He was a far-right donor without a penny... and he was also a Russian spy

He lived with his sick mother and never had a steady job. He had no obvious source of income and, according to his uncle, he even registered for social assistance subsidies as a caregiver worthy of State aid.

However, Bohus Garbar, with little luck and just over 50 years old, managed to donate thousands of euros to extreme right-wing Kremlin-related political parties in Slovakia. He also volunteered as a contributor to an anti-system website famous for recycling Russian propaganda.

His family and friends are puzzled.

“He was definitely not in a position to support any political party,” said Garbar's uncle, Bohuslav Garbar, a retired computer programmer from the family's hometown of Kosice, 80 kilometers from Slovakia's eastern border with Ukraine.

A surveillance video by the Slovak security service, released in early March, provides at least the beginning of an explanation: there you can see your nephew receiving instructions and two 500 euro banknotes, a small part of what, according to the authorities, were tens of thousands of euros in payments, from an officer of the Russian military intelligence posing as a diplomat at the Moscow embassy in Bratislava, the Slovak capital.

“I told Moscow that you are a good boy,” Russian spy Sergei Solomasov, his Slovak recruit, is heard saying before explaining that Moscow would like Bohus Garbar to act as a “hunter” in search of influential people willing to cooperate with Russia.

For years, European intelligence agencies have been warning about the clandestine activities of Russian spies, while being suspicious of those who were supporters of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. Moscow has said time and again that this is paranoid “Russophobia”, which is its response to almost all foreign criticism.

However, the invasion of Ukraine, accompanied by a barrage of obvious lies, gave reason to the darkest Western suspicions and accelerated efforts to root out hidden networks of spies and their recruits.

Slovakia, a small Slavic nation with a very pro-Western government, but also with great reserves of genuine sympathy towards Russia, shows in a microcosm how the Kremlin has tried to gain influence and sow discord in the former communist strip of Eastern Europe through the use of spies, paid helpers, extreme nationalists right and media that misinform.

“We always suspected this happening, but now we have evidence,” said Daniel Milo, director of a unit in the Slovak Ministry of the Interior charged with monitoring and countering misinformation. “This is a clear example of how the Russians operate.”

Garbar, he added, “is just the tip of the iceberg. We still don't know how many other Garbars are out there.”

Last year, the Slovak military intelligence agency recorded the video of Garbar's appointment with Solomasov, the Russian spy, as part of a lengthy investigation. Solomasov was expelled from the country earlier last month, as were more than 30 Russian diplomats recently expelled from Bratislava, as well as many more from other European capitals.

Garbar, arrested and charged with espionage and bribery, has been released pending trial. The former vice-rector of the Slovak military academy was also accused of betraying his country in exchange for Russian money.

Authorities say they both confessed and are now cooperating with investigators.

“They are talking, talking and talking and this has to make the Russian network very nervous in Slovakia,” said Jaroslav Nad, Slovak Defense Minister.

Russia has not commented on Garbar's liaison with Russian military intelligence, but called Solomasov's expulsion “unfounded”.

While an unlikely enabler, Garber proved to be a valuable conduit that donated large sums of money to the nationalist parties adept at Moscow. One of the beneficiaries was ultra-nationalist politician Marian Kotleba, sentenced this month to six months in prison suspended and stripped of his seat in Parliament for using Nazi-themed symbols.

After winning the regional governor election in 2013, Kotleba placed a banner in front of his office: “Yankees, go home! STOP NATO!”

Official records show that Garbar donated 10,000 euros (about $10,850) to Kotleba, a xenophobic party, before the 2016 parliamentary elections, making it its second largest donor. One of the slogans of Kotleba's campaign for those elections was: “For the Slavic Brotherhood, Against a War with Russia!” In 2018, Garbar donated another 4500 euros (about 4,880 dollars) to one of Kotleba's associated parties that was also related to Russia.

The researchers also analyzed Garbar's work as an unpaid contributor and translator of Hlavne Spravy or Main News. In early March, the Slovak authorities shut down the website, which calls itself the “conservative daily”, for unspecified “harmful activity”, shortly after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It still works, on a smaller scale, on Facebook, which Victor Breiner, adviser to the Slovak Defense Minister, described as “the main space there is now for Kremlin propaganda”.

In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Main News repeatedly repeated the Kremlin's arguments and mocked US warnings about an upcoming attack on Ukraine as “endless hysteria” and instead blamed NATO for rising tensions.

Robert Sopko, founder and editor of Main News, which he runs from his apartment in Kosice, dismissed the video of the security service (first published by a competing and liberal media outlet, Dennik N) as a “spy parody” and said he knew nothing about the paid work of his volunteer for the Russian military intelligence. “He surprised us all, everyone we know him,” he said.

Sopko assured that Main News was not too pro-Russian, although he admitted that “perhaps we prefer Russia a little more” to counter what he called “American propaganda” published elsewhere. He also acknowledged that for four years his staff included Yevgeny Palcev, a Russian resident in Slovakia with ties to the state media in Moscow, who wrote very pro-Kremlin articles for the website under a pseudonym.

In 2018 he stopped being a collaborator. “We liked Russia, but not like that. Not so much,” Sopko recalled.

The journalist commented that he had known Garbar for 30 years and insisted that his old friend only wrote occasional articles about China. Officials say otherwise. “I was very involved in writing about many things other than China” and in spreading “the classic propaganda speech in favor of Russia,” said Nad, Slovak Defense Minister.

Miroslava Sawiris, an expert on misinformation and adviser to the Slovak government's Security Council, said the Main News website was “quite sophisticated and didn't just talk nonsense.” According to her, “openly pro-Kremlin” stories accounted for about 20 percent of the content, but achieved unusual reach and influence due to the popularity of the site.

Like many other Russian-related media outlets, Main News destabilized itself in the face of Putin's attack on Ukraine and fought for several days to explain it. Sopko said he and his staff had decided that Russia should be criticized just as “we criticized the US imperialist wars,” but by then his site had already closed.

In the video of his encounter with the Russian spy, Garbar explains that it might be difficult to find useful people to work for Moscow because those who support Russia are often marginal guys with no real influence or access to information.

“There are many people who are in favor of Russia, but they are irrelevant,” Garbar warned Solomasov. “They wouldn't give you anything.”

Garbar's uncle was puzzled by the fact that his nephew, who was always fascinated by American culture, in particular by heavy metal bands such as Metallica, became involved with Russia. “This whole Russian thing is very strange. He must have gotten into some kind of environment where something happened,” he said.

Sawiris, the government's disinformation expert, said she didn't know what happened to Garbar, but was concerned that: “There is no limit to the impact that propaganda can have on the human mind, as we see now in Russia.” Since Russia invaded Ukraine, he added, “the blindfold fell off and many things have become evident.”

© The New York Times 2022