The story of Dmitri Senin, a former high-ranking officer in the Russian secret services, seems to be torn from a spy thriller with macabre undertones. Accused of desertion and corruption by the system he served for 18 years, Senin revealed for the first time how he managed to cross the Russian border in 2022, resorting to an escape method as ingenious as it is repulsive: he hid in the decaying carcass of a cow.
Dmitri Senin does not consider himself a traitor or a defector in the classic sense of the term. In his view, he is the victim of a system that “no longer works in the interest of the state, but for the interests of influential individuals.” A former colonel in the Federal Security Service (FSB), Senin claims that he was “worked over” by his own colleagues after he coordinated a raid in which a record sum of 90 million pounds sterling was confiscated from a corrupt police officer, writes The Sun.
Escape through the “animal cemetery”
After years spent in hiding right in the heart of Moscow – where he disguised himself as a person with disabilities to watch his children from a distance – Senin realized that the Kremlin’s “liquidators” were on his trail. The plan for his second escape, devised in September 2022, was of brutal complexity.
Assisted by a network of traffickers, the former spy was transported to the border with Kazakhstan. In order to deceive the vigilant thermovision cameras of the Russian border guards, Senin was wrapped in aluminum foil, equipped with a gas mask and a rubber suit, and inserted into the interior of a dead cow. The animal’s carcass, carried by a tractor, was thrown into a ravine at the border, used by locals as a common pit for deceased animals.
“I only needed to be thrown over the border,” Senin told The Telegraph. Once he landed on Kazakh soil, he freed himself from the animal’s carcass and managed to reach Montenegro, where he sought political asylum.
Years of hiding in the wolf’s den
A fascinating aspect of his story is the decision to hide in Russia after the first escape attempt in 2017. Pursued by Egisto Ott, a famous Austrian double agent working for Moscow, Senin realized that the only place he would not be searched for was right under his pursuers’ noses.
“I used FSB logic against them”, explains the former officer. For several years, he lived undercover in Moscow, communicating with his family through letters left in dead drop locations, just like in the Cold War spy movies. All this time, Moscow was convicting him in absentia to nine years in prison for desertion and bribery.
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