The soldier who left the army was shot many times and then hit by a car in Spain and the leader of a group was hit many times with a hammer in Lithuania. The journalist got sick from possible poisoning in Germany.
Ever since President Vladimir Putin started the war in Ukraine, Russians in Europe and other places have been targeted with attacks and harassment, and Moscow’s intelligence agents are being blamed for it.
Even though Western governments try to stop Russian spies, experts say that the Russian government can still go after people they see as traitors in other countries to stop them from speaking out. People who are against Putin are more and more worried about the power of Moscow’s security forces, even in places they used to feel were safe.
“We got out of Russia and felt like we had escaped from jail,” said Irina Dolinina, a journalist at the Important Stories news outlet in Prague.
Dolinina and her coworker Alesya Marokhovskaya were bothered in 2023, making them worried that someone was watching them. They got scary messages in the comments on a website and were told not to go to a conference in Sweden. To emphasize, the threat had their airplane ticket details, where they would sit, and their hotel reservation.
“We were wrong to think we were safe here,” Dolinina said to The Associated Press.
The Kremlin is often blamed for attacking its enemies outside of Russia, even though it denies it.
Some well-known cases are the death of Leon Trotsky, a former Soviet revolutionary who was killed in Mexico in 1940 by a Soviet agent, and the death of Georgi Markov, a dissenting worker for the BBC’s Bulgarian service, who died in London in 1978 after being attacked with a poisoned umbrella.
Britain was where other poisonings were caused by Russian security services under Putin’s rule. Alexander Litvinenko, a defector and former spy, died in 2006 after drinking tea that had been poisoned with a radioactive substance. In 2018, former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter got very sick after being attacked with an old Soviet-era nerve agent, but they eventually got better. The Kremlin kept saying they weren’t involved in the British cases.
Currently, many of the people who oppose the government in Russia, along with journalists and activists, have left the country because of the government’s strong actions against them. Many people think that Moscow is focusing more on them, and officials are saying it too.
Russian authorities are looking for many people, even if they seem unimportant, because they think these people could come back to Russia and cause a lot of harm. This was explained by security expert Andrei Soldatov.
Many people who have been forced to leave their home countries are being treated badly in many places, including former Soviet countries with a lot of Russian people and also in Europe and other places.
People who speak out and reporters who work on their own have said they are feeling sick and believe they may have been poisoned.
Journalist Elena Kostyuchenko got sick on a train from Munich to Berlin in 2022. German authorities are looking into it as a possible murder attempt.
Natalia Arno, the leader of the Free Russia Foundation in the U. S, told AP that she is still dealing with nerve damage after a suspected poisoning in Prague in May. She thinks Russian security tried to “quiet” her because she supports democracy.
In a really violent attack, pilot Maksim Kuzminov’s body with lots of bullet holes was found in La Cala, Spain, near the eastern port of Alicante. He was shot and then run over by a car. Threats came in after he stole a Russian helicopter and flew it to Ukraine.
Kuzminov, who is 33 years old, was called a “moral corpse” by Sergei Naryshkin, the leader of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, as soon as he started planning his “bad and awful crime. ”
In March, Leonid Volkov, who works for a politician named Alexei Navalny, got his arm broken in a hammer attack in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Lithuania’s security service thinks the attack was likely planned and carried out by Russians. On April 19, Polish police arrested two people for allegedly attacking Volkov under orders from a foreign spy agency.
For many years, Putin has been in charge, and the Kremlin has repeatedly said that it is not trying to harm its enemies within Russia and in other countries. It has not said anything about the suspected poisonings. Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, refused to talk about Volkov’s situation, saying it is Lithuania’s Interior Ministry’s problem.
Even new anti-war groups are being targeted by Moscow.
Russians in Stockholm, Sweden, made a group to support Ukraine and political prisoners. They burned a fake person that looked like Putin outside the Russian Embassy, calling him a “war criminal”.
Six months later, the Russian government said the group was bad and could punish its members with fines and jail. Police visited their family in Russia and their private information was shared without their permission, according to their family members who spoke with AP. They spoke anonymously because they were worried about their safety.
The Russian Orthodox Tsargrad media said that some people in the group could be working for other countries’ spy agencies. It called them “terrorists. ” The pro-Kremlin outlet said they should expect bad things if they keep fighting against the war.
A few days later, during a visit to family in St Petersburg, Marina said that a police car stopped in front of her as she was leaving a store. Three men got out and asked for her papers. They made her get into the car and drove her to a police station with the siren on.
It was very frightening. Marina was surprised and worried that they knew exactly where she was. She did not want to share her last name because she is afraid for her safety.
She was shown the leaked data and video of the embassy protest, and investigators asked her to tell them who else was involved.