The teenager who was traded for one of Putin’s hitmen
Kevin Lik was forced to confess to treason, beaten up in jail, and freed in Moscow’s prisoner swap with the West. The BBC speaks with Russia’s youngest ‘traitor’.
By Sergei Goryashko.
Sitting with his toothbrush and toothpaste in his hands, Kevin Lik had by now been waiting for six hours in the gloomy administration office of a penal colony in Russia’s far north. It was a Sunday; but unlike any other Sunday he had spent in the prison so far. He had no idea what was about to happen.
"Why don’t you say where you’re taking me?” he asked the head of the colony. “Maybe you’re taking me to be shot!"
"Don’t worry, everything will be fine.”
It was the exact same phrase he had heard from a secret police officer when he was locked up on charges of spying for Berlin a year and a half earlier, in February 2023. He had been 17 years old at the time. There was no media coverage, no campaigns for his release – it was all kept under wraps by the authorities.
By the time he was 18, in December last year, ‘Citizen L.’ was pronounced guilty and sentenced to four years behind bars - the youngest traitor in Russian history.
“My classmates stuck a label on my back saying ‘fascist’”
Eight months after the verdict, on July 28th, Kevin was freed in the largest ever prisoner swap between Russia and the West. Kevin has dual German and Russian citizenship and was exchanged for Vadim Krasikov, a 59-year-old professional killer, convicted of murdering a Kremlin opponent in Berlin five years ago.
We’re talking via video link. Kevin sits in front of a tablet and struggles a bit to connect his Bluetooth headphones: "I’m not sure about the settings - I just haven’t used them in a while."
He is back in Germany but doesn’t want to say exactly where. His concern is understandable: on the flight to Ankara, where the swap happened, an FSB officer turned to the passengers leaving Russia and said: “Don’t get too carried away over there: Krasikov might come back for you.”
Kevin’s Russian mother, Viktoria, used to speak to the media, but has now gone silent. As I talk with Kevin, she sometimes interrupts the call – to ask for his help with something, or bring him a glass of water, or open the window.
Kevin is nearly two metres tall but weighs a mere 70 kilos: "I lost a lot of weight in the colony. I could have got tuberculosis, too, and not made it out alive." The disease is rife in Russia’s prisons.
He talks shyly, and doesn’t use swear words, but his speech is peppered with prison slang. But he becomes more animated when showing the prize certificate for winning a German language competition – and when he plays a video of FSB agents searching his home.
I ask if he thinks of himself as more Russian or more German: "It's a very complicated question.”
Kevin Lik was born in Montabaur, a small town in Western Germany, in 2005. His mother, Viktoria, had married a naturalised ethnic German from Russia, and although the marriage lasted just 10 months, she chose not to go back.
Every few years, she and Kevin flew to her home town of Maykop in the North Caucasus to visit relatives. In June 2017, when her son was 12, Viktoria decided to return for good. Kevin barely knew a word of Russian, but his mother bought a textbook just before they left.
They settled on the outskirts of the town, in a flat with views of the mountains - and of the big local military base. Kevin explored the unfamiliar countryside and gathered plants for a herbarium. He loved reading and most of his pocket money went on books. A tutor helped Kevin learn to write in Russian, and on September 1st the boy stood in line for his first day of term at a new school.
At the start, Kevin was bullied. “My classmates stuck a label on my back saying ‘fascist’,” he says, because he was German. “I didn’t understand what nationality had to do with politics.”
Moving from Montabaur to Maykop had not been much of a shock for the 12-year-old. What took him by surprise was how people behaved.
"What struck me the most was the lack of politeness towards each other. If you needed help with something, everyone just turned away."
He showed himself to be an outstanding student, however, winning school events in linguistics, biology, and history. Kevin took first prize in a national German language competition and gave the two-thousand Euro award to his mother, because “it was the manly thing to do.”
She was eventually to use the money to pay a lawyer for Kevin. When the boy was imprisoned, not one of his school friends wrote him a single line.
"During Stalin’s time, I would have been shot"
The 2018 presidential election, when he was still only 12, was when Kevin became interested in Russian politics. His mother worked in the public healthcare sector.
“She would come home and say that they had been bussed to the polling stations and told: ‘Vote for Putin, or we’ll take away your bonus.’"
It began to anger Kevin that almost every classroom in his school sported a portrait of Putin.
“They constantly told us that school is not the place for politics. It’s just not right to hang portraits and promote a personality cult like that," he says. A couple of years later, Kevin decided to swap Putin’s portrait for a print-out photo of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
It caused a furore: "One teacher said that during Stalin’s time I would have been shot," Kevin recalls. Another teacher said he agreed with Kevin but advised him to be more careful.
His mother was called to the school and reprimanded. Kevin thought little of it at the time, but the security services began to monitor him. His class teacher was to testify against him in court, and said that during a trip to a school contest in Moscow, Kevin had asked to visit the German embassy to contact the intelligence services. In fact, Kevin says, he had asked his teacher to go with him so that he could pick up a German identity card because he had just turned 16.
The school in Maykop has not responded to the BBC’s request for comment.
Pizza - and no handcuffs
As Kevin’s final year in school approached, Viktoria decided they should go back to Germany. She was worried about his plans to study in Moscow. By then, Russia was at war in Ukraine, and like other young men, Kevin was registered at the draft office: if he was to leave the country, his name had to be removed from the list of potential conscripts.
She went to the recruitment centre to show that she had two plane tickets to Frankfurt via Istanbul, but her request was turned down. But she was suddenly called back to discuss Kevin’s documents. When she arrived, she was met by the police, charged with using foul language in public, and summoned to court the next day.
Kevin was at school when he got a text message saying his mother had been detained for 10 days. They were not leaving for Germany, and the plane tickets were lost.
(Levelling spurious civil charges while a criminal case is hurriedly worked up is a standard FSB tactic.)
At the detention centre, Kevin was allowed to see his mother just once, for an hour only. They hugged beneath the lens of a surveillance camera.
At home alone, Kevin stopped going to school and didn’t go out much. One day, he left the flat for a few hours to find things had seemed to have been tampered with in his absence. His mother decided to get new locks fitted when she was released – just in case.
(During his FSB interrogation later, Kevin recalls, the officer asked “Why did you change those locks?”)
They tried once more to leave for Germany, this time via the nearby town of Sochi, which has an international airport. On the train from Maykop, Kevin remembers another passenger asking where they were going, and why. After they checked into a hotel, they went out for something to eat: a man wearing a medical mask took a phone out of the pocket of his hoodie and started filming them.
Seconds later, a minibus screeched up to them: "Eight or nine FSB officers jumped out. One grabbed me by the arm, by the shoulder. Another came up, showed his ID, and said: ‘Lik, Kevin Viktorovich: a criminal case has been opened against you under Article 275 - treason.’"
“My eyes were wide with shock!” Kevin continues. “My mum didn't understand a thing that was going on. She said, 'But I have served my 10 days. What happened?' To begin with, she thought it was to do with her,” he recalls.
They drove back towards Maykop, picked up another FSB officer, switched to a car without licence plates, and went to a pizzeria.
“They ordered pizza and offered us a slice. They didn’t handcuff me or restrain me in any way,” Kevin says. “I sat there thinking everything over in my head and couldn’t understand how I had committed treason."
He remembered Vadim Krasikov, the FSB hitman who had been jailed in Germany for murder. Russia wanted him back. “Don’t worry, we just need to wait a bit longer,” he reassured his mother. “I’ll probably be exchanged. They need me as a hostage.”
He asked if he was going to be put in jail, but the secret policemen said: “Don’t worry, everything will be fine."
"It’s a chess game - it was clear that there would be no justice"
The FSB released this video of Kevin Lik’s being read charges during his arrest on Feb 23rd, 2023, the search of the flat where he lived in Maykop, and the view from his window of the local military base. The video has no sound. ©FSB
By the time they got to Maykop it was the middle of the night. The FSB officers filmed themselves searching the flat. They rummaged through Kevin’s textbooks and toys, and found an old telescope without lenses—a birthday present from his mother. When it was in working order, he had looked at the stars with it. The secret policemen suspected it had been used to take the photos of the military base outside his window they had found on his phone and laptop – images they decided he had sent to German intelligence.
The top regional FSB investigator, Colonel Denis Dagayev, showed up. Kevin recalls that the man acted strangely and smelled of booze – it was February 23rd, the old Red Army holiday. He was later to give an interview about his agency’s discovery of a traitor to state television.
Kevin admitted to taking pictures of army vehicles from his window, but said he had no intention whatsoever of passing them on to anyone. He had shown a few to classmates; and he now wonders if one of them tipped off the FSB.
At three in the morning, Kevin was driven to the FSB headquarters in town for interrogation. He was only 17 - still a minor - so his mother was allowed to go with him.
The lawyer assigned to him, Alla Fomina, was a woman in her 50s with short cropped blonde hair. She urged him to confess immediately, so as to keep the sentence to a minimum – six or seven years, rather than 10. “You’ll be able to get a girlfriend through the prison letters system,” Fomina told him.
Contacted by the BBC, Fomina, a mother of two children, would not comment.
A confession had already been typed up for Kevin to sign. An FSB officer, Major Savoshchenko, threatened to seize their apartment, and reminded his mother that she had already spent ten days in detention. Hoping to shorten the sentence, Kevin agreed to sign the paperwork admitting treason.
"Later, I deeply regretted stating my guilt. The testimony was absolute nonsense," he says. "It’s a chess game - it was clear that there would be no justice."
They put Kevin in solitary confinement in the city of Krasnodar, 80 miles away. He had been up all night, but could not go to sleep.
"They brought me food, but I couldn’t eat it. I had no appetite. I was just in shock. I didn’t understand what would happen next. I really wanted to see my mum."
He was to spend two months alone in the cell.
"I won’t survive if I don’t accept the situation"
After two months in solitary, when he turned 18, Kevin was transferred to another detention facility in the town, and placed in a cell with adults. They set about beating him up.
"They tied my hands, beat me, and even put out a cigarette on me. They hit me so hard in the chest that I couldn’t breathe."
Kevin doesn’t know if the beating was ordered by someone but remembers that one of the inmates said he "knew everything" about his case, even though it was officially classified. Recalling that ‘the code of the prison’ means complaining to the wardens was unacceptable for a ‘decent’ inmate, he kept quiet about the assault. A few other prisoners stood up for him, and it was not repeated. His mother feared, however, that her son, who had severe myopia from childhood, could have lost his eyesight.
Both in detention and in the prison camp, military recruiters paid visits to sign up inmates for the war in Ukraine. Many agreed. Kevin, sentenced for treason, was not eligible, and says he would not have joined the army even if he could.
Viktoria was allowed to see her son twice a month for roughly two hours a time.
"Son, it’s not the physically strong who survive, but those strong in spirit,” he recalls his mother saying. “You must survive, I need you," she kept telling Kevin.
"Mummy, if they tell you that I hanged myself, don’t believe it! It would mean I was probably murdered," he told her more than once.
"I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t survive if I didn’t accept my situation,” says Kevin, quoting Fyodor Dostoevsky, who after his own incarceration had written that a human can adapt to anything.
Kevin was detained for eight months before the trial started. At the hearing, it emerged that the FSB had documented his trips to Russia as a young child, even when he had been a two-year-old toddler. They had been listening in to Kevin’s phone calls for two years before his arrest.
During the trial, Kevin tried to use Putin’s own words in his defence. When the journalist Ivan Safronov was charged with treason, the Russian president had stated: “A person who uses information available in the public domain cannot be prosecuted for stealing it and passing it on to anyone. This is nonsense.”
In his case, however, Safronov was sentenced in 2022 to 22 years in a maximum security jail.
“You might say the judges don’t even respect the words of Putin,” says Kevin. He himself was handed a four-year sentence along with a travel ban that was later rescinded on appeal.
“After the trial, the prosecutor came up to my mum and said: ‘You have a very good son, but less than four years under this article is just not possible.’”
Kevin was transferred from southern Russia to Arkhangelsk, just outside the polar circle. The journey took a month. “It was relatively quick,” he says, but the hardest part was not being able to talk to his mother.
"I thought they were taking me to a punishment cell"
Kevin shared a dormitory with dozens of other men at his new penal colony. He spent his time reading and writing letters – now that his case had been made public, he received thousands of letters of support from strangers.
He was on his way out of the bathhouse on Tuesday, July 23rd, when a prison officer intercepted him and said he had to write an urgent petition to be pardoned. Kevin realised there was already someone waiting at the jail for the letter.
Five days later, as he left the dining hall, another officer stopped him: “He said, ‘We’re going to your unit. Get your toothbrush, toothpaste, and slippers.’” Kevin relates. “Usually, you get this kit when they’re about to put you in the punishment cell, so that’s where I thought they were taking me.”
Instead, he was locked in the prison colony’s admin office. Six hours later, at 01:00, a convoy arrived from Arkhangelsk to take him away. Nobody said what was happening. But the deputy head of the colony hinted: “Don’t you suspect?”
When they arrived in the city of Arkhangelsk, he was met by local Federal Penitentiary Service officers. One of them tore the badge with personal information off Kevin’s prison clothes.
"And he also stole my spoon,” says Kevin. “I don’t know why. Maybe as a souvenir. He said, ‘You’ll buy new things; you don’t need these.’”
Kevin asked to keep his prison jacket and cap. He was still wearing them when he got to Germany, waiting for his mother to arrive from Russia with his normal clothes. The prison gear is now in a plastic bag at home in Germany.
"It'll probably go to the Memorial Museum - we’ll sell it, and use the money to help political prisoners,” Kevin says.
The Russian government aircraft carrying Kevin and 15 other political prisoners landed in Ankara on the afternoon of Thursday, August 1st.
"We had mixed feelings on board the plane. There were still FSB officers there, the exchange wasn’t yet complete, and the officers were armed.”
President Putin hugs Vadim Krasikov, jailed in Germany for 2019 murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former Chechen rebel fighter granted asylum by Berlin in 2016. The German authorities identified Krasikov as a senior commander of a Russian FSB special forces unit. ©Associated Press/Russian pool)
As Kevin had suspected, the killer Vadim Krasikov was part of the other end of the swap. Along with the other prisoners from Russia, apart from the US nationals, Kevin was transferred directly onto another flight, this time bound for Germany. On arrival, they were all taken to hospital for medical examinations.
Kevin was discharged on Sunday, August 4th. The next day, he waited at the airport for his mother’s flight from Russia to touch down. He was holding a bouquet for her.
"She cried and didn’t even notice the flowers at first. I told her everything was fine, not to worry, and that I loved her very much.”
Kevin is keen to go back into education. “All the school offices are on vacation right now. I called them up to register, but they’re still closed.”
Not all Russians support Putin, or the war in Ukraine, he says: “There are quite a few who are against it, but they are frightened to say so publicly. They might even be in the majority.”
"One Russian political prisoner said he had a very strong need for revenge,” he continues. “I don't have any desire for revenge, but I do have a very strong desire to participate in opposition activism."
I asked Kevin, who is now 19, what he missed most of all while he was in jail: "Being able to hug my mum, of course."
Read the full story in Russian here.
English version edited by Chris Booth.
This story was also published by BBC News.
