Tensions between the United States and Russia are escalating together with the risk of a military confrontation in the Donbas region. Europe is the stage for a new war between Russian and Western spies. Here’s where they operate and who decided to respond
Spies and briefcases, assassins, saboteurs; diplomats summoned, expelled, threatened. If what is underway on European soil is not a new Cold War with Russia, it certainly looks like it.
The escalation is now transversal. In Ukraine it’s of the military variety, with hundreds of Russian troops amassed near the border and NATO on alert. It’s diplomatic, too, with the EU suspended between the Navalny case, the Nord Stream II gas pipeline bound for Germany and a hail of new American sanctions against Moscow for interfering in the presidential elections and for the Solar Winds cyberattack.
It’s also an intelligence war, where Europe is the chessboard of a no-holds-barred confrontation between Russian, European and American spies. The case of Walter Biot, a Navy officer arrested in Rome while selling NATO secrets to two Russian spies, is just the tip of the iceberg.
The latest news from the Eastern front comes from Andrej Babis’s Czech Republic. Relations between the Kremlin and its former satellite republic have been at their lowest in years. They arguably just sank even further, now that Mr Babis’ government has decided to expel sixteen Russian diplomats on charges of espionage. They stand accused of having played a part in the devastating explosion that in 2014 detonated a weapons depot in Vrbetice, 300 kilometers south of Prague, killing two employees.
The government says those diplomats are agents of the GRU, the Russian intelligence agency, and gave them 48 hours to leave the country. Two others are wanted. They are the Russian spies Alexander Petrov and Ruslav Boshirov, also from the GRU, accused by the British government of attempting to assassinate Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury.
This is not the first slap Babis hands out to Russian diplomacy. A year ago, in June 2020, two diplomats were expelled on charges of wanting to assassinate Czech politicians believed to be anti-Russian with a poison – ricin – carried in a briefcase.
The geopolitical West, too, ended up being a part of the European spy war. Alexander Lukashenko, the autocratic president of Belarus, is convinced that he has unveiled a plot hatched by the CIA to kill him and his family and to stir up a revolution in Minsk.
He was warned by Vladimir Putin’s main security agency, the FSS (Federal Security Service), which arrested two Belarusian men while collaborating with Lukashenko’s own secret service, the KGB. The first, Aleksandr Feduta, was Lukashenko’s spokesperson during his first election in 1994 before joining the opposition. The second, Yuras Zyankovich, has dual Belarusian and American citizenship, according to AP.
Hence, the plot: the Belarusian dictator said that the two of them had conducted the operation, that everything was planned and that they had discovered the evident work of foreign services; “most likely the CIA, or the FBI,” he said. A new decree has been announced to “avoid future coups d’etat“. Another crackdown on democracy in Minsk, “will be one of the main decisions of my quarter-century of presidency,” Lukashenko warned.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, guns are already smoking on the eastern border, where Russian spies have an axe to grind. A year ago in Kiev Valery Shaitanov, a general of the Ukrainian Security Service accused by the government of being an undercover agent of the FSS and of having received $ 200,000 for “planning terrorist attacks,” was handcuffed.
Today Moscow returns the favor, with a straw that can break the heavily-loaded camel back – i.e. tensions in the Donbas. It is not every day that you see a foreign consul general arrested as a spy. It happened to Alexander Sosonyuk, who found himself in detention on Friday, escorted by Kremlin spies.
Not just any spies, but the FSB’s, the agency that collected the inheritance of the famous KGB of which Vladimir Putin himself was an agent. The Russian government has no doubts, Sosonyuk was caught “red-handed” during a conference, receiving classified information. Also expelled, he has 72 hours to return to Kiev.
