The Russian government does not seem to be bothered with the fact that some of its diplomats have been caught red-handed before: two years after Yevgeny Umerenko was detained and expelled over attempts to steal industry secrets from Sweden’s Volvo and Scania, a maker of trucks, he resurfaced at the Russian mission to South Korea. While missions elsewhere have been shrinking, Russia’s embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, has been expanding, taking on some of the diplomats expelled elsewhere. The expelled diplomats, some of whom are believed to be undeclared agents, are often reassigned to other countries as Moscow’s resources are increasingly limited. It’s the disruption to the network they have been developing and nurturing.” “It’s not just the guys in the embassies kicked out. Others are just simply there waiting but there’s nothing there tasking them or collecting their information,” Mark Galeotti, author of Putin’s Wars: from Crimea to Ukraine, told The Telegraph. “What happens when you’ve got a sudden massive expulsion? A certain number of assets just simply drop off from the scene. The disruption is likely to have seriously affected many long-running operations involving such agents, who are carefully cultivated by now-expelled Russian officers. Not all of the expelled diplomats are Russian intelligence agents, but some of them likely were key human intelligence officers, running networks of local agents. “ Russian intelligence agencies are under pressure to produce results, and now the remaining agents are having to double work for those who no longer sit at those embassies.” “The expulsions have definitely caused great damage because this is a loss of a great number of people with diplomatic cover, and those diplomats are barred from moving to another EU country,” Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and senior fellow at the Centre for European Policy Analysis who has studied Russian intelligence for two decades, told The Telegraph. Faced with diplomatic corps shortages, Russia has been forced to close consulates in several countries.Īlthough it lacked the drama of a public exposure of an audacious spy op, the diplomatic purge dealt a heavy blow to day-to-day operations of the Russian spy network in Europe. Bulgaria kicked out a staggering 83 Russian diplomats and Poland expelled 45. Some of the Russian diplomatic missions have been completely gutted. The renewed effort in spy catching in the UK is one half of a double blow to Russia’s intelligence networks that has forced Vladimir Putin’s spy agencies to turn to riskier forms of espionage: like undercover agents, and even so-called “illegals” who spend decades cultivating false identities for highly sensitive operations.Īt least 705 diplomats suspected of spying have been expelled from Russian embassies across the world since 2022 – almost twice as many as the whole of the previous 20 years. Since the war in Ukraine began, the West has been uncharacteristically transparent about its efforts to catch those accused of spying for the Kremlin. Orlin Roussev, Bizer Dzhambazov and Katrin Ivanova reportedly held three dozen IDs from several European countries and spent years living seemingly innocuous existences in the suburbs of London.īut their arrest and public outing by Scotland Yard may not have happened in years gone by. So when a 40-something tech entrepreneur and a middle-aged couple living in an unremarkable flat in Harrow were accused of spying for Russia, more than a few eyebrows were raised. When an agency with a significant counter-intelligence section like MI5 identifies suspected undercover spies, they covertly keep tabs on them and monitor their contacts – rarely are their names revealed to the press.
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