A New Russian Ploy: Competing Extradition Requests
But then the Russian authorities sprang a trap of their own, filing an extradition request with
the Spanish authorities for a crime they said Mr. Levashov had committed in Russia years ago.
In two of the three, either the defendants’ lawyers or relatives have said
that their cases have some bearing on the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election in the United States.
Another of Mr. Musatov’s clients, Dmitry O. Zubakha, who at the request of the United States was detained
in Cyprus in 2012 on suspicion of hacking Amazon, was successfully extradited to Russia.
Why Russians suspected of hacking travel to countries that may detain them on United States extradition warrants is something of a mystery.
One theory for the travel, he said, is the “girlfriend effect”: “You are a little hacking nerd
and now you have a good-looking girlfriend, and it gets cold in Russia, and she says, ‘It’s cold; I hate it here,’ and it wears him down, so he goes somewhere sunny, and that’s it.”
Mr. Levashov, too, has claimed a political motivation for his arrest in Barcelona last spring, though a federal
indictment unsealed in Connecticut charges him only with eight counts of computer-related crime and fraud.