Spiro Lasi, a construction worker whose house looks out over the Gramsh factory, said he was stunned that the trespassers were being held on suspicion of spying. “It makes no sense to me at all,” he said, noting that the factory had stopped work decades ago and, though still guarded by the Albanian military, holds nothing but ruins.
Aldi Kozaria, an Albanian journalist who broke the story of the arrests, said that he was initially skeptical, too, but that he now thinks the three were definitely up to no good. “In the beginning I thought it was all a joke, but if you connect dots the case starts to makes sense,” he said.
One important dot, he says, is the fact that shortly after the arrests, Moscow sent an urgent request to Albania for the extradition of one of the two detained Russians, Svetlana Timofeyeva, 33, a prominent urbex photographer with more than 250,000 followers on Instagram, where she uses the name Lana Sator.
The extradition request claimed that Ms. Timofeyeva was wanted in Russia in connection with a 2018 criminal case involving illegal entry into an underground military site in Chekhov, a town south of Moscow that housed a Cold War nuclear command center.
The Albanian prosecutor leading the investigation, Kreshnik Ajazi, says he thinks it fishy that Moscow moved so quickly to dust off an old case to justify a demand that Ms. Timofeyeva be sent back to Russia. Extradition, he said, “is one of the ways they rescue people.”
But Ms. Timofeyeva, according to her lawyer, Fatmir Lushi, has no desire to go back to Russia and is fighting extradition because she “left a clear record on social media against Putin and the war in Ukraine.” Mr. Lushi discounted the possibility that Russia’s request was a ruse to save an agent. On the contrary, he said, Ms. Timofeyeva faced punishment if sent to Russia and would be treated “very inhumanely.”
