I fled Russia after exposing Putin’s murder machine & UK spy ring plotted to gas & behead me…nowhere in Europe is safe

HE’S the man who uncovered Putin’s murder machine – a team of deadly assassins whose only job was to eliminate opponents of the Russian regime.

But in the process of tracking down Alexei Navalny’s killers, identifying the agents behind the Salisbury poisonings and exposing the regime's assassins, investigative journalist Christo Grozev humiliated Vladimir Putin – making himself public enemy number one.

He has helped whistleblowers and chemical weapons experts flee Russia to safety, and has uncovered around 300 agents and has the names of another 5,000 spies.

But as a result, he too has found himself on Putin’s kill list and has had to go into hiding, unable to see his family.

Even while on the run, Christo was pursued by a ruthless Bulgarian spy ring who plotted to behead him and gas his family – and were jailed in the UK earlier this month.

And he now fears his dad's recent death in Austria could have been the work of assassins.

As Christo's son Christian says: “My dad has managed to make one of the most dangerous men on the planet very angry.”;

Two years ago, a film he helped to make about Navalny’s poisoning won a Bafta and an Oscar.

Now his own extraordinary life is the subject of a Channel 4 documentary,Kill List: Hunted by Putin’s Spies, after Bulgarian agents based in the UK were discovered plotting to abduct and kill him.

And Christo himself says he feels a mixture of pride and guilt. “At different times of the day and year I feel different,”; he explains.

“Sometimes I take pride in being able to create such a problem for such a formidable enemy of the free world, and it is kind of obvious that it has given inspiration to other journalists to do the same.

“I feel proud at times. And at times I feel very guilty because of the burden I have imposed on my family, and having to live without them and separate from them.

“Unbeknown to me having brought the Russian danger very close to the family and only finding out about it later. It is a mixed blessing.”;

Originally a businessman who managed radio stations, Christo took the leap into investigative journalism in 2014.

He explains: “I had lived in Russia in the 90s and early 2000s and had lived in Ukraine.

“And then Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and started a very particular type of disinformation campaign around the world not only on Ukraine but targeting the West.

“And I recognised some of the methods they used from my childhood in Communist Bulgaria, I was exposed to exactly that type of Soviet propaganda that my parents learnt to detect and avoid.

“And I thought wow, 20 or 30 years later they are using the same tricks of confusion, sowing multiple narratives to make people tired of seeking the truth.”;

He started to blog about it and then looked into the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, collaborating with newsgroup Bellingcat.

“It wasn’t that I started with a goal to investigate Russian malign operations, it was just something that I became gradually an expert in and obviously you pursue what you know,”; explains Christo.

He uncovered the identity of professional assassin Vadim Karsikov who has since been sentenced to life in prison.

He also helped to identify spies Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, who nearly killed Russian Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury in 2018, putting thousands of British lives at risk.

Christo then turned his attention to the poisoning of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and politician and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has joint Russian and British citizenship.

Kara-Murza had lobbied for sanctions against Putin’s inner circle and Christo’s investigations revealed he was very much on the dictator’s kill list.

And Christo discovered Kara-Murza had been targeted for poisoning not once, but twice.

He explains: “Following the Navalny investigation we had an abundance of residual data because the team of poisoners they had travelled many hundreds of times over the last 10 years.

“And only about 15% of those trips could be correlated to places where Navalny had been so the question was where else had they been? Who else had they targeted?

“And in trying to reconstruct and find overlaps with well-known Russian opposition figures we found Vladimir Kara-Murza. Before the first and before the second poisoning.

“And members of the kill team had been near him literally the day before he fell into a coma both times.”;

Kara-Murza’s wife Evgenia says: “It gave us answers that we’ve been desperately looking for. They identified a team of assassins in the service of the Russian State that had followed my husband continuously throughout years.

“It is sinister to realise that there is a team of assassins whose only job is to physically eliminate the opponents of the Russian Government, a team of assassins in the service of the Russian state in the 21^st century, yeah, it is sinister is not even the word.”;

On the run

But in January 2023, Christo discovered that he too was on the hit list.

Whilst in New York he got a message from the security services saying there was an imminent and direct threat on his life if he were to return to Europe.

With Christo still in hiding abroad he was devastated when his dad died suddenly back in Austria – leaving him to suspect foul play by the Russians or that his dad died due to the stress of Christo’s work.

“I think the time will come for me to want to look into this more deeply but for now it is still something that is very hard for me to even fathom, that it might have been connected with the Russian operation,”; Christo says sadly.

“I had put that thought behind me for a while. And then as part of the evidence that was shown to me by the Met police, I was shown a photograph of some of these Russian spies in front of my father’s apartment months before he died.

“They were pointing to the balcony through which one could enter and putting an arrow to that. Then of course all of these emotions came back and the uncertainty of what happened to him.

“I feel guilt for his death either way – whether or not the Russians had something to do with it directly or indirectly because the fact that I was forced to be away from Austria and he suddenly stopped responding to phone calls.

“Even if that was a natural death I could have saved him if I was there, so in a way me being forced to flee is always something that could have contributed.”;

Then over time as the impact became clear, and many people were imprisoned based on my investigations and cold cases were reopened I think my children started appreciating more and more what I did and tried to help me in investigations as well.

Christo Grozev

With the clock ticking and the hunter becoming the hunted, Christo Grozev found himself in the unenviable position of investigating his own assassination plot.

The authorities warned Christo not to get involved – but he could not resist.

He says: “When the law enforcement agency told me I shouldn’t go back to Europe they didn’t volunteer information about where the risk comes from.

They hinted strongly that it’s related to my investigations to the work we’ve done at Bellingcat over the years so I had to find out who it might have been.

“Then the British Police arrest five Bulgarians so started looking at the names of the Bulgarians and the leader of the pack, Orlin Roussev who went back through what eight years of investigations and we found him in dozens of messages with another forgotten object of investigation which was Jan Marsalek.”;

Marsalek is one of the most wanted people in Germany because he had mounted the biggest corporate fraud ever in German history.

He was chief operating officer of Wirecard which was one of the biggest publicly traded companies in Germany.

The company went bust because it had invented 1.9 billion euros into its balance sheet that supposedly were never there. And Marsalek vanished.

Christo believed he wanted him dead partly as a favour to the Russian state and partly because Christo’s investigations had outed him for defecting to Russia.

Deadly spy plot

Earlier this month, three members of the Russian spy ring which targeted Christo were convicted.

Katrin Ivanova, 33, Vanya Gaberova, 30, and Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, were found guilty of conspiracy to spy at the Central Criminal Court.

Three further members of the spy ring, Orlin Roussev, 47, Bizer Dzhambazov, 43, and Ivan Stoyanov, 32, previously pleaded guilty to spying offences.

All Bulgarian nationals, they were tasked with following Christo Grozev around the world with the ultimate aim of killing or abducting him.

Shocking messages between the gang were revealed at the trial uncovering horrifying plans to abduct and murder Grozev – potentially by gassing him or beheading him.

The operation spying on Mr Grozev was conducted by Roussev, Dzhambazov, Gaberova, Ivanova and Ivanchev.

They followed Mr Grozev to different countries, including Austria, Montenegro and Spain and created a number of reports for their Russian clients which set out his movements and provided information about his accommodation, his vehicle and his contacts.

It appears that the group also considered a potential ‘honeytrap’ plot, using Gaberova to target him.

Christo says seeing the messages between the gang made him feel the threat was real for the very first time.

“It made me realise this is not a film, this is not an out of body experience that I have been going through,”; he says. “It was the first time I realised how close I was to death and how close my family was to being hurt in the process.

“And the crazy fantasies of the spy group fuelled by their handlers of how exactly to kill me, and the emojis and the smilies that they put at the end of fantasising how I would be decapitated in the street by a suicide bomber who would then blow themselves up.

“My blood was curdling. I was really shocked mostly because of the callousness of these spies towards my family.

“How they planned to infuse my apartment with a sleeping gas and put my family into a deep sleep while they would break in to steal my devices. It is an incredibly cruel description and I felt horrified to read it.”;

And even though the gang are behind bars, Christo says he still lives by looking over his shoulder.

“Fear is not the right word, but caution for sure. I know for a fact that the reason Putin sent these people after me was because of the humiliation that he experienced especially after our Navalny investigation.

“And now he has been humiliated again because these people ultimately failed, they were all imprisoned and were shown to the world with hundreds and thousands of undeleted messages.

“All of this is another humiliation, which if anything is going to motivate the Kremlin to go after me even harder. I know that for a fact – it will be a different team, a different group, but I will always have to look behind my shoulder.”;

The personal cost to Christo and his family is immense. But he still manages to find humour within it.

“When it started my children were quite dismissive of my new hobby, they thought it was my midlife crisis,”; he laughs.

“They would joke around the dinner table, better this than buying a Ferrari or running away with somebody.

“Then over time as the impact became clear, and many people were imprisoned based on my investigations and cold cases were reopened I think my children started appreciating more and more what I did and tried to help me in investigations as well.

“But it was never an easy ride because the initial reaction when all the risk became known was ‘We told you so.’ But my children are very proud and appreciative.”

But despite the impact on his freedom, Christo has vowed to continue and is proud his work disabling thousands of Russian spies has forced law enforcement agencies to adopt some of his methods.

“We discovered and laid bare the algorithm they used to hide people”; he explains.

“So they can no longer be deployed overseas. We’ve named hundreds of them but we know there are thousands that have been identified, so that is one thing I take pride in.

“The other thing is the awareness that this is possible to find out. It has caused dozens of colleagues, journalists to do the same.

“But it has also made Western law enforcement and intelligence agencies adopt some of these open-source methods and be guilted into action whereas before they thought all of these spies were untouchable and undiscoverable.

“I want to help stop this virus of Oligarch-supported totalitarian regimes which are spreading around the world. I think by humiliating them, by embarrassing them, by showing that they are vulnerable is one way to make it less likely that we have copycats around the world.”;

And despite the risk to himself and his family, Christo says he is in too deep now to consider giving up his crusade.

“I have had this thought a great many times and I have concluded that it won’t help much, it won’t decrease the risk because this regime does not forgive and forget.

“If I stop doing it then it will be less of a service to the public and they will still go after me. On balance I don’t think I should stop.”;

Kill List: Hunted by Putin’s Spies is on Channel 4, Thursday 27th March. The feature documentary version, Antidote, is also playing in select cinemas.