Overview
- The Justice Department unsealed an indictment on Tuesday, Sept. 15 charging five people with conspiracy to finance terrorism and additional murder-for-hire counts for three defendants in an operation U.S. officials say worked for Russian intelligence.
- The indictment names Yuri Khrameev, his son Kirill Khrameev, Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, Yaidel Delgado Suarez and Angel Eduardo Castro and says all five remain at large while federal and international investigations continue.
- Authorities say the FBI disrupted a summer plot to kill a prominent Russian dissident believed to be in Washington after recruits in Brooklyn were paid to surveil the target and offered roughly $40,000 to carry out the killing, which the recruit refused.
- Court filings quote coded messaging and specific tradecraft — calling murder “construction,” instructing surveillance steps and to put phones in airplane mode — and allege earlier plots or attempts in Prague and Lithuania tied to the same network.
- Prosecutors frame the case as part of a post-2022 expansion of Russian covert activity beyond dissidents to attacks on infrastructure and foreign actors, a development that could complicate extradition, evidence-sharing and diplomatic responses.