For decades, Brazil remained on the periphery of global intelligence rivalries. Its documents rarely aroused suspicion, bureaucratic loopholes made it possible to forge legal identities from scratch, and the country’s lack of direct conflict with the West made it an ideal launchpad. Russian undercover agents used Brazil as a quiet transit hub—they weren’t spying on Brazil; they were becoming Brazilians. But after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the rise in international scrutiny, that landscape changed. A joint operation by the intelligence services of Brazil, the United States, and several European countries uncovered a scheme that had long gone unnoticed: in Latin America, Moscow was assembling biographies that could withstand any background check—and using them to insert "sleeper agents" into Western countries.
How Russia Turned Brazil into a Legal Incubator for Deep-Cover Operatives
For years, Russian intelligence treated Latin America—Brazil in particular—not as a target, but as a staging ground. An investigation by The New York Times, based on court documents and interviews with intelligence officials from multiple countries, reveals how Moscow built a logistics pipeline to assemble credible backstories for its illegals—agents able to quietly infiltrate the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.
The method was both simple and sophisticated: Russian intelligence operatives arrived in Brazil, took jobs, registered companies, enrolled in universities, and led low-profile lives for years. Over time, they acquired a full suite of legal documents—from birth certificates to passports and driver’s licenses. Then, having fully "become" Brazilian on paper, they vanished from Brazil—only to reappear on the other side of the world as seemingly native-born citizens of Rio or Salvador. That’s when their real work began: undercover, but armed with a backstory capable of surviving any consular interview or border screening.
"The Russians turned Brazil into an assembly line for deeply embedded operatives," writes The New York Times. "Their goal wasn’t to spy on Brazil—it was to become Brazilian."
After 2022, Brazil Shifts from Tolerance to Exposure—with Help from Western Allies
Prior to 2022, Brazil took no active measures against the presence of Russian illegals. Warm diplomatic ties, the absence of direct threats to national security, and the discreet behavior of the agents themselves fostered a quiet tolerance. But the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine changed that dynamic.
As The New York Times notes, the invasion placed Russian operatives under scrutiny even in countries where they had operated for years with little resistance. Backed by intelligence services from the U.S., Israel, the Netherlands, and other Western allies, Brazil’s counterintelligence launched a broad operation to dismantle what investigators now refer to as a "pipeline of operatives."
Brazil’s Federal Police.
The first major breakthrough came with the arrest of Sergey Cherkasov, who had been living under the alias Victor Muller Ferreira. Cherkasov spent several years in Brazil before attempting to secure an internship at the International Criminal Court in The Hague—a strategically important target for Russia. However, Dutch authorities denied him entry and deported him back to Brazil, where he was detained and charged with document fraud.
Curiously, Cherkasov’s documents were technically authentic: his passport, ID card, and driver’s license were all issued based on a legitimate birth certificate. The problem lay elsewhere—neither the man nor his backstory actually existed.
Russia avoided the standard tradecraft of recycling old, defunct identities. Instead, it exploited loopholes in Brazilian law. In remote regions of the country, births can be registered without the involvement of medical institutions—two witnesses are enough to obtain an official certificate. On this flimsy foundation, entire alternative identities were constructed, complete with fully legal documentation.
Legal Documents from Nothing: How Fake Biographies Were Built from Scratch
Cherkasov proved to be the key to understanding the entire operation. His alias—Victor Muller Ferreira—was based on a legally issued birth certificate in the name of a child whose mother, according to official records, had died when the boy was four. But upon closer inspection, investigators discovered that the woman had never had children. A bureaucratic loophole—the ability to register a birth without confirmation from a medical institution—had become the foundation of an intelligence operation.
Following Cherkasov’s arrest, Brazilian investigators began a painstaking search for other illegals. They manually cross-referenced decentralized databases of passport and birth certificate issuances, looking for anomalies: citizens who vanished for decades after their birth dates, only to "reappear" later with a full set of documents. That’s how they identified their next suspect—Gerhard Daniel Camnos Wittich.
The Story of an Operative Who Lived Under a False Name for Six Years—Then Vanished Days Before Arrest
For six years, Wittich lived in Rio de Janeiro, ran a printing business, and maintained an active social life—without raising suspicion. In reality, his name was Artem Shmyrev, and he was a Russian undercover operative. According to Brazilian documents, he was born in Rio in 1986, but his biography was a total blank until 2015. That, investigators say, was the first red flag.
Wittich explained his fluent Portuguese, spoken with a slight accent, by saying he had grown up in Austria. His print shop had steady clients, including the country’s largest media conglomerate, TV Globo. He lived in a luxury apartment, owned a pedigreed Maine Coon cat, had a girlfriend, and a wide circle of friends. He would periodically vanish on supposed business trips to Europe and Asia, joking that he was "into industrial espionage." Friends recall that he was always slightly "detached"—avoiding photos, disabling internet access on his computer, and spending more than his business appeared to earn. Yet none of this seemed alarming at the time.
Escape, Farewell, and a Broken Cover—What Shmyrev Left Behind
Brazilian authorities failed to arrest Artem Shmyrev—he left the country just days before investigators planned to detain him. To friends and colleagues, he said he was traveling to Malaysia on business. He never returned. Later, according to those close to him, he called his girlfriend to say a brief goodbye. "You’re going to hear a lot of things about me," he told her. "But you should know—I never did anything truly bad. I never killed anyone—or anything like that."
A search of his apartment gave investigators partial access to his correspondence. It revealed that Shmyrev had a wife—also Russian—who was operating undercover in Greece. In his messages, he confessed to feeling professionally stagnant after years in Brazil: "No real accomplishments. I haven’t been where I’m supposed to be for two years," he wrote.
Vladimir Putin (second from left) during his KGB service in Dresden, East Germany. Photo from the late 1980s.
The Assembly Line Exposed: How Intelligence Services Tracked Other Agents—and What Happened to the Arrested
The operation to dismantle the scheme became one of the largest counterintelligence efforts in Brazil’s recent history. With support from Western partners, authorities identified nine operatives who had built cover identities using falsified Brazilian biographies. However, only two of them—Sergey Cherkasov and Mikhail Mikushin—were actually taken into custody.
Mikushin, a Russian academic working in Norway on hybrid threats, was handed over to Moscow as part of a spy swap in August 2024, in exchange for Western political prisoners. Cherkasov, by contrast, remains in a Brazilian prison. In 2022, he was sentenced to 15 years for document fraud; the sentence was later reduced to five.
Russia attempted to repatriate Cherkasov—the Prosecutor General’s Office filed an extradition request, claiming he was wanted for heroin smuggling. But the request was denied. Independent investigations by Bellingcat and The Insider revealed that the charges were fabricated, serving only as a pretext to bring the agent back home.
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