Vladimir Sergienko, 52, is the Ukrainian-born adviser to Eugen Schmidt, a Bundestag deputy with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The Insider and Der Spiegel reported in August that Sergienko had fallen under suspicion in Germany after his email and text message correspondence with a suspected FSB operative known only as “Alexei” came to light.

Alexei’s real name can now be disclosed as Ilya Vechtomov, born in 1987, an officer of the Fifth Service of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the successor agencies of the Soviet-era KGB. Although the FSB is largely responsible for domestic security and counterintelligence activities inside Russia, the Fifth Service, created in the 1990s, acts as its foreign intelligence arm. (On Jan. 29 The Insider disclosed that at least one Fifth Service FSB officer served as a handler to Tatjana Ždanoka, a Latvian MEP. Following the publication of that article, it was announced that Ždanoka is under internal investigation by the European Parliament.)

A graduate in Complex Assurance of Information Security from the Kalashnikov Izhevsk State Technical University, Vechtomov’s identity was confirmed through telephone metadata. It shows that he is in constant communication with dozens of other known members of the FSB, including Vladimir Petrovsky, the head of the Ninth Division of Operational Information Department (DOI) of the Fifth Service. “Alexei” was also matched to Vechtomov through partially overlapping usernames, passwords and avatars he recycled between his two identities. The Ninth Division is responsible for intelligence-gathering on Ukraine, the country that Vladimir Putin tasked the Fifth Service with politically destabilizing in the lead-up to Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.

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