Reporting is hard. Often the things you want to find out, people don't want you to know. Sometimes they lie or spin. Sometimes, they're agents of hostile authoritarian regimes where the price for speaking out of turn is very high.

The damning findings say the Russian president Vladimir Putin himself probably approved of Alexander Lipmanenko's murder because of a long personal feud.

Former Russian press minister, Mikhail Lesson, was found dead at the DuPont Circle Hotel in Washington, D.C. four months ago.

One of two Russians, Britain has charged with the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Scripal and his daughter, Yulia, in March, using a nerve agent called...

Shadowy is an adjective often invoked for this kind of activity, and it's a good one.

So a recent story by the New York Times, Michael Schwerz, kind of caught our eye.

He's spent years on the trail of people who kill other people

for the benefit of Vladimir Putin, as shadowy a world as there is. But when he located one such

agent in a Ukrainian courtroom, everything that happened thereafter was altogether unexpected.

Mike, welcome to On the Media.

Thank you very much.

Your story is about this small-time racketeer named Oleg Smarodinov,

who had been recruited by Russian intelligence as an assassin.

He was charged with gunning down some obscure Ukrainian electrician

electrician named Ivan Mamtsure. But you weren't in Rivna, Ukraine, on the murdered electrician

beat. What were you investigating? I had come to Ukraine just in general looking into assassinations carried out by Russia.

The world had been riveted by the recent poisoning of a former Russian spy named Sergei Scripal in the UK.

And I wanted to dig more into this phenomenon.

This was clearly not an isolated incident.

There had been other assassinations

going back years. This is a practice that stretches back into the Cold War, back in the Soviet Union,

to Stalin's time, to Lenin's time. And so I wanted to dig into sort of the modern iteration of this

...