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Shaun Walker Profile picture
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Mar 26 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
It's Russian illegals season at the moment...

After a flurry of arrests of the deep-cover spies in the US in 2010 and a few knock-on arrests, there hasn’t been any exposed illegals in the past decade.

Then in the last year we’ve heard of minimum six.

A short thread:
1. Suspected GRU illegal Sergei Cherkasov, who posed as Brazilian Victor Muller Fereira for a decade & got close to infiltrating the ICC in the Hague. Over the week, US releases 46-page charge sheet full of bananas detail on his legend/shoddy tradecraft.

theguardian.com/world/2023/mar…
2. Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, posing as a Peruvian German (though unusually using a GRU-series Russian passport and claiming a Russian childhood) -discovered by @christogrozev last year (tho decativated in 2018) and unmasked as GRU’s Olga Kolobova. theguardian.com/world/2022/aug…
3. José Assis Giammaria, "Brazilian researcher" detained in Norway, working at University of Tromsø on "hybrid threats" (hashtag irony). A colleague told @PjotrSauer he had a "funny accent" theguardian.com/world/2022/oct…
4 & 5 Maria Mayer and Ludwig Gisch, suspected SVR illegals who posed as an Argentinian couple in Slovenia for years.

My report from last week in Ljubljana on the case: theguardian.com/world/2023/mar…
6&7, a "Brazilian" man and a "Greek" woman, possibly also SVR illegals, who disappeared recently... watch this space.
Question is why so many and why now? Imagine combo of some/all of:
1. New defector(s) giving info
2. Illegals doing riskier stuff as so many “legal” spies in embassies expelled
3. Increased CI work on Rus by FBI etc
4. Increased interest in making stuff public to embarrass Ru
(Apols for all the typos in this thread, though I do quite like Kolobova being "decativated" in 2018, given that one of the ways @christogrozev got onto her trail was through the cat she left behind...)
*the cat she took with her!! God, maybe I should pay Elon for that edit button

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More from @shaunwalker7

Shaun Walker Profile picture
Sep 30, 2022
My analysis on Putin's angry anti-West speech, and comparison with his speech in the same place eight years ago when he annexed Crimea.
theguardian.com/world/2022/sep…
“Nobody knows what happens next, it’s clear there is no grand strategy,” said one Moscow source, a well-connected political insider. “If one thing doesn’t work, we will try something else, and nobody knows where it will lead. Decisions are taken in the head of one man.”
Also worth rereading Putin's 2014 speech, made in exactly the same place: "Don't believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea... We do not want a partition of Ukraine. We do not need this."
Read 4 tweets
Shaun Walker Profile picture
Sep 21, 2022
“The other nuclear states need to say very firmly that as soon as Russia even thinks of carrying out nuclear strikes …there will be swift retaliatory nuclear strikes to destroy the nuclear launch sites in Russia,” Zelenskiy advisor told me in Kyiv today theguardian.com/world/2022/sep…
Russia “enters UKR territory, starts a war, seizes territory, and then says this territory is now ours and if you try to take it back we’ll use nuclear weapons. It looks absolutely absurd, and furthermore it destroys the whole global system of nuclear deterrence,” said Podolyak.
“You can’t have someone wandering around with a grenade with the pin removed and threatening everyone with it just because he can,” said deputy PM Vereshchuk.

Plus @lukeharding1968 with the latest from Kharkiv
Read 4 tweets
Shaun Walker Profile picture
Sep 18, 2022
Story / thread on schools in newly Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, and the decisions teachers are making on resistance or collaboration. Very clear that education is one of the key pillars through which Russia wants to reshape Ukraine to its liking.
theguardian.com/world/2022/sep…
I focussed on one occupied town where headteacher gathered his staff in early summer and told them: “Ukraine has abandoned us and the Russians are making us offers. If we don’t accept, they’ll send new people from Russia. It’s better that we stay here and try to take care of it.”
About 1/3 of the teachers agreed, the rest didn't. The headteacher said all the Ukrainian textbooks would be destroyed, and new Russian ones would arrive. They pulled down all the posters of Ukrainian historical figures from the walls of the corridors...
Read 13 tweets
Shaun Walker Profile picture
Aug 15, 2022
.@PjotrSauer and I spent a couple of days on the phone to people in occupied Kherson. We found a total lack of enthusiasm for the Kremlin's planned referendum or joining Russia, and a lot of people who are nervous about what the next months might bring:

theguardian.com/world/2022/aug…
Russian tactic here is targeted intimidation rather than full-scale terror of Bucha etc. They are attempting their version of a hearts-and-minds operation: offering free university for all, promising a future of more cash and bright future, signing up collaborators.
Instructive to watch videos of "meetings with the people" posted by Kyrylo Stremousov, formerly an antivax blogger and marginal politician who's now deputy head of the Russian administration.

He's going hard on the concept of Russia supposedly being home to traditional values.
Read 6 tweets
Shaun Walker Profile picture
Aug 1, 2022
A piece I've been keen to do for a while, on the grim ideological (and physical) transformation of Dmitry Medvedev, and on the parallel reality where Medvedev got a second term.

Was it a lost opportunity or did it never exist?

theguardian.com/world/2022/aug…
In 12 years Medvedev has gone from almost charmingly awkward schoolboy vibe, excited to tweet and meet Steve Jobs, to a puffy-faced husk spewing genocidal rhetoric
“When you feel you are a pointless and pathetic person, like Dmitry Medvedev, you try to reinvent yourself from time to time. He could have shaved his head, or gone to the gym … but instead he decided to reinvent himself as a hawk,” said @pevchikh in a May video
Read 9 tweets
Shaun Walker Profile picture
Jul 27, 2022
No idea why, but today I remembered one of the most quietly sinister episodes of my Moscow reporting life.

A short story:

It was 2016, and I got a call from London that an upcoming report would suggest Alexander Litvinenko may have been murdered on the orders of Viktor Ivanov
Ivanov was a Putin confidant, formerly KGB, who at this point was the head of the Russian Drug Control Agency. As a formality, I drafted a fax to send to the agency asking for Ivanov's comment, knowing full well there would be no response, but at least we could say we'd asked.
About an hour later, the phone rang and a woman said, "Mr Zolotov will see you tomorrow".

This never usually happened with top Russian officials.

Next day I went off to the drug agency office, an ominous black building on Pokrovka St, and went through multiple security checks.
Read 16 tweets

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