Russia accuses Europe of burning the bridges by firing dozens of its diplomats

In February 2001 Putin was still a fledgling president at the head of the Kremlin. He had not yet designed the iron vertical power of him and, showing off as a pragmatic and sneaky man, he gave strong handshakes with the leaders of NATO. On the 20th of that month, he received his secretary general, George Robertson, to smooth things out about the western anti-missile shield and the expansion of the Alliance. They were different times. The euro had not yet arrived (a copy of La Vanguardia cost 150 pesetas) and no one thought that the cold war would return with all its harshness in the form of bombs and death in the Ukraine. But those days something else also happened. Thousands of kilometers away, in the US they arrested Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who had been spying for Moscow since 1979. Weeks later, Washington expelled 50 Russian diplomats for using their positions for intelligence work, the first expulsion massive with Vladimir Putin in power.

These types of expulsions have intensified two decades later, after Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. The latest wave occurred this April, with Norway, Sweden, Moldova and Germany sending dozens of Russian diplomats home. The official explanation is always the same: “For committing acts incompatible with their diplomatic status.” In other words, they were spies.

The Kremlin has struck back. His spokesperson, Dimitri Peskov, confirmed what has been evident for some time, that relations with European countries are at their lowest possible level. And he blamed them for continuing to reduce that minimum possible space for understanding.

In his opinion, “any step such as another expulsion of diplomats narrows the basis for the continuation of diplomatic relations as such. It is an increase in the degradation of our relations.”

But Moscow pays in kind. At the end of April, it expelled a third of the diplomats from the German embassy, ​​32 out of 90. Response to the expulsion in March of some thirty employees at its embassy in Berlin.

German security agencies claimed that Russian diplomats had been using their status as cover to illegally obtain political, economic, military and scientific information to commit sabotage or spread disinformation.

Once Russia’s best partner in Europe, relations with Germany have been reduced to a bare minimum.

Last week Russia announced the expulsion of 10 diplomats from Norway in response to the expulsion of 15 of its employees in Oslo. The Russian Foreign Ministry also expressed “a vigorous protest.” Its spokeswoman, Maria Zajárova, said the Nordic country was “confirming its status as a country hostile to Russia.”

In addition, he assured that it was false. “No specific claims are made against Russian diplomats. Norwegian media have launched another fake campaign in recent months to expose alleged Russian ‘spy activities’,” he noted.

Norway, for its part, wanted to underline a fundamental difference in this give and take: its diplomats do not practice espionage. “We consider the Russian decision as retaliation. All our diplomats in Russia carry out normal diplomatic work. The Russian authorities know this, ”said her spokeswoman, Ragnhild Simenstad, quoted by Afp.

Discovering the spy Ivan has become a priority since Putin began hostilities against Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Last December Germany detained an intelligence employee on suspicion of passing secrets to Moscow. In February, a security guard at the UK embassy in Berlin was sentenced to 13 years in prison for spying for Russia. In Poland, nine people were arrested in March on charges of tracking arms shipments to Ukraine and planning acts of sabotage.

Furthermore, the past year saw several rounds of expulsions of diplomats both ways.

In March and April 2022, the countries of the European Union expelled dozens of Russian envoys: France, 35; Italy, 30; there were 40 in Germany… Spain also took part and expelled 27 employees and diplomats from the Russian embassy in Madrid. Moscow responded to all of them by expelling an equal or similar number of Western diplomats.

The RBK newspaper keeps count and ensures that since January 2022 more than 600 Russian diplomats have had to leave their destinations by decision of the countries in which they exercised their trade. The United States is the country that has expelled the most since the year 2000, a total of 223. It is followed by Bulgaria, with 83 (70 last year), and Poland, with 45. In the last two years, Russia has expelled, for the moment, 312.

But the previous years were not exempt from espionage cases either. Through the western streets we have discovered that Russian agents of all kinds were walking: undercover as diplomats, sent for specific missions or the so-called “illegals”, sleeping agents who live for years in other countries, usually under false identities.

Before the Ukrainian conflict began, it was within the rules of the game. “Expelling foreign diplomats as revenge for spying is an accepted ritual in international relations,” The New York Times editorialized on March 23, 2001, after Hanssen’s arrest, while advocating that “both countries do not allow these skirmishes to lead to a diplomatic break.” In fact, that did not happen. The then Russian Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, visited Washington in May to prepare for the Putin-George W. Bush summit in Slovenia in June, the first between the two.

A clear example of this was what happened in June 2010. The FBI discovered a network of sleeper agents in Washington, whose name in the media was Anna Chapman. But Russia and the United States, with Dimitri Medvedev and Barack Obama as presidents, were on their honeymoon and both countries took pains not to dig up the ax of the cold war. In a trade arranged in Vienna, the US handed over 10 Russian spies in exchange for four Western agents, including former Russian Colonel Sergei Skripal, a double agent for UK MI6. But they avoided expelling diplomats, with whose help Russian spies evidently sent reports to Moscow.

After Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, relations deteriorated until reaching a cold war level in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the war in Donbass (eastern Ukraine). That is why when Skripal and his daughter were poisoned in Salisbury in 2018, the Western response was much harsher. In solidarity with London, 22 countries expelled Russian diplomats. Moscow kicked out 130 Westerners.

In the last year, the discovery of Russian “illegal agents” posing as citizens of other countries, such as Brazilians, Dutch, Swiss, Slovenians or Greeks, has also increased. In June 2022, the Netherlands detained Sergei Cherkásov while using a Brazilian passport. Today he is serving 15 years in prison in Brazil for fraud and identity theft. The United States, which was on his trail and accuses him of being an agent of the GRU (Russian military intelligence), claims him. But Russia alleges that he is actually a “heroin dealer who fled Russia to evade prison” and has requested his extradition.

After the arrest in Yekaterinburg of the journalist Evan Gershkovich, correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, there was speculation that Moscow wanted to exchange him for Cherkásov.

Exposing a spy Iván causes as much sensation today as it did in 2001, when the FBI put a stop to one of their own who had worked for the enemy for more than 20 years. But in the new cold war, being a Russian spy seems more common than previously thought.