Il tenente Stupnikov, la spia che può rovinare Putin: 300 russi morti per i suoi tradimenti

In Russia, the perfect spy has always worn the face of Vyacheslav Tikhonov, the melancholic actor who played Stierlitz in a 1973 television serial that the entire Soviet Union watched—a Moscow officer posing as an SS colonel, slipping Hitler's secrets to the Kremlin without a single misstep. Lieutenant Lev Stupnikov became a Stierlitz without the training, but the Wall Street Journal placed him among the most lethal informants in recent military history. For five months, two years ago, he passed his brigade's positions to the Ukrainians. His messages cost more than three hundred Russian soldiers their lives.

On a frozen field near Vuhledar in Donetsk one February morning in 2024, Stupnikov held his phone against his chest and photographed waiting soldiers. He wrote to his contact: coordinates were already en route, and his estimate was between 120 and 150 men. When the order came to leave, he asked drivers for wet wipes, clutched his stomach, made a face, and disappeared into the trees. The explosion threw him to the ground. To the contact asking for a photo, he responded that there was only meat: 68 dead, including the brigade commander, and 60 wounded. He helped load them onto trucks, then claimed a concussion back at the barracks.

From that day forward, he passed frequencies, positions, routes of armored vehicles. He disabled surveillance cameras and fried the circuits of Russian drones. One May evening he accidentally sent the coordinates of the basement where he slept and woke to a hole in the wall—something that never happened to Stierlitz in twelve episodes. He slept rarely, as soldiers do, and poorly, as spies do. To fall asleep he convinced himself that his victims would have ended up dead anyway, that at least their mothers would recover the bodies and the compensation. The inverse of the Kremlin's logic, which pays soldiers while they live and then pays their mothers. In June his commander watched another successful Ukrainian attack unfold on the screens and sensed the anomaly. "I have the feeling there's a Stierlitz among our ranks." He stared at Stupnikov, who laughed it off—and there was something darkly comic in the commander's comparison, casting the Nazis as themselves.

The transformation belonged to his mother. Tatiana Yantsen had brought her children from Kazakhstan to Omsk in Siberia through Moscow's program to repatriate Russians living abroad. Her husband had taught them that "our historical homeland is Russia," but in that homeland Tatiana became an opponent of Putin, the kind who listened to Ukrainian punk bands at full volume in her car, careful to turn the dial down at traffic lights. Her son was sent to the front in November 2023 "for the timely replacement of losses." In February she wrote to Dmytro Karpenko, a programmer working with Ukrainian military intelligence who calls himself Apostol on YouTube—round-faced, bags under his eyes, chain-smoking in front of a dozen phones.

Karpenko fished for men and paid them, never knowing, he said, whether he would land "a minnow or a whale." This time he landed a whale of twenty-four years who could deadlift 250 kilos. Stupnikov had sworn "loyalty to the Homeland, the Russian Federation" at the St. Petersburg Military Academy and married Liza, his high school girlfriend. Then the invasion came. "I am ready to collaborate with you and to surrender myself," Stupnikov wrote to Karpenko. On one condition: no money.

The escape came on the night of July 6th. Stupnikov told a sentry he was going to check the cameras and, pointing toward Ukrainian lines, asked if he could advance further. "Yes, but not very far." "I have no intention of going far." He crossed a minefield lighting his way with his phone, guided by a Ukrainian drone to the duck pond where three soldiers waited. "Password?" "Peanut shop." Today he wears the handlebar mustache of the White Russian counterrevolutionaries of 1917 and fights in the Russian Volunteer Corps, a unit of the Ukrainian army formed by anti-Putin Russians with a far-right character. Another defector, pilot Maksim Kuzminov, was killed by an assassin in Spain six months after delivering his helicopter to Kyiv. Stupnikov concluded that for a Russian traitor, the safest place is Ukraine, a few kilometers from the army he betrayed.

His wife remained in the brigade's city, among the officers' wives, and wrote to him: "This was your dream, not mine." "So we don't talk anymore?" he asked. She did not answer, except to tell state media: "He betrayed me too." He put it this way: "Did I betray my oath? I had committed to defending freedom, independence, and constitutional order. But Putin destroyed all three."