Thread by @khodorkovsky_en

In case you missed it:

The Kremlin's secret army. How Russia's military intelligence is building a network of criminals and far-right activists to wreak havoc in Europe

🧵Here's how they operate

Previously, the GRU military intelligence service had used its own agents to carry out attacks on foreign soil. But after a series of high-profile failures, such as the botched assassination of Sergey Skripal in Salisbury, they seem to have shifted tactics

The GRU has assembled a team tasked with organizing protests and acts of sabotage overseas, often engaging foreign nationals to do the dirty work on the ground – giving them plausible deniability if the person is caught or fails to complete a task

For example, Dossier found that one GRU agent, Col Denis Smolyaninov, sought left-wing Kremlin sympathizers on social media, and tasked them with organizing small-scale anti-NATO protests all over western Europe

In another case, the GRU enlisted a pro-Putin Moldovan citizen to arrange for five of his compatriots to travel to Paris and spray-paint hundreds of stars of David around the city, evoking the Nazi occupation of France in a bid to incite antisemitism just after the war in Gaza broke out

That wasn’t the only use of graffiti – Col Smolyaninov was also documented as having organized a campaign of anti-Erdogan graffiti in the French capital to sow discord at a time when Turkey was blocking the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO

Sometimes, the GRU engages not activists, but those with criminal pasts. In two cases this year, arms factories producing weapons for Ukraine fell victim to arson – one in Latvia, the other in Germany

German intelligence believes the arms factory in Berlin was targeted by experienced professionals, recruited by the Kremlin on social media and paid in cryptocurrency

A source with criminal connections told Dossier that, indeed, the GRU has recently been actively working to recruit criminals in countries whose passports allow them to enter Europe, and sending them to Poland and the Baltic States to destabilize the situation

Putin is intent on sowing instability in the West, and these underhanded tactics allow him to do so with minimal risk. It is crucial that western intelligence services make every effort to curb the Kremlin’s schemes before even more damage can be done.

Read Dossier’s report in full here:



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