The Moscow grave of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in jail. Russia has used Interpol to pursue an American-born client of his.  

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Facing trial in Russia over the theft of a street-art drawing valued by its creator at $1.55, Nikita Kulachenkov, a Russian forensic accountant involved in anticorruption work, fled to Lithuania to avoid what he decided was a doomed battle against trumped-up charges.
What he did not realize was that Russia’s reach these days extends far beyond its borders. Arriving in Cyprus from Lithuania in January to join his mother for a holiday, Mr. Kulachenkov was stopped at airport passport control, questioned for hours by immigration officials and then taken in handcuffs to a police detention center.
“They told me there was a problem with Russia and kept asking me what crime I had committed,” Mr. Kulachenkov recalled. Cypriot immigration and police officers seemed as mystified as he was, he said, by a note in their computer systems that described him as a wanted criminal requiring immediate arrest.
The wanted notice had been put there in August last year by Russia, where the theft of millions and even billions of dollars by the politically connected goes mostly unpunished but where the alleged theft of a street sweeper’s all-but-worthless drawing has been the focus of a lengthy investigation involving some of the country’s most senior law enforcement officials.
The arrest demand, known as a “diffusion,” had gone out to Cyprus and 50 other countries through the international police organization, Interpol. It had not been endorsed by Interpol, which is “strictly forbidden” by its Constitution from any action of a “political character,” but nonetheless labeled the 34-year-old anticorruption activist as a criminal in databases around the world.
Determined to punish domestic opponents who flee abroad, as well as non-Russians whose lives and finances it wants to disrupt, Moscow has developed an elaborate and well-funded strategy in recent years of using — critics say abusing — foreign courts and law enforcement systems to go after its enemies.
Some countries, including Russia, “work really hard to get Interpol alerts” against political enemies, said Jago Russell, the chief executive of Fair Trials International, a human rights group in London, because “this helps give credibility to their own prosecution and undermines the reputation of the accused.”
“It is also potentially a good threat to use against people still in the country: ‘You may be able to leave, but don’t assume you will be safe,’” he added.
The efforts have often fallen flat in the end, but have succeeded in tying up their targets in legal knots for months and years.
Acting on a Russian request, a British court, for example, froze the worldwide assets of Sergei Pugachev, a former close friend of President Vladimir V. Putin’s who fell out with the Kremlin in a squabble over property and fled to Britain, then France.

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