Kremlin critics say Russia is targeting its enemies abroad

The military deserter died under a hail of gunfire and then hit by a car in Spain. The opponent was repeatedly hit with a hammer in Lithuania. The journalist fell ill due to alleged poisoning in Germany.

Since President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, attacks and harassment of Russians, prominent or not, have been blamed on Moscow’s intelligence agents across Europe and elsewhere.

Despite attempts by Western governments to dismantle Russian spy networks, experts say the Kremlin is apparently still able to pursue perceived traitors abroad in an attempt to silence dissent. Putin’s opponents increasingly fear the long arm of Moscow’s security services, even in countries they once thought were safe.

“We had just escaped from Russia and we were under the illusion that we had escaped from prison,” said journalist Irina Dolinina, who works for the independent media Important Stories, based in Prague, the Czech capital.

Dolinina and her colleague Alesya Marokhovskaya were harassed in 2023, leading to fears that they were under surveillance. They were sent threatening messages through comments on the media outlet’s website and told not to travel to a conference in Sweden. To underscore this point, the threat included their airline ticket numbers, seat locations, and hotel reservations.

“It was a mistake for us to think that we are safe here,” Dolinina told The Associated Press.

The Kremlin, which routinely denies persecuting its opponents abroad, has been blamed for such attacks for decades.

The most famous cases include the Soviet revolutionary turned exiled dissident Leon Trotsky, who was murdered in 1940 in Mexico after being attacked with an ice ax by a Soviet agent, and Georgi Markov, a dissident who worked for the Bulgarian language service of the BBC, who died. in 1978 in London after being pricked with a poison-tipped umbrella.

Britain was the scene of other poisonings attributed to Russian security services during Putin’s rule. Defector and former intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko died after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 in 2006, and former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter became seriously ill but recovered following a Soviet-era nerve agent attack in 2018. The Kremlin repeatedly denied involvement in the British cases.

Now, with a large-scale internal repression underway inside Russia, most of the Kremlin’s political opponents, independent journalists and activists have moved abroad. There are strong suspicions, as well as accusations from officials, that Moscow is increasingly targeting them.

The breadth of individuals pursued by Russia, “even if they look and sound completely insignificant,” is because Russian authorities believe they “could return to the country and destroy it completely,” said security expert Andrei Soldatov.

There are multiple reports of persecuted exiles not only in former Soviet Union countries with a large Russian diaspora but also in Europe and beyond.

Activists and independent journalists have reported symptoms suspected of poisoning.

Investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko fell ill on a train from Munich to Berlin in 2022, and German prosecutors later said they were investigating it as an attempted murder.

Natalia Arno, director of the U.S.-based Free Russia Foundation, told the AP that she still suffers from nerve damage after a suspected 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, the bullet-riddled body of pilot Maksim Kuzminov was found in La Cala, Spain, near the eastern port of Alicante, after being shot and run over by a car. The threats against him emerged shortly after he stole a Russian Mi-8 helicopter in August, took it to Ukraine and defected.

Kuzminov, 33, became a “moral corpse” the moment he planned his “dirty, terrible crime,” said Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service.

In March, Leonid Volkov, chief of staff to the late opposition politician Alexei Navalny, suffered a broken arm in a hammer attack in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.

Lithuania’s security service said the attack was likely “organized and implemented by Russia.” On April 19, Polish police detained two people on suspicion of attacking Volkov on the orders of a foreign intelligence service.

In the decades that Putin has been in power, the Kremlin has denied on multiple occasions that it is attacking its enemies at home and abroad. He has not commented on the alleged poisonings and Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, declined to comment on Volkov’s case, saying it was a matter for Lithuania’s Interior Ministry.

Even nascent peace groups find themselves in Moscow’s crosshairs.

Russians in Stockholm, Sweden, who in May 2022 formed one of the first organizations to support Ukraine and political prisoners, burned an effigy of Putin branded a “war criminal” in front of the Russian embassy.

Six months later, Russian authorities designated the group as an undesirable organization and threatened its members with fines and imprisonment. Their relatives were visited by police at their homes in Russia and their personal information was leaked, members told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety.

Russian Orthodox media outlet Tsargrad suggested the group’s members could be recruited by foreign intelligence services and called them “terrorists.” The pro-Kremlin media warned them of a nasty surprise if they continued to oppose the war.

Days later, while visiting relatives in St. Petersburg, a member of the group named Marina said a police car stopped right in front of her as she left a store. Three men got out, asked for her documents, forced her into the car and drove to a police station with the siren blaring.

“It was really scary. How the hell did they know my exact location?” Marina told the AP, refusing to give her last name because she fears for her safety.

Confronted with the leaked data and video of the embassy protest, investigators demanded that he identify other members of the group, reveal their funding source, and ask his opinion on the war. One even asked why he was leaving Russia before his father’s birthday, making it clear that they knew the identity of his family.

She was charged with an administrative violation, normally punishable by a fine. As police prepared to take her to her parents’ apartment, they suggested that she “cooperate” and become an informant if she wanted to see her family again without fear of being detained, Marina said.

“It is a known modus operandi of Russian intelligence and the Russian regime to follow opponents in the Russian diaspora in other countries and subject them to different types of harassment or intelligence work,” Fredrik Hultgren-Friberg, a spokesman for the Security Service, told AP. Swedish. .

Soldatov said the Kremlin is pursuing a wide range of opponents because it fears pro-Western uprisings like those in Georgia and Ukraine and wants to prevent seeds of dissent from becoming “something new.”

Although Western countries expelled hundreds of Russian spies in coordinated actions after the Skripal poisoning in 2018 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russians abroad say they are worried that Moscow can still communicate with them.

Marokhovskaya, the investigative journalist in Prague, received anonymous threats, including one indicating close surveillance that said: “We will find her wherever she walks her hissing dog.”

She and Dolinina told the AP they experienced that kind of observation inside Russia, even after publishing award-winning investigations into corruption in Putin’s family.

After moving to Europe, Dolinina said she initially thought she was experiencing “constant paranoia.” However, when she received anonymous threats and was followed through the streets of Prague, she realized that her fears were well founded.

None of the journalists have concrete evidence that Russian security services targeted them, but they said they believe personal data (flight information, passport numbers and home addresses) and physical surveillance were likely orchestrated by a state actor.

“I was very surprised that this was happening in Europe,” Dolinina said.

Although the numerous incidents that the West attributes to the Kremlin fuel speculation that Moscow may still intimidate Russians abroad, not all have been silenced.

“This is not the reason to resign,” Marokhovskaya said. “It’s the reason to keep working.”