kammergericht came to deliver its verdict, the presiding judge said from the bench that the asylum decision had later proved to be obviously wrong. The court also found no evidence that he had been politically active in Germany or had pursued any extremist aims there. He had been inactive as a fighter for years, and the court concluded that the only motive left for the order to kill him was revenge.
The victim died in Berlin on a Friday in late August 2019. The man who later stood trial had come to Germany on the Sokolov passport and a Schengen visa issued in the same name. Berlin police arrested him the same day, and he was held in pretrial detention from then until the end of his trial. He said nothing to investigators.
The first months of the inquiry belonged to the Berlin state prosecutors. Two requests for legal assistance went from Berlin to Moscow, and the German Justice Ministry later said that neither had received a substantive answer. The passport the suspect carried attracted attention quickly, because its number pointed toward a series linked to the Russian security services, and by the fall a joint team of investigative reporters was working to establish who the man in custody really was.
On December 3, 2019, that team published its conclusion that "Vadim Sokolov" was Vadim Krasikov, the man Russia had placed on its wanted lists in 2014. The match rested on the warrant photographs and on the paper trail of the Sokolov identity, which appeared to have been created after the warrant was lifted. The next day the investigation passed to Germany's federal prosecutors.
The Federal Prosecutor General took the case on December 4, 2019. A spokesman said its political nature had become clear, and the office stated that there was sufficient factual evidence that the killing had been ordered either by agencies of the Russian central government or by authorities of the Chechen Republic, part of the Russian Federation. The same day the Foreign Office declared two employees of the Russian Embassy in Berlin persona non grata under Article 9 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The government said that, despite repeated and persistent requests at a high level, the Russian authorities had not cooperated sufficiently in the investigation.
Moscow called the expulsions groundless and unfriendly, and the Kremlin spokesman said that any suggestion of Russian involvement was totally baseless. Russia then expelled two German diplomats. The Kremlin said Russia had sent several extradition requests for him to Germany before his death.
The Federal Prosecutor General filed an indictment for murder with the Kammergericht on June 18, 2020. It accused the defendant of having been commissioned, more than a month before the killing, by state bodies of the central government of the Russian Federation. The prosecutors cited the victim's long opposition to the Russian state, to the governments of the Russian republics of Chechnya and Ingushetia, and to the Georgian government, and they left open whether the defendant had acted for money or shared the motive of those who gave the order. The charge alleged murder by treachery and from base motives, either of which, under German law, turns a killing into murder and carries a mandatory life sentence.
The Russian ambassador, summoned to the Foreign Office, called the accusations unfounded and untenable and said Russia would respond to any further sanctions. The German Foreign Minister said the government expressly reserved the right to take further measures in the case.
The trial opened on Wednesday, October 7, 2020, in Berlin, before the 2nd Criminal Senate of the Kammergericht, sitting as a state security senate with five judges and two alternates. Through his lawyer the defendant made a short statement. He said he was Vadim Sokolov, a Russian citizen born in 1970, unmarried and a civil engineer, and he declined to say anything more. The prosecution maintained that he was Vadim Krasikov, then 55.
The court had first scheduled 25 hearing days, through January 2021. The trial ran for fourteen months and 55 hearing days instead. The senate heard 47 witnesses, among them two Russian investigative journalists and a witness who identified the defendant as Krasikov. It heard ten expert witnesses and worked through material from legal assistance requests to about a dozen countries. Russia, the presiding judge said at the end, had given very limited answers.
The prosecution gave its closing argument on December 7, 2021. It asked for life imprisonment and for a finding of particular gravity of guilt, describing the case as a politically motivated killing on a state order that challenged the state's monopoly on the use of force, and describing the defendant as a man who had put himself at the service of a mission. The co-plaintiffs followed the next day. The defense asked for an acquittal on the ground that the court had the wrong man. Krasikov denied any connection to the Russian state or to the FSB.
The senate delivered its judgment on December 15, 2021. It convicted the defendant, recorded as Vadim K., also known as Vadim S., of murder and of an offense under the Weapons Act, sentenced him to life imprisonment, and found the particular gravity of his guilt. It held that the killing was treacherous and committed from base motives.
On the central question the court went beyond the prosecutors' case of 2019 and adopted the case of the indictment. It was convinced that the defendant had received the order to kill "from a state body within the government of the Russian Federation," and it found that the Sokolov identity was a cover story carefully prepared by the Russian state. In the court's words, a political motive lay behind the state liquidation order. The senate rested this on three things: the cover identity supplied at the last minute, the motive, and the statements and conduct of Russian state bodies after the killing. It found that the evidence left no doubt that the defendant had carried out the killing himself, and that it could not have happened without helpers in Berlin who were never identified.
The presiding judge said the central government of the Russian Federation was the author of the crime and described the killing as state terrorism. He noted that Russian law permits the killing of alleged terrorists abroad when the president authorizes it. Because of the finding of particular gravity of guilt, the usual review of a life sentence after 15 years would not apply.
Germany acted within hours. The Foreign Office summoned the Russian ambassador and declared two members of the embassy's diplomatic staff persona non grata. The Foreign Minister said the court had joined the federal prosecutor's conclusion that the crime was committed on the orders of state bodies of the Russian Federation, and that a murder on a state order, as the court had found, was a grave violation of German law and of Germany's sovereignty. She said she had spoken to the Russian foreign minister the day before, that Germany wanted an open and honest exchange with Russia on the basis of international law and mutual respect, and that acts such as this killing placed a heavy burden on that exchange.
The Russian ambassador rejected any Russian involvement, called the verdict biased and politically motivated, and said that the unfriendly act would not go unanswered. The judgment was open to appeal on points of law. On Monday, December 27, 2021, the Kammergericht announced that neither the Federal Prosecutor General nor the defense had challenged it. The conviction and the life sentence were final.
On August 1, 2024, after a written instruction from the Federal Ministry of Justice to the Federal Prosecutor General to refrain from further enforcement of the sentence under Section 456a of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Germany handed Krasikov to Russia in Ankara as part of an exchange of prisoners between Russia and several Western countries.
A murder in Berlin would normally go to a jury chamber of the Berlin Regional Court. This one went to the Kammergericht, Berlin's highest ordinary court, because the Federal Prosecutor General had taken the case on the ground of suspected state involvement, which places a prosecution under federal authority and before a state security senate of a higher regional court. That jurisdiction is why the trial was heard by five professional judges and why the indictment came from the federal prosecutor's office.
German law fixes life imprisonment as the only sentence for murder. A person serving life is ordinarily considered for release on probation after 15 years. A finding of particular gravity of guilt, which the court made here at the prosecution's request, removes that expectation, and both the federal prosecutors and the court described it in those terms.
Section 456a of the Code of Criminal Procedure allows the enforcement authority to refrain from enforcing a sentence when the convicted person is handed over to a foreign government. In a federal state security case that authority is the Federal Prosecutor General, which is why the Justice Ministry's instruction went to that office in August 2024. The Justice Minister said at the time that it was a particularly bitter concession, weighed against the freedom of the 16 people released by Russia and Belarus in the same exchange.
Krasikov never accepted the identity the court gave him. He was tried, convicted and sentenced under the name Vadim Sokolov, recorded in the judgment as Vadim S., and the court found that name to be a cover identity prepared by the Russian state. The Kremlin's statement of August 2, 2024, that he had served in the FSB's Alpha unit was the first official Russian acknowledgment of his service.
The question of who ordered the killing was the most contested part of the case. In December 2019 the federal prosecutors named two possibilities, the Russian central government or the authorities of the Chechen Republic. By June 2020 their indictment named state bodies of the central government, and the court adopted that finding. The court did not identify the individual officials who gave the order or the helpers in Berlin. The Russian government denied the accusation throughout the trial and after it. The head of the Chechen Republic also denied that either the Chechen or the Russian authorities were involved.
The 2013 Moscow killing for which Russian police sought Krasikov in 2014 was never charged in Germany and never tried in Russia. The Russian warrant was terminated in 2015. It remains an accusation by Russian investigators of that time, not a finding of any court. Other killings in Russia that have been publicly connected to his name have never been the subject of any charge against him.
The Russian portrayal of the victim as a terrorist was never tested in a court. The Kammergericht found no evidence that he had been politically active or pursued extremist aims in Germany, and the presiding judge said the refusal of his asylum application had later proved to be obviously wrong.
August 10, 1965: Vadim Krasikov is born in Kenes-Tobe, in the Kazakh SSR.
1980s: His family moves to Buryatia; he later lives in Irkutsk.
2009: He settles in the Moscow region.
2013: A businessman is killed in Moscow; Russian investigators later name Krasikov as a suspect.
January 2014: Russian police place him on the federal wanted list; an Interpol warrant follows.
June 26, 2015: The Russian federal warrant is terminated; the Interpol notice is withdrawn the same year.
September 2015: A first domestic passport is issued in the name Vadim Sokolov.
2016: Zelimkhan Khangoshvili arrives in Germany and applies for asylum.
2018: His appeal against the refusal of asylum fails.
July 2019: The Sokolov identity receives a tax number and a Schengen visa.
August 23, 2019: Khangoshvili is killed in Berlin; Berlin police arrest the man carrying the Sokolov passport the same day.
December 3, 2019: Investigative reporters identify the suspect as Vadim Krasikov.
December 4, 2019: The Federal Prosecutor General takes over the case; Germany expels two Russian diplomats.
December 2019: Russia expels two German diplomats.
June 18, 2020: The Federal Prosecutor General indicts the defendant for murder before the Kammergericht.
October 7, 2020: The trial opens before the 2nd Criminal Senate of the Kammergericht.
December 7, 2021: The prosecution asks for life imprisonment with a finding of particular gravity of guilt.
December 15, 2021: The court convicts him of murder and an offense under the Weapons Act, imposes life imprisonment and finds the particular gravity of his guilt; Germany expels two more Russian diplomats.
December 27, 2021: The Kammergericht announces that no appeal was filed; the judgment is final.
August 1, 2024: Germany ends enforcement of the sentence and hands Krasikov to Russia in Ankara as part of a prisoner exchange.
August 2, 2024: The Kremlin confirms that he served in the FSB.