It’s easy to enter the place where the killers – some say there were two – of the Russian pilot who had defected in a helicopter in Ukraine and who lived in VilaJoiosa. Because, even though an automatic doorman with a code limits access, in the traffic of neighbors coming and going, no one leaves a mark. And now, according to the caretaker, fear has gripped the neighborhood. He joined the job in December, in time to cross paths with the victim, who asked him where he should throw the debris from the renovation he was doing in the apartment.
The janitor was the second person to find the body, as another neighbor arrived earlier. They thought it was an accident, a fall, a run-over… “but he was dead”. He had been shot up to six times. “He had a shot in the heart, another in the side, under the arm”, he adds, but no one heard any detonation, although the janitor was on the second floor of the garage, where he was killed, and he did hear how the car of the aggressor or aggressors accelerated when fleeing. The vehicle was later found charred 25 kilometers from Vila Joiosa, in Campello, and the corpse of pilot Maksim Kuzmínov remains at the Alicante Forensic Anatomical Center, awaiting official identification.
On the promenade near the building where the pilot lived, whom the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Narikhkin, called a “traitor”, there are many Russian-speaking pedestrians. They all avoid talking about the subject: “We don’t know anything about it”, they say. A graffiti accuses Putin of being a murderer. It is recent, because it adds “Navalni in memoriam”.
Behind the bar of his bar, Saras explains that he has been in Spain for 26 years and is returning to Ukraine on Monday. He goes there to see his mother, as he does from time to time. He is worried about the closure of the Polish border, in case it prevents him from getting there by bus. “If not, I’ll cross it walking.” He doesn’t remember ever seeing Kuzmínov, who lived just a couple of blocks from his restaurant, Rosa de los Vientos.
He learned about the crime from the news. He felt, like everyone else, that it was revenge, and he was surprised, “because this is very calm, nothing ever happens here”. This is confirmed by the officer on duty at the local police barracks. His colleagues were the first to show up when a neighbor called Emergency on the 13th to report that a man had been run over in a garage.
He explains that this almost paradisiacal place – too urbanized to be completely so – is the limit of the Villa, six kilometers away from the picturesque colorful houses of the fishing village.
In one of the four real estate agencies in the area, all with complaints in Russian, English and Spanish, the manager explains that the La Cala Residence, where the crime was committed, “is not the most expensive in the area, and not because whether it is of poor quality, but because it is not at the front line, which is what is paid the most here”. It was built shortly before the 2008 crisis, to the point that two of the five towers were left unfinished and not completed until later. There have always been Russians and Ukrainians. He knows this well, because he is married to a Ukrainian woman, whose brother cannot leave her country because he is of military age. Nevertheless, he assures that coexistence between them and the Russians does not seem to have changed after the invasion: “So far, there have been no problems”.
A postman who gets off his motorbike confirms that his area ends right there, at the edge of the Village, so he shares in the urbanization of crime. “No, packages and letters from your country don’t usually arrive; almost all of them are documents from Suma (tax management entity of the Provincial Council) or the City Council”.
The caretaker makes way for a woman who had recently left the housing estate. He had gone to the car in search of more papers from the surveillance company he represents. “There are neighbors interested in installing security systems.” In a window of the block next to the one where Kuzmínov lived under a false identity, a rainbow flag stands out.
