🔥 While Europe argues about how to help the 'good Russians', the FSB has long been inside this environment.
🤷🏻♂️ Today another story about why European countries should not import the so-called 'good Russians' in huge numbers. Bringing Russian 'opposition' into the Western world is an old Chekist method. For Latvia, it is an unjustified assumption of security risks.
⚠️ At the end of August, former Pussy Riot member Rita Flores, real name Margarita Konovalova, said she had worked for the FSB for three years. In February 2023, she said she was tasked with writing character references for artists and activists. 😳 In the summer of 2025, according to her, curators asked her to lure Pyotr Verzilov to a cafe in Serbia to kidnap and kill him.
🗞️ Western newspapers saw in this story Rita's human drama. We, in turn, should think again: what percentage of those Russian oppositionists who have moved to the Baltic states are Kremlin special services operatives?
🇪🇺 While Europe argued about helping the 'good Russians', the FSB had long been inside this environment. And it must be admitted — it is an old orc tradition.
❗️ Soviet security structures mastered this technique long before Putin's birth. From 1921 to 1927, the GPU carried out Operation 'Trust': a fake monarchist underground organization was created on the territory of the USSR, through which the Soviet regime took control of the White émigré movement. 😵💫 Using this organization, Boris Savinkov and British intelligence agent Sidney Reilly were lured into Soviet territory. Both ended their earthly life in the Lubyanka.
🫡 Later, the Chekists stopped waiting for the émigré to come himself. In January 1930, in Paris, communists in French police uniforms kidnapped General Kutepov, chairman of the General Union of Soldiers. 🫣 In September 1930, the same scheme was used against his successor — General Miller, a former resident of Dvinsk, now Daugavpils. Miller was drugged, stuffed into a crate, taken by steamer 'Maria Ulyanova' to the USSR, and shot in Moscow.
⚡️ And, of course, the most famous Cold War example — Oleg Tumanov. By the way, he was married to a Latvian Jewish woman, Jeta Kats. In 1965, Oleg 'jumped off a Soviet ship', passed Western security checks, and worked at 'Radio Liberty' for twenty years — up to the position of acting editor-in-chief.
📻 The radio's security service had no suspicions about him. In 1986, Tumanov was taken to Moscow, and he exposed the radio station as a 'CIA branch'.
🤔 Replace the monarchist with an anti-Putin artist, and Radio Liberty with Riga Media Hub. And you will see that the method has not changed. 😱 Western countries fall into a moral trap: refusing asylum to a person who has proof of persecution is politically and reputationally expensive. It is precisely 'escape' that has always been a convenient way to legalize an agent in a new territory.
🫵 The émigré and 'opposition' environment is a priority operational area for Russian special services. It is almost impossible to verify the victim's legend from the outside: the FSB can produce criminal cases and 'foreign agent' status on a conveyor belt.
🇩🇪 For Germany, a mistake in one or two cases is unpleasant. For Latvia, it is a gap in the security perimeter. The risks are known to all: we are a country occupied by the USSR for half a century; a country with a large Russian community; we are the external border of the EU and NATO; aid to Ukraine is delivered through our territory.
🤯 After 2022, Riga hosted a huge number of Russian journalists and activists, even a whole Media Hub emerged. But let us not forget that compassion for specific persecuted people does not oblige us to import all the other, unverifiable risks.
❓ What do you think: does the desire to help Russian oppositionists outweigh the risks to national security that such help can create?
Open referenced post