They dressed head to toe in black, hooded and anonymous. No badges or identifiers, and their verbal communication relied on a language hardly heard in those tropical latitudes. They wielded weapons and tactics unseen before by local security forces, firing high-caliber rounds. They spoke in loud voices, barely understood by the protesters they were sent to suppress. They were Russian snipers, the most visible face of a vast network of intelligence agents and security advisors dispatched by the Kremlin to Nicaragua over nearly a decade to shore up the Ortega regime and his wife Rosario Murillo, a dynastic leadership that many analysts liken to Belarus under Aleksandr Lukashenko.
Two years have passed since Fernando, a 25-year-old Nicaraguan student who prefers not to reveal his real name, left his family home in Managua in search of safety. Now, at a shelter near Monterrey in northern Mexico, he shares his encounters with these strange, terrifying figures who arrived from the cold. “We had never seen snipers in Nicaragua; we could tell they were not from here; it was clear they didn’t understand us,” he recalls. The Ortega government “tried to hide it, and since there was no way to integrate them into the police without it being humiliating, they dressed them in black,” he observes.
The sense was clear: they seemed to hold a “license to do anything” on Nicaraguan soil. “They told us, in their limited Spanish: ‘we will kill you; we have your president’s permission’,” remembers this refugee. Yet until the day he left the country, the Ortega government never admitted foreign agents on its soil; the president “only said the Russians were sending resources,” with no further details.
Extensive involvement
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The considerable participation of Russian forces and technology in Nicaragua to quell the antigovernment protests of 2018 in Managua, protests that lasted for months and left 355 dead, is corroborated by a video conference to El Periódico, part of the Prensa Ibérica group, with Douglas Farah, former investigative journalist for The Washington Post in Latin America and currently president of IBI Consultants, a security advisory firm. He notes the use of specialized rifles (Russian-made), including the T-5000 Tochnost, an instrument of precision manufactured with components of Russian origin and, according to Rossíyskaya Gazeta, adopted since its 2011 launch by the Federal Security Service (FSB) and Rosgvardia, the police corps trusted with internal suppression.
Snipers and precision rifles were not the only tools Russia provided to tilt the balance in favor of the Ortega regime and crush a citizen uprising six years ago. Local security forces relied on SORM-3, a powerful computer program enabling access to apps like WhatsApp and real-time monitoring of protest leaders, eliminating them with remarkable efficiency. “Students believed their conversations were private; they were identified and killed in short order,” Farah confirms.
Since those protests, Russia’s footprint in Nicaragua, initially discreet and barely acknowledged publicly, has grown and received institutional recognition. In February, the two nations signed an agreement described as a “professional retraining program for police personnel,” granting privileges to Russian staff stationed there, including civil and administrative immunity for actions performed in the line of duty. In Managua, the Russian Interior Ministry maintains a building with diplomatic status and several underground floors. “It functions as a second embassy with highly sophisticated monitoring equipment,” Farah notes.
At the helm of relations with the Kremlin on security matters is General Zhúkov Serrano, a Russia-trained intelligence veteran appointed in 2022 as deputy director of Nicaragua’s National Police. He arrived to implement methods learned in Russia and receives security support from Russian officers in Nicaragua, according to Manuel Orozco, director of Migration, Remittances and Development at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank. A February visit by Nikolái Pátrushev, then secretary of Russia’s Security Council and de facto second-in-command to Vladimir Putin, underscored the Kremlin’s high stakes in Managua, now a strategic platform in the Americas.
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The persistence of the regime through fear and its tight alliance with Moscow lead many to compare Ortega’s rule to Lukashenko’s. “The methods and sources of support may differ, but the aim of staying in power through force and absolute authority is almost identical,” Orozco concludes.