In yet another major setback for Russian intelligence, Brazil has uncovered the identities of nine illegal Russian spies operating under false identities. Their goal: to build deep-cover stories that would eventually be used in a third country.
According to The New York Times, the operation—codenamed “East”—began in April 2022 when the CIA alerted Brazilian authorities about a man named Victor Ferreira, who was operating in the Netherlands with a Brazilian passport. He was identified as Russian military intelligence officer Sergey Cherkasov, using a fake but officially issued birth certificate tied to a deceased, childless Brazilian woman.
Following this lead, Brazilian investigators launched a wider search for similar “ghost” identities—people who suddenly appeared in official records at an older age. This led to the exposure of several more Russian agents. Only two were arrested; the others managed to flee.
One agent, Mikhail Mikushin, was arrested in Norway in 2022 while posing as a Brazilian academic. He was returned to Russia in August 2024 in a prisoner swap involving political detainees. Another spy, Alexander Otyukhin, who operated under the alias Eric Lopez as a diamond dealer, left Brazil and is now believed to be somewhere in the Middle East.