Day: March 13, 2024

Russia has successfully relaunched its spy operations against the West after hundreds of its operatives were ejected following Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, according to analysts. They warn that the Kremlin is using a network of proxies to infiltrate European nations and carry out a range of intelligence operations.

Infiltration

In a recent report, Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, warned that Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, “is restructuring how it manages the recruitment and training of special forces troops and is rebuilding the support apparatus to be able to infiltrate them into European countries.”

The operations range from the killing of political opponents based overseas to interference in foreign elections, with the aim of undermining Western unity and support for Ukraine.

A recent high-profile case was the killing of Maxim Kuzminov, a Russian helicopter pilot who had defected to Ukraine in August 2023. Kuzimov moved to Spain and started a new life under a false identity. Last month, his bullet-riddled body was found in a parking lot in the southern Spanish town of Villajoyosa. A burned-out getaway car was found nearby.

A burned car allegedly used by the perpetrators of the murder of the Russian pilot Maxim Kuzminov to escape the scene is parked outside the Spanish Civil Guard barracks, in El Campello, Spain, Feb. 14, 2024.

in the killing, but the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service has since described Kuzminov as a “moral corpse” for defecting to the West.

Spies ejected

Analysts say the killing is the latest example of how Moscow’s intelligence operations have been reinvigorated since European governments kicked out around 600 suspected Kremlin spies in the wake of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“The Europeans had a sense of security that the Russian spies are not there anymore, that their capabilities have been significantly curtailed. But the problem is they have not been. They are mightier than ever,” said Marina Miron, an analyst at Kings College London’s Department of War Studies.

Russia last month intercepted a phone call between senior German air force officers discussing supplying long-range “Taurus” missiles to Ukraine. The recording was published by the state-owned broadcaster Russia Today, or RT, and was widely seen as an attempt to interfere in the German debate over arming Kyiv. Berlin has ruled out sending the weapons to Ukraine.

Ukraine warnings

Kyiv said it had warned Berlin of the dangers. “We have made multiple warnings to our German partners about the spy network of Russians that are very active in Germany. … It is well known that the Russians are listening to conversations of German officials, and we think it is not the last conversation they have [in their possession],” Ukraine’s national security adviser, Oleksiy Danilov, told The Times of London newspaper last week.

French intelligence services are investigating a Russia-backed campaign aimed at interfering in the June European elections, involving hundreds of websites promoting Russian propaganda and supporting pro-Kremlin candidates.

“We are going to step up our own efforts to expose a number of disinformation operations. And in this context, Russia is also attacking us. … Europe is under attack from an informational point of view,” French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné told reporters on Feb. 17 after details of the operation were revealed.

Undermining democracy

With its army tied down in Ukraine, Russia is seeking to boost its “unconventional” operations overseas, according to the RUSI report.

Russia “has an active interest in destabilizing Ukraine’s partners, and with a slew of elections forthcoming across Europe, there is a wide range of opportunities to exacerbate polarization,” the report said.

“Moreover, with its conventional forces — so often used to coerce others — fixed by the fighting in Ukraine, the significance of unconventional operations as a lever of influence increases. This is especially important with the collapse of Russian overt diplomatic access across target countries.”

Those operations aim to disrupt democracies, according to Oleksandr V. Danylyuk, an associate fellow at RUSI and a co-author of the report.

The Russians “still invest billions into intelligence operations in Europe, developing capabilities which are designed for interference into elections; radicalization of different social, ethnic, religious groups, including minorities; investing billions into political proxies who can actually even come to power,” he told VOA.

Proxy operations

Moscow’s spy agencies are increasingly operating remotely, using non-Russian proxies to carry out operations, including organized criminals and foreign nationals.

“What is actually very important for special operations is the ability to deny the sponsorship of the government,” Danylyuk added.

Several spy networks have been uncovered in recent years. In Poland, 14 citizens from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine were convicted in December of belonging to a spy ring that was preparing acts of sabotage on behalf of Moscow, including plans to derail trains carrying military aid to Ukraine.

Trials of suspected Russian spies are ongoing in Britain, Germany, Norway and several other European countries.

“It’s not any more an ideological fight,” said Danylyuk. “It’s not like ‘communism fighting capitalism,’ like the Soviets would say. It’s that authoritarian countries are trying to subvert the West as a stronghold of democracy, freedom and human rights. And this is, for them, an existential fight.”

FILE – CIA Director William Burns departs after testifying during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the “Annual Worldwide Threats Assessment” in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 11, 2024.

‘Recruiting opportunity’

Meanwhile, William J. Burns, director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, said in January that Russia’s war on Ukraine has in turn presented an opportunity for the West to improve its intelligence capabilities.

“Disaffection with the war is continuing to gnaw away at the Russian leadership and the Russian people, beneath the thick surface of state propaganda and repression,” Burns wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine.

“That undercurrent of disaffection is creating a once-in-a-generation recruiting opportunity for the CIA. We’re not letting it go to waste.”

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Annual Threat Assessment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (Avril Haines) contains some important information that should be highlighted because it refutes right wing propaganda. Let me just draw attention to some of these points.

1. Here’s an essential one: “We assess that Iranian leaders did not orchestrate nor had foreknowledge of the HAMAS attack against Israel.”

After the horrid October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israelis, the majority of them innocent civilians, the usual suspects went wild blaming Iran. The Wall Street Journal, a bizarre hybrid of Rupert Murdoch conspiracy theories and sterling reporting, erred on the side of the former with lurid allegations that Iran trained and put Hamas fighters up to the terrorist attack. The Iran War Lobby swung into action. And yet. The ODNI says all that was a fever dream.

2. It should come as no surprise that the Israeli response, which the International Court of Justice found plausibly genocidal, has given a fillip to al-Qaeda and ISIL, and that the ODNI expects it to provoke terrorism against the US. This conclusion, which seems fairly obvious, contradicts the favored inside-the-Beltway meme that Israel is an asset to US security. Its current government’s dedication to policies that produce starving children is likely to lead to anti-US terrorism.

3. But the assessment also says, “The Nordic Resistance Movement—a transnational neo-Nazi organization—publicly praised the attack, illustrating the conflict’s appeal to a range of threat actors.”

This ugly neo-Nazi movement, by the way, celebrated noisily when Trump won in 2016 and saw it as the beginnning of a global far right revolution.

The European and North American far right is confused about Arab-Israeli conflicts. On the one hand, some of them see Israel as “white” and so side with it against Arabs. But in this case apparently they were willing to idolize Hamas if only it would kill innocent Jews.

4. Another important observation: “Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from HAMAS for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralize HAMAS’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces.”

In other words, the stated goal of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, of wiping out Hamas, is impossible. Hamas will pose a danger for “years to come.” Likewise, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s support for the far right Netanyahu government’s total war on Gaza is misplaced, since he said he believes it is waged “so that this never happens again.” Combine points 2, 3, and 4 we can conclude that Netanyahu is virtually assuring that it does happen again.

5. Then there is this:

• “• Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has publicly stated his opposition to postwar diplomacy with the Palestinian Authority (PA) toward territorial compromise.”

First, the ODNI is saying that there isn’t an icicle’s chance in hell of there being a two-state solution as long as Netanyahu is prime minister. This conclusion contradicts everything President Biden keeps saying about the future of the Palestinians, and his tired mantra about the imaginary “two-state solution.”

Well, you could say, if the problem is Netanyahu, he may not be there very long. But what the assessment doesn’t say is that the entire Knesset just voted against a Palestinian state. So it isn’t just Netanyahu. It is the Israeli mainstream.

Times of India: “Netanyahu Out? U.S Intel’s Stark Assessment Of Israeli President’s Political Career I Key Details”

6. Speaking of Netanyahu not being there:

• “• Netanyahu’s viability as leader as well as his governing coalition of far-right and ultraorthodox parties that pursued hardline policies on Palestinian and security issues may be in jeopardy. Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections. A different, more moderate government is a possibility.”

Note that US intelligence concurs that the Netanyahu government is extremist, which is the only way to understand the hope for a more moderate successor. Netanyahu gets between 17% and 19% approval in opinion polls, and keen observers of the Israeli political scene believe that his far right Likud Party and its extremist allies (Religious Zionism and Jewish Power) will take a bath in the next parliamentary elections. So US intelligence is not telling us here anything we don’t already know.

Making this assessment public, however, is surely intended to give courage to Netanyahu’s political opponents and to signal that the US intelligence community thinks America would be better off with a different leader.

American officials estimated that Ukraine, a country without a traditional navy, has sunk 15 Russian ships in the past six months.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov in July. A Ukrainian official said that Admiral Yevmenov’s removal from command was directly related to the loss of Russian ships.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images