The men were part of a mission. But the target was not Belarus and they were not under the orders of any Russian entity.
They were being installed. The 32, along with another man detained in southern Belarus, were the target of elaborate intelligence by Ukraine, with the knowledge and alleged support of the United States.
Three former senior Ukrainian military intelligence officials described exclusively to CNN how they orchestrated the extraordinary operation aimed at luring alleged Russian war criminals to face trials for atrocities committed in eastern Ukraine, where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting for years.
First, Ukrainian agents posed as a Russian private military company, recruiting for security jobs that paid above the current rate, offering a lucrative contract of $ 5,000 a month to protect Venezuelan oil facilities, according to CNN men, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not allowed to talk about the sensitive operation.
This bait has been taken by hundreds of future Russian contractors who applied for work, sources said, giving Ukrainian intelligence an unprecedented opportunity to begin identifying and crawling suspects in war crimes.
“We started calling them and saying,‘ Hey, man, okay, tell me something about you. Maybe you’re not really a fighter, maybe you’re a plumber or something, ”one of CNN’s former military intelligence officers said of the verification calls to applicants.
“And then they started revealing things about themselves, sending us documents, military IDs and evidence of where they had fought. And we are, like ‘bingo, we can use it,'” the source added.
In other words, according to intelligence officers, the same targets began to send evidence of who they were, their military experience, and even the particular battles and incidents in which they had been involved, including ID cards, and potentially incriminating photos and videos of his exploits in eastern Ukraine and elsewhere.
A video, shared with CNN by former military intelligence sources, captures a group of rebel fighters in eastern Ukraine containing the wreckage of a military plane that sources said had just been shot down, a crime designated as terrorism in Ukraine.
“There were two who were present when the missile that shot down MH17 was launched. Four more were members of a group responsible for carrying out our military aircraft and killing at least 70 of our best men,” he told CNN. a second source of Ukrainian military information. .
“Identifying and punishing these people was of great interest to us,” he added.
Apparently he was also interested in American intelligence, although U.S. officials deny having a direct role. According to Ukrainian intelligence officials, the operation led by Ukraine obtained US cash, technical assistance and CIA advice on how to attract Russian mercenaries.
A senior U.S. official told CNN that these claims are “false.”
He indicated that American intelligence was aware of the operation, but denied their involvement. The official, who requested anonymity because he was not allowed to speak publicly, suggested that efforts to implicate U.S. agencies could be an attempt to share, or even pass the blame on, a high-risk Ukrainian operation that went wrong.
CNN spent weeks in Ukraine, checking and reviewing the accounts of the operation and talking to the men who were inside.
Pretending to be a private military company made sense: Kremlin-linked military contractors have become a familiar aspect of life for Russian veterans.
With the recruitment trap of their website undetected, Ukrainian intelligence officials simply picked those men with the closest and most controversial links to Ukraine and offered them fake Venezuelan contracts, sources said.
They chose 28 Russians allegedly related to illegal acts in Ukraine and five more without connections to dispel any suspicion, they said.
The Russians were told they would go to Turkey for a flight connection with Caracas. The real plan was to take them to Ukraine, where they could be arrested, sources told CNN.
The coronavirus pandemic threw an unexpected key to the plan when Russia closed its borders to stop the spread of Covid-19.
However, Moscow continued to allow travel to its neighbor and ally Belarus. According to Ukrainian sources, the involuntary recruits were transported by land to Minsk by bus, from where they thought they would soon leave for Venezuela.
But once in Minsk there was a delay. The recruits were told that it would be a few days before they could leave and they were taken to the Belorusochka sanatorium, a discreet Soviet-era health center located in a quiet reservoir 15 minutes from the capital, where, according to sources, s ‘hoped he could go undetected.
A corpulent spa mercenary who promises “comfort and convenience” amid the “absence of city nuisance and daily worries” seemed incongruous, if not suspicious, a staff member recalled.
“Yeah, I remember, I met them,” a security guard told CNN last month. “They spent a couple of days here. They did nothing to upset us,” he said, adding that the arrests were a surprise. “People come here because there’s a good reservoir on the other side of the sanatorium,” he said.
The delay was long enough for Belarusian security services to act, just hours before the group left, according to CNN sources.
At the time, some suspected Russian involvement. In dramatic scenes, broadcast on Belarusian state television, the arrested men were paraded on screen and their identification documents were shown as proof of their Russian military background.
“We confirmed the information that these Russians had real experience in combat and that they actually participated in armed conflicts,” an anonymously disguised Belarusian police commander revealed on state television.
A former presidential adviser in Belarus told CNN on condition of anonymity that Belarusian authorities believed the group had been sent to Belarus by the Russians to destabilize the country before the next elections.
He told CNN that there was confusion in Minsk over what appeared to be the aggression of his Russian allies.
The Kremlin also appeared trapped, and its spokesman told Russian media that “they did not have complete information” about the incident. The Kremlin later denied that they had sent men to interfere in Belarus’ internal affairs.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was also involved and called for the extradition of the men to Ukraine during a telephone conversation with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko a few days after the arrests.
One week after that call, Russia announced the return of the 32 arrested Russians to the sanatorium. The 33-year-old man, who was a dual national of Belarus and Russia, remained in Belarus.
Ukrainian President Zelensky has publicly denied there was a Ukrainian operation and told Ukrainian television in June 2021 that his country had been “dragged” by the issue.
“I understand that the idea of this operation was that of, say, other countries, definitely not Ukraine,” he said.
Ukrainian officials did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on the story.
But, according to Ukrainian sources on CNN, the failure dealt a severe blow to Ukrainian intelligence, which they said had been working on hooking Russian suspects for nearly 18 months.
“If these people had ended up here in Ukraine, the details of their criminal acts would have been known around the world,” one of the sources told CNN.
“Ukraine could have brought them to justice and shown that our struggle with Russia is serious and that we will not raise our hands in surrender,” the source added.
CNN’s Matthew Chance reported from Kiev and Zahra Ullah from Minsk. Katharina Krebs contributed from Kiev.