Investigation: Shattering the secrecy of Putin’s top spy chief

Even for a Russian spy service official, Sergey Korolev stands out as exceptionally secretive.
Korolev, the second-in-command at Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), has hidden the details of his life and identity so well that even the basics like his birth date and appearance are mixed up or appear to have been invented entirely.
This secretiveness may be helping him evade international sanctions. The spy chief, whose agency plays a special role in Russia’s war against Ukraine, is identified inconsistently or incorrectly on numerous international sanctions lists, possibly rendering him at times undetectable to sanctions enforcers.
Moreover, the only photo of “Korolev” that appears in many media reports about him pictures a completely different Russian man.
The Kyiv Independent has filled in the gaps in the story of Korolev, stripping Vladimir Putin’s deputy spy chief of a significant portion of his long-lived anonymity.
The FSB, a successor to the notorious Soviet KGB service, plays a crucial role in Vladimir Putin’s regime. The service is known to have been engaged in recruiting pro-Russian agents in other countries, sabotage, cyber operations, espionage, disinformation campaigns, and even poisoning and assassinations. The FSB was also responsible for providing Putin with intelligence prior to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, according to media reports.
Following the invasion of Ukraine, Korolev, FSB’s first deputy director and the second most influential figure in the country’s main security agency, was among the Russian officials targeted by international sanctions.
The EU sanctions list said Korolev’s actions at the FSB “threaten Ukraine’s territorial integrity and independence.”
Spanish law enforcement also uncovered significant connections between Korolev and the Russian mafia in the first decade of the 2000s, according to media reports.
Despite the high-profile role, Korolev, much like a character from a spy novel, is one of the most mysterious individuals in Russia’s special service leadership.
His name helps the secrecy. He bears one of the most popular Russian names and a fairly common last name. He is a namesake of the famous Sergey Korolev, the scientist behind the Soviet Union’s space race success.
Like everyone in Russia, Korolev bears a patronymic. His full name is Sergey Borisovich Korolev. That doesn’t help much to pin his true identity down: According to two leaked databases of Russian individuals’ data, he has nearly two dozen full namesakes in Russia.
Moreover, a puzzling error was made in Korolev’s identifying information in European sanctions lists. The European Union’s and Swiss sanctions lists contain two different dates of his birth — both of which seem to be incorrect.
It doesn’t help that his Russian name has variations of English transliteration: It can be Korolyov or Korolev, and Sergey or Sergei. Official sources use different versions, potentially complicating his identification. (Editor’s Note: Throughout this story, we identify him as Sergey Korolev, as we believe this spelling variant most likely matches his passport.)  
Korolev has never been interviewed by the media and has no known social media accounts. It seems that very few people know what the second-in-command at the FSB actually looks like. When he is mentioned in the media, the accompanying photo is that of another person, as the Kyiv Independent has been able to prove.
One will not find Korolev’s photo or date of birth on the FSB website. Only a few details from his biography are available there. Korolev was appointed to his current role by Putin in 2021. He holds the high rank of general in the Russian military and has been with Russia’s security services since 1979.
These scant details gave a start to our search.
The single image used online as the photo for Korolev shows a young-looking man with a buzz cut, wearing a black jacket and tie, similar to the stereotypical image of a secret service officer.
This photo has been used hundreds of times to accompany mentions of Korolev online.
The real Korolev looks nothing like the man in the picture. However, the fake photo is so prevalent that it was even listed as Korolev’s portrait on the website of Rosatom Corporation, a Russian state-owned nuclear holding. Korolev has been sitting on Rosatom’s supervisory board since 2017, combining it with his role at FSB.
Rosatom added the photo in 2021, when Korolev was appointed deputy head of FSB. Media reports about the appointment massively used the fake photo. It spread across the web and even got into foreign press.
Then, the fake photo traveled even further. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian National Agency for Corruption Prevention maintained a register of persons sanctioned by Ukraine. This public list included Korolev – again, with the same photo showing a different person.
But where did the fake photo of Korolev come from in the first place?
In some articles, the image is credited to Boris Yarkov. We found him. Yarkov is a photographer, founder, and editor-in-chief of a local news agency Poviestka Dnia in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. It appears that it was Yarkov’s news agency that gave a start to the years-long misidentification of Korolev.
In July 2016, Yarkov’s news agency apparently used the photo in question to illustrate the news about Korolev’s appointment to the FSB’s Economic Security Unit. The report didn’t indicate that the buzz-cut man in the photo was Korolev. It’s a frequent practice for smaller online media to use photos with an illustrative purpose, where the image doesn’t necessarily depict the person or event mentioned in the story. Moreover, within the next year, the media outlet removed the photo from its news story. It remained on Yarkov’s personal Facebook page, where we found it.
In a conversation with the Kyiv Independent, the photographer Yarkov confirmed that it was not Korolev in the photo, and suggested the person was a security guard. He could not remember the circumstances of taking the photo.
We have identified the man who had accidentally and unwillingly lent his appearance to a top FSB official. Image analysis software indicates that the photo most likely represents a Yekaterinburg resident, Artem Kupliennikov, who does not appear to have any connections to Korolev.
We called Kupliennikov, pretending to be the communications director of Rosatom. Kuplennikov admitted that it was him in the photo of “Korolev.” When the photo was taken, he worked at the security service of Yeltsin Center, a cultural complex in Yekaterinburg. The center hosts many public events, and Kupliennikov believes he was photographed during one of them. Kupliennikov claims that he reached out to some media outlets saying it was him in the photo and asking to take it down — but the photo nevertheless circulated as the photo of Sergey Korolev.
As bizarre as it is, this mistake has helped the real Korolev keep his appearance private.
While investigative journalists reporting on Korolev suspected that the man in the widespread photo wasn’t him, they had no other images, and all the previous investigative journalism reports about Korolev ran without his photo. Exiled Russian investigative journalists have revealed Korolev’s business and criminal connections, but never ran his portrait.
Ukrainian intelligence sources have provided the Kyiv Independent with photos that they believe show the real Korolev. Several Ukrainian and foreign media outlets have received and published similar photos, seemingly without verification.
We have investigated these images independently, and were able to confirm that the man in the photos is the real Sergey Korolev.
The real Sergey Korolev shows up in several photos published on the website of the Russian Anti-Terrorist Committee, an inter-agency assembly headed by FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov. Most of the photos don’t have any captions and Korolev is never mentioned in the reports about the committee meetings. But two photos provide a clue: A name sign reading “Sergey Borisovich Korolev” is in the frame.
The second source to confirm Korolev’s appearance was an account on the Russian social media platform Odnoklassniki (Russian for “Classmates”). The account is dedicated to archiving Russian border guards’ history. It appears that the account is run by a former classmate of Sergey Korolev from the FSB Border Institute — formerly, a KGB School. The page has been active for at least five years and contains more than a thousand photographs, mostly of Russian security forces involved in the border service at various times. Korolev — the same man seen in the photos with the FSB director — can be spotted in many of them.
Several photos show a gathering of FSB Border Institute alumni, dated June 2003, apparently taking place on the occasion of the 20-year anniversary of their graduation. Korolev is seen in two photos from the gathering: a large group photo, and a smaller photo of nine men, added to an album called “Classmates who are now generals.” The account published the photos long after they were taken, in 2019 and in 2023.
In the comments, the account owner and alleged classmate of Korolev described the career path of the men in the photos. Korolev, he wrote, started in the border guard service and rose to head the FSB economic security department.
The account also has photos of young Korolev as a cadet in the FSB Border Institute, in an album entitled “Studies at the Border Guard School (1979-1983).” The year matches Korolev’s official date of joining Russia’s security services — as a cadet, he’d count as a member of the force starting his first year of studies.
The former classmate isn’t the only source of Korolev’s imagery online. For all his secretiveness, the deputy head of FSB has left some more traces.
Korolev was photographed alongside former Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. During Serdyukov’s tenure as minister, Sergey Korolev served as his adviser.
At least once, Korolev did something atypical for a top spy agency official: In 2020, he showed up at the recording of a popular Russian TV comedy show, KVN.
The man who was months away from being appointed deputy head of FSB sat in one of the first rows, where he would certainly be caught on camera.
The filming took place in Yalta, Crimea, a Ukrainian city that has been under Russian occupation since 2014. The TV version of the show can still be found on YouTube and has over a million views, with Korolev shown throughout the recording multiple times.
Perhaps Korolev was convinced that years of secretiveness granted him enough anonymity that he could attend a popular show incognito, sit in the second row, right behind the jury, be filmed from every possible angle, and shown on Russia’s state TV. A photo report from the filming, published in a local newspaper, also captures Korolev, but doesn’t identify him.
Korolev didn’t attend alone: It was a family outing. We identified the people around Korolev: Sitting next to him are his wife Marina, son Boris, and daughter Anastasia. We matched them with other images we found on the web.
Korolev is subject to sanctions imposed by the EU, Switzerland, the U.K., Canada, the U.S., New Zealand, Australia, and Ukraine as a result of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
These sanctions restrict his access to assets in these countries, limit financial operations, and, in some of them, impose a travel ban. The sanctions were imposed in 2022 and 2023.
For the sanctions to work efficiently and for the authorized bodies to be able to identify the exact Sergey Korolev and his assets, his date of birth is an important detail.
Up until the sanctions were imposed, there seemed to be no confusion about Korolev’s date of birth: It was listed as July 25, 1962. This date of birth was on Wikipedia pages about Korolev, both in English and Russian, where notably, there was no photo. This is the only date of birth mentioned by Russian investigative journalists reporting on Korolev and his alleged links to Russian criminals in a story published in 2021.
Thus, at the time of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent imposition of sanctions on Korolev, his date of birth was not a secret and was not questioned.
But then, something went wrong. In 2022, the EU and Swiss sanctions lists offered two possible birth dates for Sergey Korolev, both a decade earlier than the real one: July 25, 1952 and Nov. 9, 1952.
We couldn’t find any obvious explanation for why these birth dates were listed. Equally interesting is why Korolev’s publicly known date of birth wasn’t included in the EU and Swiss sanctions lists even as one of the options.
We were able to verify that Korolev’s actual date of birth is July 25, 1962. This date is listed in his registration documents in a St. Petersburg apartment, where his daughter Anastasia is also registered, according to leaked Russian databases. This date is also mentioned in the Odnoklassniki account presumably run by Korolev’s former classmate. “Second row, second from left — Korolev Sergey Borisovich. On July 25, 2022, Sergey celebrated his 60th birthday,” the account owner wrote, commenting on one of the photos.
Several countries have also identified Korolev’s date of birth as July 25, 1962 in their sanctions lists: the UK in April 2022, Australia in May 2022, Ukraine in October 2022, New Zealand in November 2022, and the US in July 2023. Canada has also listed 1962 as his year of birth without mentioning a specific date in its sanctions in March 2022.
The wrong date is listed only in the EU and Swiss sanctions.
The Kyiv Independent sent inquiries to the European Commission, the EU Council representatives, and Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), asking how the mistake occurred, what consequences it could have had, and whether any assets belonging to Korolev in the EU or Switzerland had been identified.
In a written response, the EU Spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Peter Stano said that he had “no information about difficulties in implementing the sanctions” against Korolev in the EU member states.
“The date of birth is only one of the identifiers,” he said, without specifying what other identifiers in the EU sanctions list could help banks and other institutions identify the correct Sergey Korolev.
He also did not explain how the incorrect birth date of 1952 got into the sanctions adopted by the EU Council, saying the Council has “every relevant information at its disposal to identify precisely the individual or the entity to be added to the list of those subject to sanctions.”
The SECO spokesperson responded that the Swiss list of sanctions against Russia is identical to the EU list.
“Deviations are being examined,” Francoise Tschanz, spokesperson for SECO, told the Kyiv Independent, adding that SECO does not comment on individual cases.
To make matters worse, Korolev and his family appear to have used fictitious names.
According to the leaked Russian databases, Sergey Korolev and his family were registered at the same address in St. Petersburg with fictitious names. The surname, patronymics, dates of birth, and passport numbers were real — which we confirmed via the Russian Tax Service database — but the first names were altered. In the database, Sergey Korolev became Nikolai, his son Boris became Vadim, and his daughter Anastasia became Veronika.
A Russian investigative journalist previously claimed Korolev’s son was listed in official documents under the fake name Gennady Streltsov.
Another potential obstacle for Korolev’s identification in the sanctions list is the inconsistent transliteration of his name.
“Sergey Korolev” is likely the spelling used in Korolev’s passport. It’s the only spelling that shows up in a leaked database of Russian individuals’ data. “Korolev” is also the transliteration used by the official’s children when registering emails and social media.
However, only the Australian and U.S. sanctions notices use this spelling for all parts of his name. The others spell his name as “Sergei” or surname as “Korolyov.”
This spelling used to be listed as one form of his name on the U.K. sanctions, but in March 2023, it was removed. The removal was explained as eliminating a duplicate entry. As a result, only Sergei Borisovich Korolyov remains on the U.K. sanctions list.  
The EU and Swiss sanction lists went further, adding an extra letter “s” to his patronymic: Sergei Borissovich Korolev, in accordance with the French transliteration.
The errors in sanctions’ lists — the wrong birth date and wrong transliteration — could complicate identifying Korolev as a sanctioned FSB official for border authorities, banks, and other institutions.
“This leaves wiggle room. The sanction remains, but some banks, for example, might not recognize this person as sanctioned, especially if there is no other identifying data,” explains Vladyslav Vlasiuk, Ukraine’s presidential commissioner for sanctions policy.
This means that the FSB’s first deputy director may have been able to circumvent restrictions in some European countries.
Whether Korolev holds any accounts, real estate, or other assets in Europe remains uncertain. What is clear is that he and his family lead a wealthy lifestyle often linked to European countries.
Korolev may be an important cog in the Russian regime’s war machine against the West and all it stands for, but the senior FSB official seems to be a believer in Western education. For years, he sent his children to take courses in pricy schools in the U.K. and Switzerland — they can be seen in the photos published by these schools.
Both of Korolev’s children have attended summer English courses, known as the Pilgrims Course, taking place at the prestigious Harrow School in London.
Photos of Anastasia Koroleva attending the course in 2014 can still be found on the school’s website. Judging by the site, these are summer English courses lasting from two to six weeks. The current tuition for the course varies from 5,000 to 15,000 pounds, depending on the duration.
Korolev’s daughter can also be seen in the 2016 and 2018 photo reports of the summer programs at the American Tassis School in Switzerland. The current price of a summer program is 8,000 Swiss francs, or $9,420.
Korolev’s family enjoys a wealthy lifestyle in Russia, as well. The family appears to have a range of real estate and luxury cars. In a manner typical for officials, most of it is registered in family and associates’ names.
Korolev used to work at FSB in St. Petersburg, and the official has maintained connections to the city.
Korolev’s wife Marina is registered at a house in Sestroretsk, a suburb of St. Petersburg. Korolev and his daughter are registered at an apartment in St. Petersburg. While registration doesn’t prove ownership, it usually points to a link to this property.  
Other real estate connected to Korolev’s family is in Moscow, his current place of work. His son Boris is registered in an elite apartment in central Moscow, with an area of 200 square meters. The official owner of the apartment is Maria Koroleva, according to a BBC Russian service report. The woman appears to be Sergey Korolev’s niece.
Additionally, a large plot in the Lesnaya Bukhta housing development near Moscow was registered in the name of Korolev’s son, according to previous reports.
Can Korolev’s salary at FSB pay for this lifestyle? He has never filed a public declaration, and his salary hasn’t been made public. His predecessor was reportedly making around $180,000 a year in 2019.
Yet salary may not be the only source of income — there are traces of the family’s business interests.
In the St. Petersburg suburb, a short drive away from Korolev’s wife’s house, there is a spa hotel Voda. According to the Russian real estate register, the hotel’s building is owned by Shalash, a Russian company. Shalash has several owners, one of them Korolev’s sister Tetyana Koroleva. Another co-owner is a British company, Steelcore Alliance LLP. Its beneficiary is an Uzbek citizen, Aybek Buribekov.
Another company allegedly connected to Korolev’s family is Citadel LLC, Russia’s largest manufacturer of wiretapping equipment, mandatory for the Russian mobile operators to install. Its founders are classified in the Russian company registry. Independent Russian investigative journalists from iStories have claimed that Citadel is linked to Korolev through his alleged confidant Valery Bitaev, who co-owns the company.
Incidentally, Citadel depends on FSB licensing.
According to the BBC’s Russian Service, Citadel invested in Korolev’s son Boris Korolev’s business venture — a tech company called Bastion. Like with Citadel, the company owners are classified in the registry.
Korolev’s son’s company Bastion is noteworthy by itself. Founded in 2018, the company claims to specialize in ethical hacking — testing the vulnerabilities of other companies’ information systems.
In the past few years, reports have surged of Russian state hackers targeting people and entities in Ukraine and Western countries. Many reports directly mention the agency behind it: It’s FSB.
Hello, this is Alisa Yurchenko, the author of this story. Thank you for reading my first investigation for the Kyiv Independent. I joined the team recently, but I have been working in investigative journalism for over 10 years.
I spent the last 1.5 months studying social media, photos from FSB-related events, and hacked Russian databases — all of it to end the long-cherished secretiveness of the top official of the Russian FSB, the security service that plays a crucial role in the Russian war.
This story proves that even the FSB deputy director who’s been hiding his appearance for decades can leave unexpected traces online. All we need is the desire and the skills to find them. I love OSINT, and there will be more investigations in the Kyiv Independent. You can support our independent investigative journalism by becoming a member of the Kyiv Independent.