A RUSSIAN “rogue agent” has revealed how he escaped Vladimir Putin’s death squads inside the rotting carcass of a cow.
Dmitry Senin, a once high-flying FSB officer, found himself running for his life – for the second time – after years of dodging the ‘s .
Former Russian agent Dmitry Senin Credit: YouTube
Relying on an , he was transported from to the border with Kazakhstan in September 2022.
He donned a gas mask and rubber suit to protect himself from the fumes of decaying flesh as he prepared to climb inside the cow he hoped would carry him to safety.
The final step was for Senin to be wrapped in tin foil – to protect him from the thermal cameras set up along the fortified border.
Local smugglers hauled the carcass containing Senin onto a tractor, drove over the border and then heaved it off into a ravine used as a “graveyard” for animals.
“I just needed to be thrown over the Kazakhstan border,” Senin told The Telegraph about the daring escape.
Once he knew he was safe, he rolled out of the cow, clambered out of the ravine and into the grass before being eventually picked up by a contact and flown to Montenegro.
By his own words, Senin is not a defector. Instead, he describes himself as an innocent man framed for a he did not commit.
“I did not bring secrets to the West in exchange for protection,” said Senin, who spent 18 years in ‘s main security agency.
People walk next to their cars queuing to cross the border into Kazakhstan in September 2022 Credit: AP
Recruits practice military skills at a training ground near the frontline in the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine Credit: AP
“I am an officer who tried to fight corruption from inside the system – and whom the system decided to destroy precisely because of that…
“The system I had served was not working in the interests of the state, but in the interests of specific individuals in power.”
Back in the mid-2010s, Senin had a distinguished career in the FSB, the main successor agency to the Soviet Union’s KGB, and he believed he was well on course to becoming an FSB general.
It all changed in 2016 when a hot tip came across his desk about a luxury Moscow flat linked to a high-ranking officer.
A subsequent raid on the property revealed more than £90million, one of the largest cash seizures in modern Russian .
The bust did not bring glory to Senin.
Instead, his identity as an FSB agent was leaked to the Russian press. Then, another tip – within hours, his colleagues were going to arrest him.
Senin suspected that he was about to be framed – as punishment for the raid.
Former BVT chief inspector Egisto Ott, before the start of the trial at the Vienna Criminal Court Credit: Alamy
The site of a Russian air strike in the frontline city of Kramatorsk in Donetsk region Credit: Reuters
“I did not understand what I had done wrong, I understood one thing: if they arrested me then I wouldn’t be able to prove my innocence in any way from ,” he recalled.
The officer first fled Russia in February 2017, leaving behind his wife and three children – two girls, aged 10 and seven, and a two-year-old son.
On the same day he arrived in Georgia, his FSB colleagues raided his home.
Only then Senin found out that he was accused of racketeering and bribery, which he denies.
Shortly after he disappeared, Russian intelligence services activated one of their most notorious foreign spies to hunt him down – Egisto Ott, an ex-police officer who worked at Austria’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism.
Austrian police documents seen by The Telegraph show that Ott used his police and intelligence contacts both at home and abroad in 2017 to try to trace Senin after he fled Russia, running checks on a yacht they believed he was hiding on in Croatia.
Senin knew he was being hunted, and that time was running out.
“So I used the FSB’s logic against them,” he said. “I went back to Russia.”
Who is Dmitry Senin?
Dmitry Senin is a former high-ranking Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) colonel who fled Russia in 2017, using a fake name to evade arrest.
He is a key figure linked to the corruption case of the former Interior Ministry Colonel Dmitry Zakharchenko, who was also his friend.
Russian authorities accused Senin of desertion and of acting as an intermediary for bribes for Zakharchenko.
While on the run, the officer was the target of surveillance by an Austrian ex-spy working for Russia.
After years of hiding from Russia’s “liquidators,” Senin eventually fled to Montenegro where he received political asylum after claiming that he was being prosecuted by his own government.
He was sentenced in absentia in 2023 to nine years in prison.
His logic seemed sound – his pursuers would never even think to look for a fugitive traitor inside Russia.
Senin claimed that he lived undercover in Moscow for years while he tried to clear his name.
To maintain his cover, he used disguises – including a wheelchair, then a set of crutches and a performative limp.
He said: “I would go to the school where the children studied and watch them from afar.
“I was in a disguise, as they show in films – in a hood and a cap, so my face wouldn’t be caught on camera.
“I passed handwritten letters through dead drops and my people. My children also passed their wishes and drawings through agreed locations – these were the most precious parcels I received.”
Eventually, Senin realised that his attempt to clear his name was futile – and he planned his second escape – inside the dead cow – which took two months to organise.
Upon landing in Montenegro, he immediately applied for asylum, claiming political persecution in his home nation.
Senin was instead arrested on an Interpol warrant issued by Russia, and was then held in prison, awaiting the outcome of the Russian extradition request.
After five months in jail, in February 2023, Montenegro refused Russia’s extradition request, declaring that he was facing political persecution at home, as he claimed.
Senin was released and granted asylum in the Balkan country, where he is now based with his family.
Eze Chidiebere Paul
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