The intended targets were two men living in Lithuania. The first is 46-year-old Ruslan Gabbasov, founder of the Bashkir national movement Bashkort, which advocates for the decolonization of Russia. Gabbasov was granted political asylum in Lithuania in 2022 and lives there with his wife and five-year-old son. Russia has designated Bashkort an extremist organization and placed Gabbasov himself on its list of "foreign agents." In 2023, Russian authorities arrested his brother, Rustam Fararetdinov, in Ufa on suspicion of aiding terrorism — a move that Gabbasov and his supporters regard as pressure on his family. The Insider ↗ The second target was Valdas Bartkevičius, a Lithuanian citizen who organizes assistance for the Ukrainian army and is a public critic of the Kremlin. Novinky.cz ↗
The investigation began in March 2025, when Gabbasov, while inspecting his car, discovered a tracking device under the hood. According to the news outlet The Insider, it was an Apple AirTag intended to monitor his movements. Gabbasov claims that on the day the operation was planned, a hired killer was already waiting outside his home — the Lithuanian services' intervention came, quite literally, in the final phase. The Insider ↗
Deputy Director of the Lithuanian Criminal Police Saulius Briginas said on Monday that "the nature and objectives of these crimes correspond to the objectives of the Russian Federation" and that "this person's life was in real danger." Prosecutor Martynas Jovaiša of the Prosecutor General's Office confirmed that the accused face charges of murder with terrorist intent, which carries a possible sentence of up to life imprisonment. Seznam Zprávy ↗
The operation was international in scope. Investigators cooperated with police in Poland, Greece, and Ukraine. On February 10, 2026, a 55-year-old ethnic Greek of Georgian origin was detained in Thessaloniki; according to Lithuania, he was to arrange the transfer of €5,000 intended to finance the murders. The arrest was carried out under a European arrest warrant. A Greek court ordered his extradition, but he has appealed to Greece's Supreme Court. Meduza ↗
From sabotage to planned murder
The Lithuanian case does not stand in isolation. In January 2026, the same prosecutor's office charged six people (citizens of Spain, Colombia, Cuba, Russia, and Belarus) with setting fire, on behalf of the GRU, to a factory in Vilnius that produces radar systems for the Ukrainian army. According to Lithuanian investigators, the same multinational network was also preparing acts of sabotage in Poland (building supply warehouses), Romania (oil infrastructure), and the Czech Republic (buses, postal facilities, a cinema). Al Jazeera ↗In April 2026, a trial began before a Vilnius court against five more men accused of sending explosive parcels via courier companies on Russia's behalf — the same method that caused a fire at a DHL facility in Leipzig in July 2024. Before that, Lithuanian police had investigated a suspicious fire at an IKEA store in Vilnius and the sabotage of shipments of military equipment for Ukraine transiting through Bulgaria. Euronews ↗
The Gabbasov–Bartkevičius case shifts Lithuanian suspicions from infrastructure sabotage to the planned murder of specific individuals. The hybrid operations that Lithuanian authorities have so far linked to the GRU had, in the Baltic region, targeted warehouses, production facilities, and logistics for aid to Ukraine — their impact was material and logistical. The plan from March 2025 targeted people's lives: a political exile and a domestic activist. Briginas told LRT that investigators also documented the group's efforts to gather intelligence on military infrastructure in Greece. LRT ↗
For the exile community around Bashkort, Lithuania's claim of a planned assassination of its founder marks a security turning point. Movements of Russia's minority nations (Bashkirs, Tatars, Buryats, and others), which relocated to the EU after 2022 and began organizing a decolonization agenda there, may, according to this case, find themselves further up the scale of Russian repressive reach. Russia's tools against them so far have been legal — extremist lists, imprisonment of family members, extradition requests. Lithuanian investigators are now claiming that a network linked to the GRU was also preparing a contract killing. The Insider ↗
