Polish prosecutors are investigating acts of sabotage involving courier shipments containing hidden incendiary devices that ignited during transport, causing fires at Leipzig and Birmingham airports. The investigation also includes plans to send similar packages to the United States and Canada.
Following the trail of the Russian accused of terrorism, the failures of BiH institutions, and an investigation that (wasn’t) conducted, Detektor brings previously unknown details about Aleksandr Bezrukavyi (Aleksandr B.), whom BiH extradited to Poland for planning sabotage operations.
For almost a year, we tried to understand how Aleksandr Bezrukavyi, a Russian citizen whom Poland accuses of sabotage, espionage, and organizing the mailing of packages with explosive devices to the USA and Canada, ended up in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
We created a detailed reconstruction but couldn’t help but wonder—is this a story about him, or about the failure of a state that compromised its security system?
The owner of the accommodation in Bosanska Krupa told journalists that the reservation arrived properly, via an app, with payment on the spot. “He behaved completely normally… he was in the apartment the whole time, I don’t think he went out anywhere.”
That “didn’t go out anywhere” sounds almost prophetic today. While Bezrukavyi was allegedly walking in the woods and preparing to cross the border, an Interpol warrant had already been issued for him. Polish authorities suspected him of being part of a group that was planning and executing sabotage “on the orders of the Russian intelligence service.”
At first glance, the story sounds like a Netflix thriller script. The difference is that there is no fiction here. Everything happened right here—in a small town on the Una river, a few hours’ drive from Sarajevo.
Upon arrest, the police found “a Spanish residence permit, two iPhones, four cables, 1,300 euros, and a packaged Vodafone SIM card.” Materially unpretentious, but symbolically powerful: enough of an arsenal to maintain contact, movement, and anonymity.
According to documents obtained by Detektor, Bezrukavyi stayed in BiH twice. The first time, in early 2024, he “toured the city as a tourist” and planned an illegal border crossing into Croatia. The second time—in November of the same year—he returned on foot, without a valid visa or residence permit.
The Service for Foreigners’ Affairs later determined that he had “remained in residence after the expiry of his right to visa-free stay.”
What is particularly striking is not his return, but the fact that no service in BiH had any signal that someone with an Interpol warrant was in the country again.
This is more than a failure—it is a mirror of a system that only functions when someone else knocks on its door.
A specific detail that Detektor noted is that the phone number used by Bezrukavyi was connected to a Telegram account named “FromSibirwithlove,” later renamed “Alexey_exchange.” This account had been active since 2022.
If this is not a digital signature, I don’t know what is.
In a world where every app records traces, where servers and metadata have become a battlefield, BiH still has not developed mechanisms to digitally recognize those who enter the border as “tourists” and leave as “incidents.”
Bezrukavyi’s case also has a political tone. Detektor recorded that Oleg Kudryavtsev, the second secretary of the Russian Embassy in Sarajevo, visited the suspect in custody and was present at the hearings. At one of them, Bezrukavyi read a letter in Russian, claiming the “case is political in nature.”
This is a common line of defense in similar cases—claiming to be a victim of international persecution, not an actor in an operation. But the behavior of BiH institutions is more interesting.
While Poland and Russia were sending extradition requests, BiH Minister of Justice Davor Bunoza merely said that “the Court of BiH allowed both for Russia and for Poland, and said: act according to the law.”
A sentence so bureaucratically perfect that it contains nothing within it. No stance, no responsibility, no interest.
What makes the whole story frustrating is that BiH institutions conducted an investigation against Bezrukavyi only for document forgery. Not terrorism, not espionage, not sabotage—none of that.
The Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office of Una-Sana Canton issued an order on September 22, 2025, that “no investigation will be conducted because it is obvious that the reported act is not a criminal offense.”
When I read that, I thought: in a country where “obvious” has become synonymous with superficiality, no one even bothers to look beneath the surface anymore.
State Prosecutor Dubravko Čampara said he was unaware of “everything Bezrukavyi was doing in BiH,” because his priority was the extradition to Poland. He added that “perhaps surveillance was carried out in cooperation with Western agencies.”
Perhaps.
That word “perhaps” in the domestic judiciary often means “we didn’t want to say,” and sometimes—simply—”we didn’t do it.”
Professor Adnan Huskić reminds in the same text that institutions had to monitor a person “for whom there are clear indications that they are a security interest.”
He adds that investigations could have been launched for illegal border crossing and forged documents, and potentially espionage.
And that is where the essence lies: you don’t have to prove sabotage to act proactively. It is enough to show that you care.
Bezrukavyi was extradited from BiH to Poland by military aircraft. The Poles made sure their part of the job was concluded. We, on the other hand, closed the file.
It is this feeling of formal indifference that bothers me the most.
This is not the first time that BiH has been a transit corridor for suspicious actors. It has happened before—from arms smugglers to terrorism suspects.
But rarely do we have a case so documented, where every step, every border, and every opportunity for reaction is clearly visible.
Bezrukavyi had an address, a reservation, money, devices, and contact with the embassy in our country—everything. And we had a system that was satisfied with the fact that “there were no incidents.”
The point is not that BiH failed to uncover a Russian network. The point is that it didn’t even try.
Imagine that BiH institutions decided not to extradite Bezrukavyi immediately, but to conduct a full investigation.
That they analyzed the phones, contact networks, financial transactions, and communication channels. That they questioned everyone who helped him—consciously or not.
That would mean that BiH has the ambition to be a serious state. That it intends to protect its own borders, not treat them as a formality.
Instead, the whole case ends in Warsaw, and we are left with a report and a few uncomfortable questions.
It speaks, above all, about holes—in the system, in communication, and in awareness. It shows how insecure BiH is in its own sovereignty. How afraid it is of deep investigations, especially when they touch on foreign interests. It also shows how little we trust our own institutions—because the reflex is always: “let others take over.”
In one part of the article, Bilajac quotes a source from the judiciary who says that everything was done “in a very narrow circle of people.” And precisely there, in that narrow silence, the greatest dangers arise.
When I look at the case of Aleksandr Bezrukavyi today, I see much more than one spy story. I see a mirror of our system—administrative, political, and moral.
Because this case did not end the day the plane landed in Warsaw. It will be repeated every time an institution decides it is easier to close the file than to understand it. Every time “perhaps” is replaced with “do it.”
In the end, Bezrukavyi did leave—but the question remains: who else has passed through our system without us even noticing?
If one thing should emerge from this story, it is the awareness that without transparency and professionalism, there is no security. And without security—every state, however formally independent, becomes merely a transit station for the plans of others.
A neat, polite, quiet guest from Booking. Except that this guest, as it turned out, worked for Russian services. And he was escorted out of Bosnia and Herzegovina by a military plane—while our authorities breathed a sigh of relief that he was no longer their problem.
But he is our problem—because he shows everything that we are still not ready to admit about ourselves. And as long as we pretend that borders are a matter of geography, not politics and responsibility—there will always be some new “guest” who knows how to cross them.
Nino Bilajac. Journalist, Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) BiH
The articles published in the “Opinions” column reflect the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the position of the Center
