French authorities have launched a criminal case over an alleged Kremlin murder plot against a well-known Russian human rights activist who has published damning exposés about Moscow’s abuses at home and in Ukraine.

Vladimir Osechkin, the founder of Gulagu.net, announced the probe Tuesday, publishing the corresponding court documents provided to him by prosecutors handling the case in the region surrounding the Atlantic coastal city of Biarritz, where he says an assassination attempt by Russian security services fell apart in spectacular fashion in September.

The French prosecutor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Osechkin’s group has long exposed abuses in the Russian penal system and security services, and more recently began to butt heads with Putin crony Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman behind a recruiting effort to send thousands of prison inmates to go fight in Ukraine. Osechkin’s Gulagu.net has detailed that effort, prompting lawyers for Prigozhin’s company to call on Russia’s prosecutor general to look into the human rights group, as well as the sudden appearance of a rival site called Gulagu.da, which publishes glowing testimonials about inmates recruited by Prigozhin’s Wagner Group.

Osechkin on Tuesday said, “Putin and his security services want to get revenge against me and kill me” for the damning investigations conducted by Gulagu.net. He said Russian security services had put the wheels in motion for his murder back in 2021, when they “began to choose perpetrators and organizers from among members of a criminal community in France and Spain that get support from Moscow.”

The court document he posted shows him listed as the plaintiff in a prosecution against unnamed individuals in an alleged organized criminal conspiracy to carry out murder. The notice sent to Osechkin at his Paris address also listed Spain as the location where the plot was hatched.

The conspiracy charges carry a minimum 5 year prison sentence.

Osechkin went public about the alleged assassination attempt back in September. After going away from home for the weekend with his family following warnings that he was the target of a Kremlin-ordered hit, he said, he’d been preparing dinner for his wife and kids when he accidentally foiled his own would-be killer.

“I was carrying plates to set for the children and in my peripheral vision, on one of the terraces, I saw a red dot moving in my direction over the terrace railing,” Osechkin said after revealing the plot at the time.

He and his family all fell to the floor and later hid in a safe room, and French authorities confirmed at the time that they were investigating death threats against him.

Osechkin said he’d been alerted to the murder plot by Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev days before it happened. The alleged hit against him, he said, was proof of “international terror” by Putin’s regime, with a long list of high-profile assassinations in recent years carried out on the orders of the Russian leader.

“And now, in the 21st century, we see how Vladimir Putin’s security 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 and outside of prisons for more than 20 years,” he wrote.

“I don’t know how much longer I will be able to 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.”