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Brazilian authorities have dismantled a sophisticated Russian intelligence operation that used Brazil as an assembly line for creating deep-cover operatives with authentic Brazilian identities, according to a New York Times investigation by reporters Jane Bradley and Michael Schwirtz.
The Brazilian Federal Police uncovered at least nine Russian officers operating under Brazilian cover identities over the past three years through an operation codenamed "Operation East." Six of these operatives had never been publicly identified until now.
The investigation began in April 2022, just months after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) alerted Brazilian authorities about a Russian military intelligence officer attempting to infiltrate the International Criminal Court in The Hague using a Brazilian passport.
The officer, traveling as Victor Muller Ferreira with legitimate Brazilian documents, was actually Sergey Cherkasov. Dutch authorities denied him entry and he was sent back to Brazil, where police arrested him on document fraud charges.
"There was no link between him and great Mother Russia," an anonymous Federal Police investigator told The Times, noting that Cherkasov possessed authentic Brazilian documents including a passport, voter registration, and military service certificate.
The breakthrough came when investigators discovered that Victor Muller Ferreira had never existed, despite having a genuine birth certificate. The document listed a Brazilian mother who had died in 1993 but whose family confirmed she never had children.
This discovery prompted Brazilian agents to search for what they called "ghosts"—people with legitimate birth certificates who appeared suddenly as adults, rapidly collecting identity documents without any prior record of being in Brazil.
The investigation revealed Russian operatives had spent years building credible Brazilian identities before deploying to other countries for espionage operations. The Times investigation found:
Recovered text messages between Shmyrev and his wife, also a Russian spy operating in Greece, revealed the personal toll of deep-cover work. In 2021 exchanges, Shmyrev expressed frustration with his assignment.
"No one wants to feel loser. That is why I continue working and hoping," he wrote in imperfect English.
His wife responded unsympathetically: "If you wanted a normal family life, well you have made a fundamentally wrong choice."
Most of the identified spies fled Brazil between late 2022 and early 2023 as investigators closed in. Shmyrev left the country in December 2022, just days before police planned to arrest him, leaving behind $12,000 in cash and electronic devices.
The last known contact he had with Brazil was a phone call to his girlfriend. According to his friend Felipe Martinez, Shmyrev said: "You're going to hear things about me, but you need to know that I never did anything that bad. Like I never killed anyone or something like that. My past caught up with me."
The investigation involved intelligence services from at least eight countries, including the United States, Israel, the Netherlands, and Uruguay. Brazilian authorities issued Interpol blue notices for the suspected spies, effectively ending their careers as foreign operatives.
"We just put our heads together and thought, 'What's worse than being arrested as a spy?' It's being exposed as a spy," a senior Brazilian investigator told The Times.
Of all the identified operatives, only Sergey Cherkasov remains imprisoned in Brazil, serving a reduced five-year sentence for document fraud. Russia attempted to secure his release by claiming he was a wanted drug dealer, but Brazilian prosecutors argued this required keeping him imprisoned longer for investigation.
The operation dealt a significant blow to Russia's illegal program, eliminating highly trained officers who will be difficult to replace and marking a shift in Brazil's historically friendly relations with Russia.
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