LONDON (AP) — On October 14, a Russian engineer named Gleb Karakulov boarded a flight from Kazakhstan to Turkey with his wife and daughter. He switched off his phone to shut out the crescendo of urgent, enraged messages, said goodbye to his life in Russia and tried to calm his fast-beating heart.
But this was no ordinary Russian defector. Karakulov was an officer in President Vladimir Putin’s secretive elite personal security service — one of the few Russians to flee and go public who have rank, as well as knowledge of intimate details of Putin’s life and potentially classified information.
Karakulov, who was responsible for secure communications, said moral opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and his fear of dying there drove him to speak out, despite the risks to himself and his family. He said he hoped to inspire other Russians to speak out also.
“Our President has become a war criminal,” he said. “It is time to end this war and stop being silent.”
Karakulov’s account generally conforms with others that paint the Russian president as a once charismatic but increasingly isolated leader, who doesn’t use a cell phone or the Internet and insists on access to Russian state television wherever he goes. He also offered new details about how Putin’s paranoia appears to have deepened since his decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022. Putin now prefers to avoid airplanes and travel on a special armored train, he said, and he ordered a bunker at the Russian embassy in Kazakhstan outfitted with a secure communications line in October — the first time Karakulov had ever fielded such a request.
Along with information on Putin, Karakulov’s testimony offers an intimate view of one man’s decision to defect — without telling his own mother, who he said remains a strong Putin supporter. It raises critical questions about how deep the Russian public’s acceptance of the war runs, and how Putin’s opponents in the West and beyond might leverage any silent opposition.
While not speaking directly about his case, an official with a security background from a NATO country said a defection like Karakulov’s “has a very great level of interest.” He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive political matters.
“That would be seen as a very serious blow to the president himself because he is extremely keen on his security, and his security is compromised,” he said. “That’s something that he would be very unhappy about — particularly if the compromise is to do with communications, upon which a great deal relies.”
PUTIN IS “SIMPLY AFRAID”
As an engineer in a field unit of the presidential communications department of the Federal Protective Service, or FSO, Karakulov was responsible for setting up secure communications for the Russian president and prime minister wherever they went. While he was not a confidant of Putin’s, Karakulov spent years in his service, observing him from unusually close quarters from 2009 through late 2022.
Karakulov, his wife and his child have gone underground, and it was impossible to speak with them directly due to security constraints.
The Dossier Center, a London-based investigative group funded by Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky, interviewed Karakulov multiple times and shared video and transcripts of more than six hours of those interviews with The Associated Press, as well as the Danish Broadcasting Corporation DR, Swedish Television SVT, and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK. The Dossier Center confirmed the authenticity of Karakulov’s passport and FSO work identity card, and cross-checked details of his biography against Russian government records, leaked personal data and social media postings.
The Associated Press reviewed the materials from the Dossier Center and independently confirmed Karakulov’s identity with three sources in the U.S. and Europe, who were not authorized to speak publicly. AP…
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