A BONE THIEF IN UKRAINE'S BACKYARD

Ukrainian officials say the Russians continue their efforts to repatriate the remains of Soviet war dead

- Matthew Luxmoore

Late one evening last summer, a gaunt man snuck 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 within the walls of the Kremlin.

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

Six decades had passed since Nikolai Kuznetsov had been 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, placing himself squarely 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 had dispatched official delegations to Lviv in an effort 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 Kuznetsov'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 on the top floor of a crumbling housing block in an apartment where cat food is scattered on the floor and the ceiling is caving in.

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