How I escaped Vladimir Putin in the belly of a dead cow | Exclusive

Speaking for the first time, former Russian agent Dmitry Senin says he was framed by powerful figures – and used his skills to evade capture. For an hour, Dmitry Senin lay still inside the carcass of the dead cow, making certain there was no sign of Russian border guards. It was twilight in September, a date chosen carefully as it is a time of year when the temperatures drop below freezing on the border between Siberia and Kazakhstan but the snow is yet to arrive, allowing an escapee to take cover among the grasses and crops which carpet the frontier in the early autumn. The high-flying Federal Security Service (FSB) agent, dressed in a gas mask, a rubber suit and wrapped in tin foil, was running for his life from Vladimir Putin’s death squads – populated by a number of his former colleagues. His escape from the cow, over the border and onto the back of a motorcycle driven by a former Soviet KGB spy, played out in the shadows of two of the biggest espionage cases in European legal history. But Senin, 47, is no defector. At least, not in his telling. Instead, he is what screenwriters would call a rogue agent: an innocent man, he claims, framed for a crime he did not commit, using a very particular set of skills acquired over a long and highly decorated career to stay a step ahead of his own side while trying to clear his name. Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/05/12/dmitry-senin-russia-fsb-escaped-putin-in-dead-cow/ ► Sign up to the Telegraph's free new daily newsletter, From the Editor, bringing you the latest news, features and analysis from the Telegraph newsroom: www.telegraph.co.uk/customer/secure/newsletter/from-the-editor/?WT.mc_id=tmgoff_youtube_telegraphmain ► Get the latest headlines: www.telegraph.co.uk?WT.mc_id=tmgoff_youtube_telegraphmain ► Stay ahead with a Telegraph digital subscription: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/customer/subscription/store?WT.mc_id=tmgoff_youtube_telegraphmain https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ and https://www.youtube.com/telegraph are websites of The Telegraph, the UK's best-selling quality daily newspaper providing news and analysis on UK and world events, business, sport, lifestyle and culture.