A New Russian Ploy: Competing Extradition Requests<br />But then the Russian authorities sprang a trap of their own, filing an extradition request with<br />the Spanish authorities for a crime they said Mr. Levashov had committed in Russia years ago.<br />In two of the three, either the defendants’ lawyers or relatives have said<br />that their cases have some bearing on the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election in the United States.<br />Another of Mr. Musatov’s clients, Dmitry O. Zubakha, who at the request of the United States was detained<br />in Cyprus in 2012 on suspicion of hacking Amazon, was successfully extradited to Russia.<br />Why Russians suspected of hacking travel to countries that may detain them on United States extradition warrants is something of a mystery.<br />One theory for the travel, he said, is the “girlfriend effect”: “You are a little hacking nerd<br />and now you have a good-looking girlfriend, and it gets cold in Russia, and she says, ‘It’s cold; I hate it here,’ and it wears him down, so he goes somewhere sunny, and that’s it.”<br />Mr. Levashov, too, has claimed a political motivation for his arrest in Barcelona last spring, though a federal<br />indictment unsealed in Connecticut charges him only with eight counts of computer-related crime and fraud.
