After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, a mass expulsion of Russians, especially undercover intelligence officers, from Europe began. Now, however, Russian spies are returning, many of them third-country nationals.
The interception of a confidential conversation between senior German officers discussing military aid to Ukraine has drawn attention to the activities of Russian agents. It is now on the offensive after several failures of the Kremlin’s intelligence apparatus, notes AFP.
The agency recalls that the first year of Russia’s war against Ukraine was marked by the “mass expulsion” to Europe of Russian spies who worked under diplomatic cover. Thus, according to experts, the Kremlin has lost hundreds of spies.
“This affected operations,” investigative journalist Andrey Soldatov, founder of the specialized site Agentura.ru, told AFP.
Even before that, Russian intelligence services – from the military intelligence GRU to the successor of the legendary KGB, the Federal Security Service to the foreign intelligence SVR – fatally underestimated Ukraine’s ability and will to resist. As a result, when they invaded the neighboring country on February 24, 2022, Russian troops probably expected to defeat it in a few days, or simply to be greeted “with bread and salt” – something that apparently did not happen.
Nor was Russian intelligence able to prevent an attempted riot by mercenaries from the Wagner Group, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, last June. Although the “Kremlin Chef” subsequently died just two months later in a plane crash that few doubt was deliberately caused.
However, the Russian intelligence services “managed to pull themselves together and now we are observing more and more operations conducted in Europe, disinformation, the liquidation (of people) or the transfer of agents, espionage,” Soldatov points out. He spoke of a very great effort on their part.
Russian spies were kicked out of Europe. Now they are back, summarizes in turn in. “Financial Times”.
The British daily commented that Russia has aggressively renewed its espionage war with the West, and Moscow’s release of a phone conversation in which senior German air force officers discussed sending cruise missiles to Ukraine is just another chilling example.
“The cat and mouse game is back,” the Financial Times quoted a Western intelligence official as saying. A colleague of his warns that “Russian (espionage) activities … are as much, if not more, than during the Cold War.” “Russian intelligence is a huge machine and it’s doing what it always does again,” added a third Western intelligence official.
AFP notes that the Russian secret services have made themselves the talk of the town in recent weeks with undeniable success.
At the end of last month, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, admitted that Russia had obtained in advance the plans for the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer, the failure of which was a severe blow to Kiev.
“Another trophy” for Russian intelligence was the audio recording of the conversation between German officers, which was released on March 1 by the editor-in-chief of Russian state television RT (RT) Margarita Simonyan. The case embarrassed Germany’s allies and caused a state scandal in Berlin.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, intelligence has not ceased to be a priority for the Kremlin, according to AFP. It has received even greater attention and resources since the rise to power of President Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB agent who served in communist East Germany in the 1980s.
Weakened by the mass expulsion of their agents in Europe, the Russian authorities “already rely on foreign citizens”, explains Andrey Soldatov. “We see Serbs, we see Bulgarians and citizens of several other countries, for example Austrians, participating in Russian operations,” he added.
The former director of French military intelligence, reserve general Christophe Gomard, commented that Russian intelligence services were “constantly adapting. And, without any doubt, they took advantage of Ukrainian refugees and Russian exiles, among whom there are agents.”
According to research by the Royal Joint Services Institute, the GRU reformed its system of conducting operations and employed, in some cases through shell companies, people with various profiles, often with no connection to official institutions and who were therefore difficult to detect by counterintelligence. The British think tank is leading by example with students from Balkan countries, Africa and even Latin America.
Beyond the usual goal of gathering classified information, experts say, these agents are tasked with other tasks: destabilizing European societies, weakening support for Ukraine and sowing divisions among allies. The leaked German military tape is a prime example of this strategy.
Russian services “are very good because Westerners have been completely naive since 1991 (when the Soviet Union collapsed), they don’t understand the Russian threat, they don’t have Russian-speaking experts and staff,” warns one of the study’s authors, Oleksandr Danilyuk.
General Gomar added that “today the real problem of the Westerners is that they are not very aware of the risks and show too much confidence and laziness, which led to the interception (of the conversation) of the Germans”. Officers simply did not conduct their discussion over encrypted communication channels simply because they were more complicated to use, he believes.
For Soldatov, however, the main factor is psychological: “The Russian army is in a state of war, while the Europeans technically live in peace. And to change military culture in peacetime is really very difficult.”
In recent years, Russian intelligence, which inherited the legendary status of the Soviet-era KGB, has taken a number of blows, including allowing Western services to pre-empt plans for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and apparently underestimating its armed forces. Subsequently, however, it seems to have begun to adjust to the new international environment reminiscent of the Cold War period, as well as Russia as a whole. So, despite the superiority of Western powers in a number of respects and the strengthening of cooperation between their services, Russian intelligence remains a secretive and dangerous adversary, which, as the Financial Times reports, is capable of “spectacular operations”.
#Banished #Europe #Russian #spies #return #battle
