He showed up at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport a week before Christmas on KLM Flight 598 from Cape Town to testify about Russian war crimes in The Hague.
There is great excitement among intelligence experts about the Igor Salikov case. The 60-year-old says he is a former Russian GRU colonel and former member of the Wagner paramilitary group who fought in Ukraine and has since defected, claiming he witnessed war crimes and child abductions. Salikov, former head of the 4th Department of the Special Operations Directorate of the so-called “DNR Prosecutor General's Office”, who was involved in combat operations and special operations of the Central Intelligence Service of the FSB and the Main Directorate of the General Staff. In 2014-2015 he worked in the Ministry of Defense in Eastern Ukraine, became Senior instructor at Wagner in 2017, then moved to Syria and returned to Ukraine in February 2022.
A week before his arrival, Igor wrote an affidavit dated December 10, 2023, addressed to ICC prosecutor Karim Khan and collected by Gulagu, a group that claims to support Russian defectors. Salikov is not asking the court for immunity in exchange for his testimony and has written a book called “No War!” about the 2014-15 war in Donbass and is now writing a second one about Wagner. In an interview with Dutch public broadcaster NPO1, he stated: “I have witnessed atrocities against civilians.” He added that he had witnessed prisoners of war being mistreated and executed and children being kidnapped, saying: “I have seen how Secret service people brought a large number of children without parents across the border into Belarus.” Salikov also claims that those who committed these alleged war crimes did so on orders from the Russian Defense Ministry, but also on direct orders from President Vladimir Putin's office have done. Words that, if confirmed, could make him a key witness before the criminal court in The Hague.
The former GRU officer then says that he managed to leave Russia together with his family in June 2022 and that he settled in Cyprus for a certain period of time. He then fled to the Netherlands via Serbia and other countries until he landed at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam yesterday. It is currently unknown where exactly Salikov is, as he was detained by police at the airport and whether the International Criminal Court has been informed of his application.
Since the beginning of Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine, there have been several cases of soldiers fleeing Russia, expressing their reluctance to participate in aggression and their willingness to testify about war crimes. For example, in 2023, Dmitry Mishov, a Russian Air Force pilot, and Ivan Korolyov, a Russian lieutenant, arrived in Lithuania and requested political asylum. Last winter, Andrei Medvedev, former commander of the Wagner Group, fled to Norway, but later changed his mind and said he wanted to return to Russia. The profiles must be examined very carefully, especially in light of Moscow's infiltration and espionage campaigns in the West.