Before being busted last year, accused Russian spy Sergey Cherkasov lived a life worthy of Hollywood.

But the 37-year-old comes off as more Ace Ventura and less James Bond.

After posing as a Brazilian national at Johns Hopkins University, Cherkasov was busted en route to a new job at The Hague — and he was in possession of a laptop containing the details of his cover.

“He carried a laptop with a script about himself? That’s bad trade-craft,” Aliia Roza, who was an operative with the Russian spy agency FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation), told The Post.

“The idea is to build a perfect legend [spy-lingo for a backstory] and commit it to memory,” added Roza.

“If he is a model of others in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence program, the quality and training of deep-cover agents there has seriously declined,” Robin Dreeke, a former FBI agent, told The Post. “He was highly unprofessional and way below typical standards of the past.”

Known as Victor Muller Ferreira to classmates at Johns Hopkins University’s Washington, DC, campus, Cherkasov pursued a graduate degree in international relations from 2018 until 2020.

According to an indictment, filed in federal court on March 24 by the Justice Department, Ferreira was no ordinary student. He is believed to have been a so-called “illegal”: a spy without diplomatic immunity, who lives among ordinary Americans as if he is one of them.

The ruse apparently started back in 2010, when according to Brazilian court files obtained by the Washington Post, Cherkasov, entered that country on a legitimate visa.

There, operatives are said to have set him up with a bogus birth certificate, driver’s license and passport‚ all under his new identity as Ferreira.

He apparently enlisted the help of a Brazilian woman who could “help … obtain identity documents.” Greased by the gift of a $400 Swarovski necklace, she allowed him to cut corners on obtaining official documents — and gave him bragging rights with his handlers.

“She is quite religious and believes that helping people in need is what will deliver her to paradise after death,” Cherkasov gloated by email, according to the indictment. “I believe she can be used for the purposes of our work, related to documentation.”

By 2014, Cherkasov was posing as a citizen of Brazil when he enrolled at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, to study political science. There, according to the Irish Times, he taught English to foreign students before graduating in 2018.

After returning to Brazil, he worked for a travel agency — possibly owned by a GRU comrade — and Cherkasov used his undergrad degree to worm inside the Hopkins program.

In celebration of getting “into one of the top schools in the world,” according to the indictment, he emailed his undercover colleagues: “Victory belongs to all of us man … Today we f—king drink!!!”

Attending Hopkins on a student visa, the indictment maintains, Cherkasov was also procuring secrets for the GRU (aka the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation).

He went on a school trip to Israel, where he scored names of officials from the US and Israel. Soon after, Cherkasov met his handler in the Philippines.

At least one classmate thought something was off. The student, a former naval officer fluent in Russian, befriended Cherkasov and the two agreed to go for a motorcycle ride.

But when the former officer asked if Cherkasov was Russian, the Washington Post reported, “He really stepped back from answering questions at that point.”

In November 2021, months before Russia invaded Ukraine, Cherkasov managed to obtain and share information about US concerns regarding “Russian preparations near its border with Ukraine,” according to the indictment.

He allegedly relayed a belief that “the administration is thinking that the situation in Ukraine can’t get any better before it gets worse.”

Cherkasov also found out that a person, who appears to be a diplomatic official, stated in a report, “Russians are tired and will not negotiate.”

As per Dreeke, those seeming tidbits are not trivial: “All governments are trying to cover blind spots and [these revelations] contribute to that. Little bits of information, gathered by a large network of people, paint an entire picture.”

Cherkasov surely believed that his biggest scores were yet to come.

In March 2022, armed with his graduate degree from Hopkins, he was to begin an internship at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

The Holland-based institution prosecutes war crimes, including charges against Russia. In March, the Hague issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of, among other war crimes, the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.

Dreeke, who hosts the podcast “Forged By Trust,” sees good reason for Cherkasov’s assignment: “Looking at his tasking at The Hague, the Russians looked to be assessing what [Americans] know, our intel assessments and policies regarding Russia.”

Had he pulled it off, Cherkasov could have gotten access to computers with sensitive information.

What he didn’t know is that, while he was spying on America, America was spying on him.

Cherkasov left Brazil and arrived in Amsterdam — en route to The Hague — on March 31, 2022, believing he had cleared an elaborate security check.

At the airport, according to the Washington Post, Dutch agents, working with information from the FBI, asked him questions and went through his drives. He was then put back on a flight to Brazil.

En route, he messaged a Russian girlfriend, asking her to get him help from the GRU.

But help was in short supply.

Brazilian authorities laid in wait and apprehended Cherkasov after his flight landed.

In his possession were hard drives that allegedly contained information of dead drops in the Brazilian jungle, money transfer details, correspondence with GRU bosses — and a carefully concocted backstory for his life as Ferreira.

It described his deceased mother and his aversion to fish because he had grown up near a port (Cherkasov himself hails from Russia’s waterfront city of Kaliningrad). The story went so far as to imagine kids taunting him with the nickname “Gringo” due to his light skin.

Cherkasov has been in jail in Brazil for eight months, serving a 15-year sentence for crimes related to document fraud.

Calder Walton, author of the upcoming “Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West,” believes that this bumble might be indicative of other shortfalls: “There is an impression that Russians are masterful spies. [After Cherkasov], we need to rethink the narrative.”

Cherkasov’s handler, according to Walton, looks particularly bad: “The handler is in a colossal amount of trouble; Putin will take this personal. The handler, I think, would be scared for his life. In Western services, we make mistakes, learn our lessons and get on with our lives. In Russia this is not the case.”

As for the spy, Roza, who now sells empowerment advice to women via a service called Super Lady, expects the worse. “He failed, he’s a loser, he’ll have a miserable life. Every agent is a tiny ant to Russia. Nobody cares about you.”

And if Cherkasov spills state secrets? “I hope he is not that stupid. He will be terminated but not shot,” Roza said. “He will die of a heart attack or poisoning or in a car accident.”

Russia maintains that he is a wanted narco trafficker. America has now charged him with counts that include visa fraud, wire fraud and that Cherkasov was in the US, between 2017 and 2020, while working at the direction and control of the Russian Federation.

Then there is the possible unintended consequence of the accused spy’s arrest.

One line of thinking is that the public reveal of Cherkasov’s capture could have kicked off the detainment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Last week, soon after the indictment’s release, Gershkovich was charged with espionage, which the Journal denies.

Author Walton told The Post, “I think it’s entirely possible that [Gershkovich] … will be used for a trade.”