Spy games: The expulsion of diplomats exposed Putin's monstrous secret network in the world

France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden... Europe is expelling Russian diplomats en masse. There are already more than 400 who are on the global blacklist and all of them are targeted by spies.

Russia, before Putin and with Putin, has used its diplomatic network to strengthen its espionage network. The method is simple. They present themselves as cultural or commercial attachés and weave contacts at all levels. However, the mission of each of them in the countries to which they are sent is only one: to collect information and to infiltrate high levels of government.

The unprecedented wave of expulsions of Russian diplomats from European capitals is not only a symbolic act, although reversible, it is part of a decades-long battle to guard the dividing line between espionage and diplomacy

John Sawers, former head of the M16, said last year that he suspected that the West only captured 10% of Russian espionage.

Until last Friday, among the EU Member States, only Malta, Cyprus and Hungary had so far refused to send any Russian “diplomats”.

Renowned former French diplomat François Heisbourz assured in dialogue with The Guardian that there is a clear and valid distinction between a diplomat and a spy, and that those expelled from Europe were not chosen at random, but because there is evidence that they violate the Vienna Convention, the code governing legitimate diplomacy. In addition to espionage, it could also be about the spread of disinformation on social media.

“If you send messages on Twitter insulting the host country government, if you follow the 'wolf warrior' diplomacy undertaken by Chinese diplomats, that may fall under that definition of making you persona non grata,” Heisbourg said.

Heisbourg said that expulsions are an art. “Obviously, it's easier to keep track of the spy you know than the one you don't know. Once its existence is known, it becomes a useful counterspy. If you don't know who they are, you have a problem.” He recalled that during the so-called Farewell affair, in the 1980s, a KGB defector, Vladimir Vetrov, handed almost 4,000 secret documents to DST, the French internal secret service, showing how Russia had penetrated the West to steal its technology. Vetrov also provided a list of 250 intelligence officers stationed under legal cover in embassies around the world.

Only following Vetrov's arrest in Moscow, France, based on the files provided by Vetrov, did he act to expel 40 diplomats, two journalists and five commercial officers. Heisbourg was involved in the management of the case and recalls: “Even then, it was useful to retain some names, so we had a list A and a list B that we kept in reserve in case the Russians took countervailing measures. We let the Russians know that if they made a counterpart, they would take a much bigger blow.”

Distrust of commercial, military and cultural “aggregates” is growing in the democracies of the world. Unlike other delegations with more democratic representativeness, the titles that appear on their business cards are only a facade. The main function of these diplomats is to frequent political, business, journalistic and cultural corridors in order to obtain sensitive information. The network has been armed since the time when the Soviet Union placed control of its international relations with agents of the KGB (Committee for State Security, for its acronym in Russian).

After the collapse of the Soviet experiment in Russia, the image washing of the KGB came into operation. His heiress would only change his name: it was renamed FSB (Federal Security Service, for its acronym in Russian), after several restructures in its organization chart. It depends on President Vladimir Putin, who was a spy during the final years of the Cold War in East Germany. It operates in the same building as its predecessor and employs around 300,000 secret agents. An army.

Since the 1980s, the proportion of spies operating within the Russian diplomatic service is higher than in most countries.

Heisbourz wonders, for example, why 290 Russian diplomats continue to operate in neutral Austria, even after the Foreign Ministry, after days of hesitation, expelled four diplomats. By way of comparison, Austria has about 30 diplomats operating in Moscow. It is true that large countries have larger embassies - an excellent example is the US embassy in Baghdad - and some of the Russian diplomats in Vienna - possibly 100 - are attached to the many UN institutions in Austria, such as the UN Nuclear Watchdog Agency, the IAEA. But the imbalance of Russian and Austrian interests in each other's countries is, at best, striking.

Poland may also wonder, in retrospect, why after expelling 45 diplomats on 23 March, it had granted diplomatic status to so many Russians in the first place. Stanisław Żaryn, spokesman for the coordinating minister of special services, has justified the expulsions: “We are neutralizing the Russian special services network in our country”. He claimed that half of the expelled diplomats were direct employees of the Russian secret services and the other half were involved in operations of hostile influence.

“Russia uses diplomacy not to keep in touch with its partners, but to promote false claims and propaganda statements against the West,” Żaryn said. In total, the 45 Russians expelled account for approximately half of the Russian diplomatic staff in Warsaw.

Two other countries at the forefront of the supply of heavy weapons to Ukraine - Slovakia and the Czech Republic - have also recently been on the front line of espionage with Moscow.

On 30 March, Bratislava expelled 35 diplomats, one of the largest expulsions of the current wave.

Just a fortnight earlier, on March 14, Slovakia arrested four people suspected of spying for Moscow, and expelled three Russian diplomats in response. Russia had paid the suspects “tens of thousands of euros” for sensitive or classified information. The quality of this information is disputed, but one of the two accused men was pro-rector and head of the security and defense department of the Armed Forces Academy of the northern city of Liptovsky Mikulas.

It was also reported that there have been contacts since 2013 with four officers working for the Russian military intelligence agency GRU. One of them was Lieutenant Colonel Sergey Solomasov, a GRU spy. Slovak intelligence filmed Solomasov smoking and talking in a park with Bohuš Garbár, a contributor to the now closed conspiracy website Hlavné Správy. In the video he tells Garbár: “Moscow has decided that you will be a 'hunter' of two types of people: those who love Russia and want to cooperate, who want money and have confidential information. The second group is his acquaintances who may or may not be thinking about working for Russia. I need political information and communication between countries, within NATO and the EU.”

The Czechs also have reason to doubt the good faith of the Russian diplomat. In 2014, a mysterious but massive explosion occurred in a couple of remote Czech arms warehouses, including one in Vrbětice, near the Slovak border, resulting in two deaths. At that time, Ukraine had been on the arms market to fight Russia in Donbas. It was not clear whether the cause of the explosions was sabotage or incompetence, and the case went cold. But then investigations by the British police, as well as the open source investigative medium Bellingcat, revealed the identity of two alleged GRU agents. These were Ruslan Boshirov (whose real name is Anatoliy Chepiga) and Alexander Petrov (Alexander Mishkin).

The Guardian details that these same aliases were allegedly given by two Russians who had visited a hotel near Vrbětice just before the 2014 explosion. Intelligence sources suggested that the planned arms shipments belonged to EMCO, a company owned by Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev, who was poisoned in a luxury restaurant in Sofia in April 2015, just months after the explosion in the Czech Republic.

An investigation conducted in 2019 by Bellingcat stated that another senior GRU official, Denis Sergeev (alias “Sergey Fedotov”), was in Bulgaria at the time of Gebrev's poisoning, which he survived.

Sergeev would also have been in the United Kingdom at the time of the novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer who had spied for Britain, in Salisbury, England.

After the war crimes in Bucha were revealed, Germany expelled 40 Russian diplomats, France 35, Spain 25, Slovenia 33, Italy - which had cast out two Russian spies in 2021 - selected 30 others. Lithuania decided to expel Alexey Isakov, the Russian ambassador himself. As a parting gift, someone stained the lake in front of the embassy blood red.

Some, such as Belgium (expelled 21) and Holland (17) took action before news of the Bucha massacre began to circulate.

The expulsion of spies on this scale is unprecedented. This is more than double the number expelled in 2018, when 28 Western countries returned 153 suspected spies to Moscow in response to Russia's attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal. The latest expulsions are “exceptional” and “should have occurred a long time ago,” Marc Polymeropoulos, who led CIA operations in Europe and Eurasia until 2019, told The Economist. “Europe is its historic playground and its diplomatic personnel have always been confused with that of intelligence agents.”

KEEP READING: