Former FSB colonel recounts his escape from Russia inside a cow's carcass – The Telegraph
Former FSB Colonel Dmitry Senin, who was convicted in absentia in Russia, gave a high-profile interview to The Telegraph in which he stated that after leaving the country in 2017, he secretly returned and lived in Moscow until the fall of 2022. According to the fugitive, he spent years in disguise, using wheelchairs and crutches and altering his appearance beyond recognition. The most striking part of the story was Senin’s account of a second escape across the border with Kazakhstan inside a dead cow carcass to evade thermal imaging cameras.
The Telegraph reports on this.
To carry out this plan, the former intelligence officer reportedly donned a rubber suit and a gas mask and wrapped himself in foil, after which smugglers used a tractor to haul the carcass—with him inside—into the neutral zone. Senin claims he spent about an hour inside the dead animal before he was able to reach a safe location on Kazakh territory. Journalists from “The Agency” confirmed through databases only the fact of the departure and return of a person with a passport bearing the name used by Senin in 2017.
Dmitry Senin is currently in Montenegro, where local authorities have denied Russia’s request for his extradition. The story of his stay in Russia and his escape remains difficult to fully verify, but it has already generated significant attention in Western media. The former intelligence officer emphasized that he refused to go to the front in exchange for “pardon” from the Russian authorities, as he considers the war that has begun to be unprofessional and senseless.
It was previously reported that Senin left Russia in February 2017 out of fear of arrest in connection with a criminal investigation into his friend and relative, Interior Ministry Colonel Dmitry Zakharchenko. He left the country under the name Timur Kudasov across the Russian-Georgian border on February 23, 2017. Russian media report that after his disappearance, the security services either did not know or pretended not to know about their colleague’s escape abroad three years ago. It was only in December 2020 that operatives of the FSB’s Internal Security Service learned that their compatriot had been using a passport issued under a different name. Six months later, on June 28, 2021, the fugitive’s name was added to the international wanted list, and on September 4, 2022, Senin was detained in Montenegro. The Russian prosecutor’s office filed an extradition request, but Montenegro rejected it because the former FSB colonel had already been granted refugee status.
