Moscow’s agents are trying to destabilize Ukraine’s supporters – but while the Baltic states and Finland are boldly countering Russian espionage, others are more reticent, reports Helen Fitzwilliam.
Chatham House
The World Today
9 September 2024
Helen Fitzwilliam
Viacheslav Morozov was a well-known professor of political theory at Estonia’s most prestigious university. What was less well known was that the Russian citizen had been spying for Moscow for 14 years. A few months ago, the authorities caught up with him and he was jailed for six years.
The prosecutor said Morozov passed on information about Estonia’s defence and security policies to his Russian special services handlers on regular visits. It is a problem that shows no sign of going away.
‘No matter how many we prosecute, they will keep running agents,’ said Arnold Sinisalu, the former director general of the Estonian Internal Security Service. We have to accept that Russians place a high premium on human intelligence and will be relentless in their pursuit of it, he added.
The Morozov case is just the latest in a string of incidents highlighting the spike in Russian spying in Europe and beyond. Last month’s prisoner swap between Russia and the West revealed how deeply Kremlin spies have penetrated European capitals.
Artem and Anna Dultsev, undercover agents known as ‘illegals’, posed as Argentinian expats in Slovenia, dispensing instructions and money to Moscow’s agents across the Schengen zone before their arrest. A former FSB colonel convicted of murder and several others accused of spying or cybercrime were also brought home. Ensuring the release of such people is how Putin retains the loyalty of his security services.
As the exchange shows, Russia’s shadow war with the West has intensified with widespread use of saboteurs, electronic warfare, attacks on infrastructure and an alleged attempt to assassinate the head of a German armaments firm.
The Baltic response
The aim is to destabilize and intimidate Ukraine’s supporters. How can the West formulate a response to these hybrid attacks? While many western allies have been criticized for their complacency, those on the front line in the Baltic states and new NATO member Finland have begun putting extra measures in place.
Spy cases used to be quietly swept under the carpet, but there has been a shift to bring Russian espionage into the daylight. Many states have updated their legislation to make it easier to prosecute those found working for foreign powers. Estonia took a strategic decision to aggressively pursue spies and to publicize their court cases.
Marek Kohv, of the International Centre for Defence and Security, a leading Estonian think tank, believes holding these individuals to account acts as a deterrent, increases public awareness and promotes vigilance to intercept potential operations. ‘Our counterintelligence is highly effective at countering,’ he told The World Today, but experts add that you need political will.
Another strategy is to make it easy for civilians who have been approached while in Russia to seek help before they commit any crime. Since 2022, there have been notices at the Estonian border advising anyone who has been recruited by Russian special services to contact the Estonian Internal Security Service. According to Sinisalu, several have come forward. Latvia’s State Security Service has a similar scheme.
The case for ‘pessimistic pragmatism’
In April, Finland closed its 800-mile border with Russia after its neighbour began weaponizing migration, pushing across more than a thousand migrants from the Middle East and Africa since last year. Russian border guards are members of the FSB, so this was no normal migration but a way of overwhelming the authorities, said Minna Alander of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.
There were other fears: ‘Not every migrant would be a fifth columnist, but some might have been coerced to do something for Russia,’ she said. As a countermeasure, Helsinki is introducing a controversial temporary law to grant Finnish border guards the power to block asylum seekers crossing from Russia.
Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said at a press conference: ‘This is a strong message to Russia, a strong message to our allies, that Finland takes care of its own security.’
The Finns are driven by what they call pragmatic pessimism to constantly improve their defences and prepare for the worst, explains Alander, which is why they are arguably one of the most war-ready states in Europe. They have studied their neighbour and have long understood that Russians are ‘completely different’, she adds, a fact that may have been lost elsewhere in the West.
The cost of prosecution
For two decades there were no spy convictions in Sweden. But a change of policy and procedure has led to several cases since 2021. Tony Ingesson, an intelligence expert at Lund University, explains that under the old system, the prosecution had to hand over copies of the evidence to the defence, which ran the risk of giving the suspect access to intelligence.
‘It was sometimes deemed safer not to prosecute,’ he said. Now recent court cases, such as that of two brothers accused of passing secrets to Russia’s GRU military intelligence, are given the full media spotlight even if it does increase public unease.
More awareness of the threat is vital as there is a clear link between official recognition that a country is under sustained attack and effective countermeasures. ‘It empowers the government, civil society and the media to start doing something about it,’ says Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow in the Russia-Eurasia Programme at Chatham House.
To hit back at the Russians, he added, they have to suffer a direct operational cost, such as the exposure of a unit of 70 Russian military intelligence operatives ordered to carry out assassinations, sabotage and bombings across Europe.
EU complacency
Ejecting more than 600 Russian intelligence officers with diplomatic cover in Europe after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine eviscerated the Kremlin’s spy network. Yet there was a glaring exception – Russia’s diplomatic mission to the European Union in Brussels, which escaped sanction.
According to analysts, EU officials, keen to keep their mission in Moscow open, opposed plans by Belgium’s State Security service to expel 20 personnel including chargé d’affaires Kirill Logvinov, alleged to be a senior intelligence officer.
Spies under the cover of an EU diplomatic passport can go anywhere in the Schengen area. This makes it easier for them to pursue a new Kremlin tactic of hiring criminal gangs as proxies to carry out acts of violence or disrupt the supply of weapons to Ukraine.
‘We’ve created a situation where all the dominoes are in place for the success of these malign actors,’ Kohv said. NATO, along with Estonia, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and others have urged Brussels to restrict the free movement of Russian diplomats in the EU to their accredited country.
This does not go far enough for Kohv, who would like the mission, and other Russian embassies in Europe, closed down. EU diplomats say Germany and Austria are the main opponents of any restrictions. Both fear escalation with Moscow and have many pro-Russian supporters in their countries, as well as historical business ties.
Officials in the Baltics who spoke on condition of anonymity are shocked by what they see as Germany’s complacency. Perhaps the alleged Russian plot to assassinate the chief executive of the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall, which as well as supplying weapons is committed to opening factories in Ukraine, might bring about a more realistic approach to the Kremlin threat.
A changed threat
The war in Ukraine has changed the nature of that threat, however. Russia’s somewhat random recruitment of agents on encrypted apps such as Telegram shows a certain desperation, suggests Ingesson. ‘It all looks a bit sloppy,’ but it makes them more unpredictable. Operations were far more professional and followed certain rules during the Cold War, he explained, but now Moscow has a more urgent need to undermine support for Kyiv.
Sinisalu worries that using amateurs could lead to botched operations and more collateral damage for civilians. Officials say this scattergun, decentralized online recruitment adds to the challenge of exposing subversive operations. Operatives, many with police records, are usually recruited in third countries to confuse law enforcement.
To fight back, European security services have stepped up cooperation. The suspected arsonists behind a warehouse blaze in Lithuania were detained in Poland. NATO has increased intelligence sharing among members. The closing declaration at its July summit said: ‘We have decided on further measures to counter Russian hybrid threats or actions individually and collectively and will continue to coordinate closely.’
NATO also wants to embarrass Moscow by letting it know that the alliance is well aware of its plans for subversion. A senior NATO official told reporters: ‘The very first thing that you have to do when you are pushing back against something that Vladimir Putin believes is below the threshold, is to show him that we know what’s happening,’ he said.
The effort will have to be sustained. When the Russian professor Morozov was arrested, it became clear that he had given Moscow background details of students who went on to have key jobs with access to intelligence, says Sinisalu.
How many might be approached by Moscow in the years to come?