When the NY Times decides to, they can be informative [NY Times] The target lived on the sixth floor of a cheerless, salmon-colored building on Vidinska Street, across from a thicket of weeping willows. Oleg Smorodinov found him there, rented a small apartment on the ground floor, and waited.
He had gotten the name from his two handlers in Moscow. They met at the Vienna Cafe, a few blocks from the headquarters of Russia's domestic intelligence agency, and handed him a list of six people in Ukraine. Find them, they told Mr. Smorodinov, and he set off. He was already boasting to friends that he was a spy.
Each person on the list was assigned a code name related to flowers. One was ";briar." Another was "buttercup." The target, a man named Ivan Mamchur, was called "rose." To Mr. Smorodinov, he was a nobody, an electrician who worked at the local jail. To the handlers in Moscow, though, he was significant.
"Drenched in blood up to his elbows," they told him.