A military defector died in a hail of gunfire in Spain, then was hit by a car. In Lithuania, an opposition figure was repeatedly hit with a hammer. Journalist fell ill in Germany due to suspected poisoning.
Since President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, attacks and harassment against Russians, high profile and otherwise, have been blamed on Russian agents in Europe and elsewhere.
Despite Western attempts to dismantle Russia’s spy network, experts say the Kremlin still appears capable of pursuing people it deems traitors abroad to silence dissent. Says. Opponents of President Vladimir Putin are increasingly worried about the long arm of Moscow’s security forces, including in countries they once considered safe.
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“We had just escaped from Russia and it felt like we had escaped from a prison,” said Irina Dolinina, a journalist who works for Important Stories, an independent media outlet based in the Czech capital, Prague. Ta.
Dolinina and her colleague Alesha Malokhovskaya were harassed in 2023, sparking fears that they were under surveillance. They were sent threatening messages through comments on the media’s website and instructed not to go to the conference in Sweden. To drive home the point, the threats included ticket numbers, seat locations, and hotel reservations.
“I was wrong to think I would be safe here,” Drinina told The Associated Press.
Russian exile Maxim Kuzminov attends a press conference on Tuesday, September 5, 2023 in Kiev, Ukraine. Spanish police say the bullet-riddled body of a man found in a Spanish town was that of 33-year-old Kuzminov, who was on a Russian military plane. Last year, a helicopter crossed the front lines and arrived in Ukraine. Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, said Kuzminov became a “moral corpse” from the moment he planned the “dirty and horrible crime.” (AP Photo/Vladyslav Musiienko, File)
The Kremlin routinely denies pursuing opponents abroad, but has been accused of such attacks for decades.
The most famous incidents include the death of Leon Trotsky, a Soviet revolutionary defector and dissident who was attacked with an ice ax by Soviet agents in Mexico in 1940; One example is the death of Georgi Markov of the sect. After being stabbed with a poisoned umbrella in London in 1978.
Britain has also been the scene of other poisonings blamed on Russian security services under Putin. North Korean defector and former intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko died in 2006 after drinking tea containing radioactive polonium-210, and former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were left in critical condition, but in 2018 He was attacked with a Soviet-era nerve agent in 2010 and recovered. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied this. British involvement in the incident.
A full-scale crackdown is currently underway in Russia, with most of the Kremlin’s political opponents, independent journalists, and activists emigrating abroad. In addition to the accusations against the officials, there are also strong suspicions that the Russian government is increasingly targeting them.
Security expert Andrei Soldatov said that even though the scope of these individuals tracked by Russia “seems completely trivial at first glance,” Russian authorities “have the potential to return to Russia and completely destroy them.” This is because he believes that there is.
There are reports of exiles being persecuted not only in former Soviet Union countries with large Russian diaspora populations, but also in Europe and other countries.
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Activists and independent journalists have reported symptoms of suspected poisoning.
Investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko fell ill on a train from Munich to Berlin in 2022, after which German prosecutors announced they were investigating the incident as attempted murder.
Natalia Arno, director of the U.S.-based Free Russia Foundation, told The Associated Press that she still suffers from neurological damage after an alleged poisoning in Prague in May. She believes Russian security services tried to “silence” her because of her pro-democracy work.
In one particularly brutal incident, pilot Maksim Kuzminov was found shot, hit by a car, and his bullet-riddled body in La Cala, near the eastern port of Alicante, Spain. The threats against him surfaced shortly after he stole a Russian Mi-8 helicopter and flew it to Ukraine to defect in August.
Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, said Kuzminov, 33, became a “moral corpse” the moment he planned the “dirty and horrible crime.”
In March, Leonid Volkov, chief of staff to late opposition politician Alexei Navalny, suffered a broken arm in a hammer attack in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.
Lithuanian security officials said the attack was probably “organized and carried out by Russia.” On April 19, Polish police arrested two people on suspicion of attacking Volkov on the orders of foreign intelligence services.
During Putin’s decades in power, the Kremlin has repeatedly denied targeting enemies at home or abroad. The government has not commented on the poisoning charge, and Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on Volkov’s case, saying it was a matter for the Lithuanian Interior Ministry.
Even newly established anti-war groups are under Moscow’s scrutiny.
Russians in Stockholm, Sweden, who formed one of the first organizations to support Ukraine and political prisoners in May 2022, hold a portrait of President Putin labeled a “war criminal” outside the Russian embassy. burned.
Six months later, Russian authorities designated the group as an undesirable organization and threatened its members with fines and prison terms. Their relatives were visited by police at their homes in Russia and their personal information was compromised, members told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity due to safety concerns.
Russian Orthodox Tsargrad media suggested that members of the group could be scouted by foreign intelligence services and labeled “terrorists.” Pro-Kremlin media outlets warned of dire surprises if they continued to oppose the war.
A few days later, a group member named Marina, who was visiting relatives in St. Petersburg, said she was leaving a store when a police car stopped in front of her. Three men got out of her car, demanded her documents, forced her into her car, and drove to the police station with her siren blaring.
“I was really scared. How on earth did they know my exact location?” Marina told The Associated Press, declining to give her last name out of fear for her safety.
She was faced with leaked data and videos of the embassy protests, and investigators demanded that she identify other members of the group, reveal their sources of funding, and ask them about their views on the war. Some even questioned why she would leave Russia before her father’s birthday – revealing that they knew the identity of her family.
She was charged with an administrative violation, which usually carries a fine. As her police prepared to drive her to her parents’ apartment, Marina said she would “cooperate” if she wanted to be reunited with her family without fear of being detained. He said he was offered to become her informant.
“Russian intelligence services and the Russian regime are known to follow dissidents in the Russian diaspora in other countries and subject them to various types of harassment and espionage,” Swedish Security Service spokesman Fredrik Hultgren Friberg told the Associated Press. It’s a trick,” he said. .
Soldatov said the Kremlin was pursuing a wide range of dissidents because it feared pro-Western uprisings like those in Georgia and Ukraine, and to prevent seeds of dissent from growing into “new ones.” He said it was because he wanted to.
Even though the West expelled hundreds of Russian spies in a coordinated action after the Skripal poisoning in 2018 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russians abroad are worried that Russia will still be able to contact them. He says he is concerned about this.
Malokhovskaya, an investigative journalist in Prague, has received anonymous threats, including one suggesting closer surveillance: “We’ll find you wherever you walk your wheezing dog.” .
She and Drinina told the AP that they have experienced such observations in Russia, including after publishing an award-winning investigation into corruption within President Putin’s family.
After moving to Europe, Drinina said she initially thought she was experiencing “constant paranoia.” But when she receives anonymous threats and is followed on the streets of Prague, she realizes that her fears are well-founded.
Although neither journalist has concrete evidence that Russian security services targeted them, they believe that personal data such as flight information, passport numbers, home addresses, and physical surveillance were orchestrated by state actors. He said he believed it was likely.
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“I was really shocked that something like this was happening in Europe,” Drinina said.
A number of incidents that the West has blamed on the Kremlin have fueled speculation that Moscow could still blackmail Russians abroad, but not everyone is staying silent.
“This is not a reason for my resignation,” Malokhovskaya said. “That’s why I keep working.”
