Kill List: Hunted by Putin's Spies, review: like something from the realms of a crazy novel

Telegraph

28-03-2025

It is a brave man who takes on Vladimir Putin, and Christo Grozev must surely be wondering if it has been worth it. An investigative journalist for Bellingcat, Grozev is the subject of Kill List: Hunted by Putin's Spies (Channel 4).
To begin, we see an example of Grozev's work. He is helping to facilitate the escape of a whistleblower who was part of a secret Russian programme to create variations of Novichok. These scenes have the feel of a thriller, as the man – his face digitally altered to protect his identity – flees through the countryside to a rendezvous point, desperate to reach a new life in the West.
Grozev also investigated the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, and of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. This, as you can imagine, has not made him popular with the Kremlin. And so there is a bounty on his head, which means he can't return home to his family in Vienna. In 2023, the security services told him that there was an imminent threat to his life if he was to land in any European country. He is currently living in the US. It's a nervy existence.
Recently, his name came up in an Old Bailey trial of some Bulgarians caught spying for Russia. Their job was to conduct surveillance on Grozev. Bizarrely, they were hired by the former Wirecard boss Jan Marsalek, who wondered about paying a suicide bomber to behead Grozev in the street then blow themselves up. Another idea was to release poison gas into Grozev's apartment. This, like so many other elements of the story (including Grozev's fears that his father has been visited by assassins trying to ascertain his whereabouts), sounds like fiction. Or, as Grozev put it: 'This is the realm of a really, really crazy novel. It doesn't happen. Until it does.'
There are other journalists and activists in this two-part film, but Grozev's personal story is the most riveting. Until he was specifically told that his life was under threat, he had considered the general threat to be 'almost like a fun thing to know', which seems an oddly cavalier way to look at it. Did he get caught up in the excitement of the job, appearing at public events and being introduced as 'the rock star of investigative journalism'?
A doctor told him he had never seen a patient whose system was under such a constant level of stress. The Russians surely know exactly where he is. Grozev has done admirable and vital work, and he is paying a very high price for it.