The rules have changed’: Has Russia begun to order assassinations on US soil?

 Roman Dobrokhotov had been content enough for his appearance at a conference in Washington DC this week to be publicised, although it was not something he would normally risk in Europe. The dissident Russian journalist was named during a trial in London last year as one of the targets of a Russian spy ring that appeared to have murderous intent.

“Maybe burn him alive on the street, spray him with some super-strong acid, VX, like the North Koreans, or the ricin,” a Russian-hired operative had texted of the plans for Dobrokhotov in Britain.

American soil, though, has traditionally been regarded as something of a safe place for those speaking out against the Kremlin, whether it has been under the red flag of the Soviet Union or the tricolour of Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation. It might be possible for Kremlin agents to get away with deploying poison-tipped umbrellas on people crossing London’s Waterloo Bridge, as was the fate of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978, but risking such colourful assassinations on the Brooklyn Bridge or indeed anywhere on US territory would be a different matter entirely.

If not part of the so-called Moscow rules, the fabled operating guidelines for western and Russian spies, then there was certainly an adjunct, a gentleman’s agreement of sorts, that neither side would kill on each other’s soil. That had been the understanding of many of the other dissidents as they prepared to appear at the Washington Dialogue conference on Russian affairs being held in the high-rise office of the National Endowment for Democracy, a short walk from the White House.

This week the kaleidoscope was shaken. “It looks like starting from today, the rules have changed in America,” Dobrokhotov, 43, said. “We will have to change how we behave there. Nowhere is safe.”

The game changer overshadowing the Washington conference was an announcement on Tuesday that the US Department of Justice was unsealing indictments in absentia against five individuals allegedly working for Russia’s intelligence services who were said to have conspired to “conduct attacks and murders around the world, including in the United States”.

The most eye-catching claim was that of an audacious plot to recruit unnamed US residents to “eliminate” a prominent Russian dissident living in the US capital. Those named as part of the spy network were a serving officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), Kirill Khrameev, 27, and his father, Yuri Khrameev, 63, who is a former FSB colonel, along with two 35-year-old Cubans, Oemis Romagoza Durruthy and Yaidel Delgado Suarez, nicknamed “the Viking”, and a 22-year-old Venezuelan, Angel Eduardo Castro.

The FBI had uncovered encrypted messages – written in Spanish and ineptly shrouded in spy code – commissioning what one of the alleged ring members had described as “gravely serious work”: an offer of $40,000 (£30,000) to surveil and then kill someone in Washington that the Russian state wanted to “disappear”.

There was talk of bringing in assassins from Mexico to carry out the “construction” (the word used by the agents for murder) but they were “delayed” and so a local killer was sought, according to the indictment. The identity of the purported victim was not revealed by the authorities, but among the rumoured potential targets was Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was freed from jail in Siberia and went to the US as part of a swap for Russian intelligence operatives in 2024. He declined to comment on the case when approached by the Guardian.

The almost unprecedented nature of the plot on US soil was unintentionally highlighted in the indictment itself, which listed a series of assassinations carried out by the Russian intelligence services. There was Paul Klebnikov, an American journalist and historian, murdered in Moscow in 2004. Two years later, Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer, was killed in London by two Russian agents who put radioactive material in his tea. In 2018, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer, and his daughter, survived after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in Salisbury in the UK; a local woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after being contaminated. In 2019, a court in Germany found that Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former commander in the second Chechen war, was assassinated in Berlin, on the order of the Russian state. And in 2024 Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, died while in custody after being previously poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok while outside the country.

“More recently, countries throughout Europe have accused Russia of sabotage operations and extrajudicial targeting,” the indictment goes on. “For example, in or about September 2026, a German investigation reportedly linked the GRU’s military intelligence services to a drone attack at the Leipzig/Halle airport in Germany.”

But no such activities on US soil were raised in the paperwork, and for historically rooted reasons.

“I would describe it as an unwritten set of cold-war rules of the road,” said Chris Costa, a former US intelligence chief who is today executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington DC. “The US and Soviet Union conducted aggressive espionage against one another, but there were understood limits, particularly around physically targeting each other’s intelligence personnel and families … If these allegations are proved, directing surveillance and murder on US soil crosses a very different line from traditional espionage.”