Russian espionage activities higher than during the Cold War

Russia has aggressively resumed its spy war with the West, and the release of a phone call from Moscow in which senior German air force officers discussed sending missiles to Ukraine is just the latest chilling example.

“The cat-and-mouse game is back,” said one Western intelligence officer. “Russian activities… are as high or even higher than during the Cold War,” said another. “Russian intelligence is a big machine and is back to doing what it has always done,” said a third official.

It seems that almost every week another covert operation comes to light, showing just how far Russian intelligence services have penetrated Europe since Moscow launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

On the one hand, Putin’s growing authoritarianism has created an “undercurrent of discontent” in Russian security agencies “and a unique recruiting opportunity,” CIA chief William Burns recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, reports The Geopost.

On February 27, Tihomir Ivanov Ivanchev became the sixth Bulgarian to be charged with involvement in an alleged Russian spy ring in the United Kingdom. Two weeks earlier, Maksim Kuzminov, a Russian military pilot who had defected to Ukraine last year, was found dead in Spain. His body was riddled with bullets – including a shot to the heart.

A week ago, France uncovered a network of 193 websites aimed at spreading disinformation in the run-up to this year’s European elections. And two weeks earlier, the European Parliament launched an investigation into whether a Latvian MEP could be an agent of the Russian secret service.

However, it was last weekend’s phone call between high-ranking German air force officers that represented Moscow’s most explosive propaganda coup so far this year in its ongoing hybrid war against the West.

Air force officers, one of whom compromised security by dialing into the WebEx chat over an insecure connection, discussed how Kiev could use missiles supplied by Germany to destroy the Kerch Bridge, which links the Russian mainland to Russian-occupied Crimea. German officials said the leak and Moscow’s subsequent accusations that Germany had developed “cunning plans” to attack Russia were an overt attempt by President Vladimir Putin to divide Ukraine’s allies.

The apparent increase in Kremlin-led intelligence operations was a sign of renewed confidence among Russian intelligence chiefs after the humiliating setbacks they suffered in early 2022, intelligence officials and analysts said. Most of the interviews took place before the German missile talks became public.

Firstly, Western authorities stole and published Moscow’s plans for the invasion of Ukraine. After Russian tanks invaded Kiev, European capitals expelled 600 diplomats, around 400 of whom were believed to be spies. In addition, several Russian “illegals” – agents acting without diplomatic cover – were discovered. When Russia’s ground invasion stalled, Putin placed leading FSB leaders under house arrest because they had grossly underestimated Ukrainian resistance.

Since then, the main Russian intelligence services – the GRU military intelligence service, the FSB Federal Security Service and the SVR foreign intelligence service – have regrouped and refocused their espionage to improve the chances of Russia’s conventional military operations.

The priorities remain the same as before the war: stealing Western secrets, widening divisions within NATO and undermining support for Ukraine. But the methods have become more sophisticated to compensate for their disrupted spy networks in Europe and to circumvent restrictions on Russians working on the continent.