Poland has expelled a former Russian spy catcher who defected to the West, accusing him of falsely promising cooperation and sharing evidence of Ukrainian war crimes.
Emran Navruzbekov, who claimed to be a former counterintelligence officer for the FSB, Russia’s main security agency, was deported on Tuesday after Polish authorities determined he lied about his background and reasons for entering the country.
The expulsion of an ostensible Russian dissident who claimed to have valuable information against President Vladimir Putin was a highly unusual step for Poland, one of Moscow’s most ardent critics in the West .
Navruzbekov faced torture, detention and reprisals from his family in his native Dagestan for trying to defect, his wife and lawyer said.
Karina Moskalenko, a prominent Russian human rights lawyer who helped represent Navruzbekov, said: “He is one of the most important witnesses. We don’t have many people from law enforcement agencies, but this person has a lot of information. He took it with him when he fled the country.”
But Polish intelligence services said on their website that Navruzbekov’s story “turned out to be inconsistent and in many places untrue or unverifiable”. It described him as “a man whose intentions and testimony are unreliable and which call into question the reasons for his presence in Poland”.
On May 17, police detained Navruzbekov, who lives in a refugee camp in central Poland. They detained him on suspicion of violating camp regulations and charged him with resisting arrest. He was transferred to a deportation center in Przemysl, on the border with Ukraine.
Navruzbekov’s lawyers argue he has until August to contest his deportation. But authorities then escorted him from the camp in the early hours of Tuesday, took him to Poland’s border with the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, and deported him ahead of an urgent appeal before the European Court of Human Rights.
“He has fallen into Russian hands. There is no way to help him. It is too late,” his wife, Irada Navruzbekova, told the Financial Times. “He works there. I know what’s going on. They must be hitting him, or they would have sent him to fight in Ukraine.”
Navruzbekov first entered Poland via Belarus in 2017. He applied unsuccessfully for asylum but was allowed to remain in the country pending an appeal. But this week he was deported and banned from entering Poland and the Schengen area for 10 years, according to a Polish border guard spokesman.
In December, he made his first public comments in a YouTube interview with Vladimir Osechkin, an exiled activist , since Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, he has helped several Russian soldiers and security service officials defect to Europe.
Navruzbekov told Osechkin that he decided to defect after he was asked to travel to Turkey and spy on opposition militants and exiles from the North Caucasus, a war-torn, mostly Muslim region, including his own. Home Dagestan and neighboring Chechnya.
He said the FSB carried out “controlled terror attacks” and extrajudicial killings in the area and fabricated evidence against locals, some of whom were tortured for refusing to be informants.
He claimed that his relatives had been detained in Dagestan in retaliation for his outspokenness. “Of course, I’m scared. I know how they work. I’m going to be killed anyway.
Later, however, Osechkin, who fled Russia to France in 2015, said he became suspicious of Navruzbekov after receiving a series of strange and contradictory messages from Navruzbekov seen by the Financial Times. Zbekov’s story.
These include claims that he met with unspecified intelligence agencies in various other European countries, and Navruzbekov’s apparent covert surveillance of Polish border agents.
Navruzbekov told him he would be deported from Poland in February, Osechkin said, and then began sending Osechkin some of 9,000 secret documents he claimed he wanted to give to prosecutors investigating Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine.
The pair then fell out, with each accusing the other of working for the FSB. Osechkin denies being an FSB agent.
Navruzbekov’s wife, Irada, said Osechkin’s claims about her husband were “completely untrue” and denied he had met Secret Service officials in other countries, claiming the family had traveled abroad to seek asylum and receive medical treatment.
Osechkin said he had concluded that the Navruzbekov documents — which included intercepts of secret communications between U.S. intelligence and Ukraine, as well as apparent evidence of Moscow’s deep infiltration of Ukraine’s security services — did not point to Russian wrongdoing, but rather likely Designed to undermine relations between Washington and Kiev.
“It’s a true detective thriller,” he said. “We spent months trying to figure this out, but we didn’t get to the bottom of it.”
The Polish statement said Navruzbekov’s story “looks like an attempt to prove himself to the Polish side” and concluded that “his continued presence in Poland poses a threat to the Polish Republic”.
Moskalenko declined to comment on Poland’s allegations, but said they “could not explain why the authorities transferred Emran so hastily to a country where his life was in danger”.
Moskarenko said: “They could extradite him to the North Pole or the Antarctic if they wanted to, but not to Russia. That would be a death sentence for him.”
Additional reporting by Raphael Minder and Barbara Erling in Warsaw