Pizza vs. the SVR: How a Margherita Outed the Agents?

According to The Insider, even before their trip to Austria Kukla and Cherevik regularly had food delivered to the flat at 20 Tarusskaya Street, building 3 — the so-called „cookoo”, a training safe house of the Foreign Intelligence Service located on the grounds of military unit 28178. That is where language and acclimatization courses for „illegals” — officers being prepared for undercover work — take place. Records in courier-company databases preserved their orders: pizza, drinks and other small items — hardly training materials. 

Interestingly, The Insider reports that among Cherevik’s phone contacts appeared Svetlana Strelkovska — an instructor at the SVR academy, known in the trade as a „legend” of German-language operations. She advised agents preparing for missions to Austria, Germany and Switzerland. In short, Olga and Maksim not only ate at the „cookoo”, they also consulted the right people. Had it not been for those orders, their story might have looked like a routine replacement of personnel — after all, the TASS office in Vienna had been empty since June 2024, when Austria expelled the previous correspondent pair, Ivan Popov and Arina Davidian, suspected of working for the SVR. 

And this was not the first such embarrassment. As early as 2024 The Insider described a prior case in which Russian agents were again tripped up by… pizza. In that story investigators traced activity to 17 Vilnyusskaya Street in Moscow, part of GRU infrastructure, after analyzing a leaked food-delivery database. It turned out that orders placed regularly by agents pointed not only to the training building itself but also revealed access codes and hours of operational activity. The databases contained information on dozens of GRU and SVR officers, including academy instructors and trainees — all thanks to ordinary pizza receipts. One of the main characters in that compromise was Andrei Liashkevich, whose orders led investigators straight to the agents« training site. The scale of exposed information was so large that Russian services internally reminded their officers of the ban on using courier apps at operational addresses. As the Kukla–Cherevik episode shows, however, not everyone took those reminders seriously. In response to increasingly frequent data leaks — from courier firms to telecoms — the Russian Duma in 2024 adopted tougher penalties for the „illegal use of personal data.” The law came into force in 2025 and, in practice, makes it harder for independent journalists« investigations that have often relied on analyzing publicly available databases and leaks.      

The pizza episode is not just a funny anecdote — it’s also a symbolic summary of the entire Russian school of cover operations, where carefully constructed „legends” can be undone by something as trivial as a food delivery app order. It’s not an isolated case, either: in the Netherlands in 2018 and in Germany in 2021, investigators uncovered GRU networks thanks to courier and transport company data that revealed operational addresses.

And, to make things even more ironic — since 2002, FSB officers in Russia have been formally forbidden from ordering food or goods to official addresses, precisely because of similar embarrassments (according to Russian archival sources). Apparently, the SWR and GRU never implemented such effective bans… or perhaps Olga and Maksim simply never read the memo.

Their blunder becomes even more amusing when viewed against the historical backdrop. During the Cold War, TASS correspondents were considered one of the most classic covers for the KGB’s First Chief Directorate — the CIA described TASS as a „standard cover” for agents at the UN and in Western capitals (according to the CIA Reading Room), and Time magazine wrote as early as 1951 about „tassmen” who were „more spies than reporters.”

In the 21st century, the strategy has been modernized. The Kremlin no longer relies solely on elegant correspondents at the UN — „independent” commentators, operators of fake media outlets, and influencers have joined the game. According to MI5, the media sector is one of the key vectors of Russian intelligence activity, and Germany’s BfV has long warned about „fake editorial offices” used for reconnaissance and influence operations. In the US, the FBI dismantled the so-called „New York TASS network,” while the Department of Justice exposed the involvement of RT and Sputnik in financing and supporting influence operations. 

The case of Kukla and Cherevik is like a slapstick version of a classic espionage operation. Instead of encrypted messages and clandestine meetings, we have pizza, a Delivery Club number, and courier data. And while the whole story sounds like the plot of a bad spy comedy, its consequences are real. The scale of data leaks and resulting embarrassments led Russia in 2024 to tighten its laws — new regulations that came into force in 2025 are meant to make it harder for journalists and investigators to use publicly available databases to expose such cases.

Olga Kukla and Maksim Cherevik are therefore more than just the butt of online jokes about „pizza spies.” They are symbols of an era — one in which Russian journalistic covers still exist, but increasingly stumble not over counterintelligence, but over their own habits.