PRAGUE — When an associate of one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies launched a pro-Kremlin media outlet here in May 2023, Czech counterintelligence officers began keeping careful watch.
For nearly a year, European intelligence officials said, the Czech authorities secretly recorded hours of meetings between several far-right politicians from across Europe and the associate, Artem Marchevsky, who was running the propaganda website, Voice of Europe, including at its offices on a quiet side street in the center of Prague. E.U. and Czech authorities, which have shut down the site, have labeled Voice of Europe a Russian propaganda operation.
The Czech probe rapidly expanded into Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and France, European security and intelligence officials said, as investigators concluded that Voice of Europe represented far more than its official veneer as a pro-Russian website interviewing favored European politicians about ending aid to Ukraine.
The organization was being used to funnel hundreds of thousands of euros — up to 1 million a month — to dozens of far-right politicians in more than five countries to plant Kremlin propaganda in Western media that would sow division in Europe and bolster the position of pro-Russian candidates in this week’s European Parliament elections,according to interviews with a dozen European intelligence officials from five countries. Most of the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing and sensitive investigation.
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Officials described the Russian operation as among the most ambitious undertaken by the Kremlin in Europe in its efforts to undermine support for Ukraine and create divisions in the transatlantic alliance. Previous Kremlin-backed covert actions include the attempted union of the far right and far left in Germany, stoking domestic divisions in France and sabotage in Poland, The Washington Post has reported.
Internal Kremlin documents obtained by one of the European intelligence services and reviewed by The Post show for the first time that Voice of Europe was part of an influence campaign established by the Kremlin in close coordination with Viktor Medvedchuk, the Putin ally who until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led a pro-Moscow opposition party in Kyiv. It was later managed by a key Medvedchuk lieutenant who, other documents show, worked closely with a unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, responsible for Ukraine and some former Soviet states, otherwise known as the FSB’s Fifth Service.
After the expulsion from Europe of dozens of Russian intelligence officers following the invasion of Ukraine, fronts such as the Voice of Europe became instruments for the Kremlin to regain lost ground, one of the senior European intelligence officials said. “The Russian intelligence services had to change their work. The result is, for example, influence networks such as Voice of Europe,” the official said.
The website’s status as a news organization was designed to provide cover, another of the intelligence officials said, making it “easier to approach politicians” under the guise of interviewing them about Ukraine, anti-globalism and other issues.
Michal Koudelka, head of the Czech domestic security service, said that the Voice of Europe operation was also an attempt to get more pro-Russian members into the European Parliament and that after the vote that starts this Thursday, “there was a plan for the people in the European Parliament to conduct classic espionage” on behalf of Russia.
“It was an operation that aimed to shape Europe,” Koudelka said in an interview.
Far-right parties could end up with 25 percent of the seats in the 720-member European Parliament, according to some opinion polls. And for Russia, increasing influence among those parties could provide a mechanism for threatening aid to Ukraine, as well as fertile ground for espionage, according to Vera Jourova, the European Commission’s vice president.
Pro-Russian politicians “could really make the financing [of Ukraine] difficult,” Jourova told The Post.
Tens of thousands in cash
The Czech investigation has led to raids on the home and offices of an aide to a far-right Dutch member of the European Parliament and of Petr Bystron,a leading member of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and the party’s No. 2 candidate for the European Parliament. Bystron, the AfD’s spokesman for foreign affairs, has been among the most vocal in Germany against sending Western weapons to Ukraine and for lifting sanctions on Russia.
German authorities said in May they have placed Bystron under investigation for alleged corruption and money laundering as part of the probe, and police raided his office in the German parliament as well as properties in Germany and Spain. In one recording, three of the senior European intelligence officials told The Post, Bystron can be heard complaining to a Voice of Europe official about the difficulty of transporting tens of thousands in cash to his vacation home in Mallorca.
“We knew he was pro-Russian,” said one of the senior intelligence officials, noting Bystron’s long-standing ties with Russia and pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. The official believes authorities have now gathered evidence supporting the accusation that Bystron received money from Russia and placed propaganda in far-right publications in return.
The Czech-born Bystron wasn’t only “a passive person who received money,” the official said.
“He organized things,” according to the official, saying that Bystron,who speaks Russian, brought other political figures into Voice of Europe’s orbit and was “the main leading person.”
“Bystron knew about the plans for the espionage operations” in the European Parliament, this person said, adding that there was recorded evidence of this.
Bystron remains a candidate for the European Parliament and has denounced the investigation as a plot by European security services to damage AfD’s standing ahead of the elections. “Before every election it is the same: defamation with the help of the secret services,” he told Deutschland Kurier, an AfD-linked website.
In a brief text exchange with The Post, Bystron said, “We already had a house search during an election campaign in 2017, which was subsequently declared to be illegal by the courts. Nobody was interested after the election.” He declined to be interviewed furtherand did not respond to detailed written questions.
AfD is still expected to come second or third in the June 6 poll, behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union, despite the controversy, which has touched other AfD leaders. Prosecutors in Germany have said in a statement that they initiated a preliminary investigation into Maximilian Krah on allegations of accepting payments from Russia and China for his work as an AfD member of the European Parliament. Police searched his office as part of an investigation into allegations that one of his aides was working as a spy for China. On Wednesday, police raided the residence and offices of the Dutch parliamentary assistant who had previously worked for Krah.
Krah said in a statement to The Post that the allegations were part of a “disinformation campaign against my party orchestrated by intelligence agencies” and called the accusations “not only wrong” but “slandering.”
Security services in Europe are still investigating the role of dozens of other far-right politicians in the Voice of Europe network, including from France, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well up to six more AfD figures, including politicians and parliamentary assistants, people familiar with the investigation said. Belgian authorities have also played a leading investigative role, with key Voice of Europe meetings with politicians taking place in other locations in Europe, including Brussels, senior officials said.
European security officials and Kremlin documents link the creation of Voice of Europe in early 2023 to Russia’s presidential administration andMedvedchuk, who is so close to Putin that the Russian president is godfather to his daughter. Medvedchuk was turned over to Russia in September 2022 as part of a prisoner exchange between Moscow and Kyiv. He was seen in Moscow as a possible leader of Ukraine if the Russian invasion succeeded and the Kremlin was able to install its allies in power in Kyiv, intelligence officials said.
The Kremlin documents show Voice of Europe was initially connected to a Russian propaganda operation launched in January 2023 by the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko. It was designed to boost support for Medvedchuk in Ukraine and position him among European opinion makers as a viable replacement for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, promoting peace talks “as an alternative to possible nuclear war,”the documents state. The campaign, dubbed “The Other Ukraine,” would present Medvedchuk as the head of a government in exile, the documents show.
The aim was to create “an organization that could be brought in after Russia demonstrated the illegitimacy of the Zelensky regime and negotiate an end to the war from a position of strength,” said one intelligence official familiar with the plans.
Medvedchuk declined to comment.
Kremlin political strategists, including Ilya Gambashidze and Nikolai Tupikin, whom the United States has sanctioned for their roles in disinformation campaigns, were brought in to assist with the launch of the project, which envisioned promoting interviews with Medvedchuk and his Other Ukraine organization through a web of social media and YouTube accounts, and appearances in Western media, the Kremlin documents show.
Voice of Europe was described as a “news resource,” with Marchevsky, a longtime Medvedchuk associate, at its helm, one of the documents shows. In July, its overall management was taken over by Renat Kuzmin, another key Medvedchuk associate, who, documents show, worked closely with the FSB’s Fifth Service.
Neither the Kremlin nor Kuzmin responded to detailed requests for comment.
The Prague news outlet, intelligence officials said, gave Marchevsky a way to engage a network of extremist European politicians, some of whom, including Bystron, had been cultivated by Russia’s political allies in Ukraine since the Kremlin illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. Those relations were often first managed by Oleg Voloshyn, a political operative in charge of foreign relations for Medvedchuk’s For Life political party before Russia’s invasion.
In an interview, Voloshyn said he introduced Medvedchuk and Bystron in Berlin in 2020. Voloshyn said he brought Bystron and Krah to Kyiv to celebrate his 40th birthday in April 2021, introducing them to Marchevsky, who at the time headed one of Medvedchuk’s three television stations in Ukraine.
After Medvedchuk was placed under house arrest by Zelensky’s government and accused of treason, Bystron and Krah traveled again to Kyiv to visit Medvedchuk in his home, a trip that raised concerns among European security officials.
Voloshyn’s ability to travel in Europe was hampered in January 2022, shortly before Russia’s invasion, when the U.S. Treasury Department placed him on its sanctions list, calling him an “FSB pawn” in efforts by the Russian security agency to destabilize and take over Ukraine. Voloshyn said the sanctions — and allegations that he was connected to Russian intelligence — were based on inaccurate information.
When Bystron made a secret trip to Belarus in November 2022 — acknowledging the visit only after it was exposed by Lithuanian and German media — he met with Voloshyn, who had relocated there following Russia’s invasion, Voloshyn told The Post.
Voloshyn said he connected Bystron with Medvedchuk by phone during the visit but insisted that the German and the Ukrainian spoke for no more than a few minutes. In a 2023 interview with The Post, Bystron said he met only with Belarusian officials during the trip. Soon after the visit, Bystron presented a peace plan favorable to the Kremlin to the German parliament.
With Voloshyn unable to travel to the European Union, Marchevsky became the face of Voice of Europe in Prague.
Marchevsky did not respond to a detailed request for comment. In earlier comments to the Financial Times, he denied working as a proxy for Medvedchuk and said he was not involved in Voice of Europe’s management, claiming his company was only a third-party contractor. He declined to reveal his whereabouts after fleeing the Czech Republic.
A series of scandals dogging the AfD — including a statement by Krah that not all members of the Nazi SS in World War II were guilty of crimes — has dented but not destroyed the party’s standing ahead of the European Parliament elections. Krah has withdrawn from the race, and AfD is still expected to get at least 15 percent of the vote, which could allow it a second-place finish in Germany.
Krah’s statement about the SS did prompt the far-right National Rally party in France, led by Marine Le Pen, to say it would not sit with the AfD in the European Parliament. But the AfD’s membership in such official groupings may not mean much when it comes to voting on issues related to Russia or Ukraine, one of the European intelligence officials said, with parties able to vote in ad hoc blocs.
The Czech intelligence services, for one, are still vigilant. “We stopped [the Voice of Europe operation], and I am very proud of my service,” Koudelka said. But there are concerns that other networks may be working in other European countries. “This fight is never-ending.”
Source link : https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/06/03/russia-europe-far-right-espionage/
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Publish date : 2024-06-03 10:32:03
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