A human rights campaigner who exposed brutal sexual torture in Russian prisons has accused Vladimir Putin of seeking to assassinate him.
Vladimir Osechkin, 41, is in exile in France and he revealed the country's authorities have opened a criminal case into an attempt on his life.
He said investigations into claims the criminal underworld was involved in a Russian bid to assassinate him are underway in France and Spain.
The man said: "I don't know how much longer I can be here with you on this planet.
"My life is now in real danger and largely depends on the competence of the security service and the work of law enforcement agencies in Europe."
Mr Osechkin, the founder of Gulagu.net, has in recent years exposed a series of abuses in Putin's law enforcement machine.
These include the barbaric use of torture and sexual violence in jails.
Last week he claimed a female medic from Putin's FSB had defected to the West bringing key intelligence secrets with her.
"In France, a criminal case has been opened over the participation…of my murder by an organised criminal group," he said.
"The case has been referred to - and is being investigated at - the highest level in France."
Osechkin posted today: "We now know for certain that the Russian special services (the FSB and SVR) began to select the perpetrators and organisers of the contract killing of the founder of the human rights project Gulagu.net back in 2021 in Spain and France from among the members of the criminal community."
He alleged an operation to kill hick was funded by the state authorities.
"Putin and his secret services want to take revenge on me and kill me because of the work of the Gulagu.net project, the growing popularity of our Youtube channel (more than 500,000 subscribers) and our high-profile independent investigations and exposures of grand corruption and torture conveyors in Russia," he said.
He added Moscow authorities resented "our ability effectively investigate the crimes of Putin's murderous regime and tell the world."
Osechkin said: "An attempt to organise my murder is essentially an act of international terrorism, when the Russian special services want to kill a person they don’t like on the territory of a European democratic state, publicly showing that they have no borders and they can kill people like me and intimidate Russian civil activists and opposition figures.
"Now in the 21st century, we see how Vladimir Putin's special services want to use their agents in the criminal world with the aim of killing me now, in order to eliminate the threat of exposing crimes against humanity that have been committed by Russian special services in prisons and prisons for more than 20 years."
He said: "Putin is so terribly afraid of an international investigation and a possible tribunal that he is ready to spend millions of dollars and euros and commit new terrible crimes already on the territory of the EU.
"I consider the dictator and criminal Vladimir Putin the main enemy of Russia and Russians.
"He and his accomplices carried out an anti-constitutional coup, subjugated all three branches of government and use the secret services to arrest and kill principled and courageous people who are objectionable to them.
"During the decades of his reign, many good people, journalists, opposition figures, politicians and businessmen were killed.
"Thousands of people were subjected to torture and humiliation, political and custom-made arrests.
"And on 24 February the ‘One Man War’ began before the eyes of the whole world, which neither Russia nor Ukraine needs."
The conflict "occurs only to please dictator Putin and his maniacal desire to enter the textbooks of history as a ‘collector of lands’."
Osechkin told last month how he was the target of shots at his exile home in Biarritz.
He said: "I wasn't hit but there were shots. The scope was moving towards me."
An assassin made unspecified mistakes that "helped me survive", he said.
The campaigner was behind a mega-leak of videos implicating the FSB and prison authorities in a "torture conveyor belt" in jails where it is alleged rapists are deployed to break male inmates with sexual brutalisation.
Osechkin said he had been warned of a Putin hit squad.
He saw a red dot allegedly from the sight of the assassin's gun on the wall next to him at his home in the French resort.
His family turned off the lights and lay on the floor as previously instructed by security experts, and alerted the police, he said.
Last week he told how Dr Maria Dmitriyeva, 31, a whistleblowing female medic in Russia’s feared FSB security service, had fled abroad.
She claimed her sources said Putin will appoint brutal General Sergei ‘Armageddon’ Surovikin - now commander of his war campaign - as his defence minister.
She had predicted promotions for Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Putin ‘fixer’ Yevgeny Prigozhin as the Kremlin dictator surrounds himself with uber-loyalists.
She had worked for the Defence Ministry before the FSB and her patients were senior figures in this twilight world.
"Many of my colleagues and patients have access to state secrets," she said ahead of an interview with a major European broadcaster when she is expected to reveal more.
"I am against the war and I am against [Putin's] criminal power.
"I want to voice what my colleagues and patients [in the FSB] cannot…"
She told how some ‘siloviks’ [security apparatchiks] "managed to leave [Russia] using fake passports…."
She spoke of "discord" among Putin's top-brass over him handing power and state cash to Kadyrov and Prigozhin.
