Bone Thief Busted Trying to Spirit A World War II Spy Back Russia

LVIV, Ukraine-Late one evening last summer, a gaunt man sneaked through the darkness into a Soviet military cemetery here in western Ukraine to do something the Russian government has been trying to do for decades: Retrieve the bones of a famed spy revered by the Kremlin.

Ruslan Litvinov passed a guard and crept toward his target. He set down the two hydraulic car jacks he brought and began to pry up the heavy marble slab encasing the spy's remains.

Six decades had passed since Nikolai Kuznetsov was laid to rest at Lviv's Hill of Glory cemetery. Before his death, he infiltrated the Nazi high command during World War II and assassinated several of Hitler's top officials in occupied Ukraine, putting himself in the pantheon of the Soviet Union's wartime heroes.

Moscow had sued in court to get Kuznetsov reburied in his native region in Russia, and before the invasion nearly three years ago dispatched official delegations to Lviv to get the city to hand him over. Litvinov promised a quicker fix.

He said he was hired to do the job after someone in Russia contacted him on a messaging app, offering a handsome payday for stealing Kuznetzov's bones and sending a photo as proof he had done it.

There was just one problem: He is hardly the kind of agent who would have made Kuznetsov proud. An unemployed drifter in his late 40s, unmarried and without a high school diploma, Litvinov lives in a crumbling housing block.

He fumbled the operation when a cemetery guard spotted what he was up to and called the police.

The next day the mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadoviy, denounced what he described as another Moscow-backed attempt to pilfer Kuznetsov's bones. "We don't need Kuznetsov," he wrote on social media. "But we won't give him away just like that." Litvinov was hauled before a judge and fined.

The brazen nighttime raid could have been written off as a one-off stunt by a disillusioned Russia sympathizer in need of easy money. But Ukrainian officials allege it was just the latest salvo in a campaign by Moscow to repatriate from Ukraine the bodies of prominent Russians and rebury them with pomp and circumstance in their ancestral homes.