He Called Himself "Colonel Yuri." His Business Was Murder for Hire.
The DOJ Just Unsealed Moscow's Assassination Network
Somewhere outside Moscow this week, a 63-year-old man who goes by "Colonel Yuri" is finding out the U.S. government knows his name, his son's rank, and his sales pitch. The Justice Department unsealed an indictment describing a Russian intelligence-run network that spent the better part of two years trying to recruit ordinary people in the U.S. and Europe — a Venezuelan in the New York area, an American in Vilnius — to surveil and kill Kremlin critics living abroad. Nobody died. Not because the network didn't try, and not because it ever stopped asking.
The indictment lays out what prosecutors call the "RIS Network" — RIS for Russia's intelligence services — run in part by Yuri Khrameev, a retired colonel who's told recruits he once worked alongside Vladimir Putin, and his son Kirill, an active FSB officer. Their pitch was almost bureaucratic in its coldness: a few hundred dollars to photograph a dissident's house, tens of thousands to make the problem disappear. One U.S.-based recruit was offered $1,000 to $1,500 just to surveil a target the network believed was living stateside, then $40,000 to "eliminate" him — and when he balked at doing it himself, they asked if he knew "someone who can do the work." A separate recruit in Lithuania was told a target needed to die because he was "spreading dirt about my country," with suggested methods ranging from a thrown bottle of gasoline to a knife.
"These defendants allegedly operated as part of a global assassination network that reached into the United States, attempting to recruit U.S. citizens and foreigners to carry out killings at the behest of the Kremlin."
— John A. Eisenberg, Assistant AG for National Security, September 2026What strikes me reading this isn't the violence — it's the patience and the outsourcing. This wasn't a hit squad flown in on false passports. It was a recruitment funnel, built the way a call center is built: cutouts in Cuba and Venezuela doing the talking, a retired colonel doing the closing, and American or European nobodies doing the dirty work for a few thousand dollars because the money beat anything else on offer. That's tradecraft optimized for deniability, not speed. If the recruit says no, Moscow loses nothing. If he says yes, the Kremlin's fingerprints never touch the trigger.
It's also a rare, real-time look at how a foreign intelligence service actually runs a covert action program on U.S. soil — usually this kind of thing surfaces years later, in a defector's memoir or a declassified cable. Here it's happening inside an active federal indictment, with FBI field offices in New York and Washington coordinating a multi-year disruption. The message from DOJ and the FBI is blunt: transnational repression — states hunting their own dissidents on foreign soil — isn't a theoretical policy topic anymore. It's showing up in court filings with dollar amounts attached.
Key Takeaways
- The DOJ unsealed charges against five alleged members of a Russian intelligence-run "RIS Network" accused of financing terrorism and conspiring to commit murder for hire in the U.S. and Europe.
- The network allegedly recruited a U.S.-based Venezuelan citizen to surveil a Russian dissident, offering $1,000–$1,500 for surveillance and $40,000 to "eliminate" him.
- A separate recruit in Lithuania was offered $25,000 to kill a Russian expatriate, then a smaller sum to burn an electrical substation or warehouse instead after he refused.
- All five defendants remain at large in Russia; the case marks one of the first known U.S. indictments for an attempted Russian-intelligence-directed assassination on American soil.
The Blake MacKay Connection
Blake MacKay has spent three books untangling operations built exactly like this one — layers of cutouts and intermediaries designed so the person pulling the trigger never has to know whose orders he's really following. The RIS Network's cash offers and secondhand instructions are the same machinery MacKay spends every book tracing back to the man giving the orders. Start the series free with Intercept and see how far that chain really goes.
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