An Argentinian couple living in Slovenia, a Mexican-Greek photographer who ran a yarn shop in Athens and now three Bulgarians arrested in Britain. Over the past year, police and security services across the globe have accused numerous people living apparently innocuous lives with being Russian intelligence agents or operatives.
Many others have been accused of passing information to Russia, including a security guard at the British embassy in Berlin, sentenced to 13 years in prison, and more than a dozen people arrested in Poland accused of carrying out various tasks for Russian intelligence.
Much about the three Bulgarians, said to be among five people detained in February, remains unclear. They have been charged but their trial is not until January, they have yet to enter pleas, and the British authorities have made no details public about the allegations.
But elsewhere one thing is clear: since Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February, Moscow has had to resort to riskier and less conventional methods of spying, mainly because so many of the spies it had placed under diplomatic cover in Europe have been expelled.
Traditionally, all three of Russia’s main security services – the domestic FSB, the SVR foreign intelligence service and the GRU military intelligence – have posted their operatives abroad under diplomatic cover. They have also used operatives posing as Russian businesspeople, tourists or journalists.
The war has made all of that much harder. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that more than 450 diplomats were expelled from Russian embassies in the first three months of the war, most of them from Europe.
“The time after the war, with all the expulsions, was a fateful time for the Russian intelligence system and they have tried to replace it with different things,” one European intelligence official told the Guardian in spring.
Many avenues that Russia previously used for its aggressive espionage operations have been shut down. When Sergei Skripal was poisoned with novichok in 2018, the poisoners were GRU agents who used Russian passports issued under false identities to obtain British visas.
The investigative outfit Bellingcat traced their passport numbers to a particular passport office in Russia, allowing the identification of many other GRU operatives who used passports with similar serial numbers and blowing the cover of numerous Russian agents.
On top of that, since the war it is much harder for any Russian citizens to obtain visas for travel to Britain or the Schengen zone, meaning people like the Skripal attackers would now struggle to obtain visas even if their links to the GRU were not detected.
All of this has meant Russia has turned to activating sleeper cells or passing on more active espionage work to unofficial agents and operatives. These may be third-country nationals, or they may be “illegals” – Russian operatives posing as third-country nationals, who spend years painstakingly building up their cover.
Illegals, a holdover from a Soviet-era programme, traditionally do little active espionage work, allowing them to blend into societies for longer-term missions.
However, in the past year, at least seven alleged illegals have been unmasked in the west – in Norway, Brazil, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Greece. Some managed to escape and are presumed to be back in Russia; others are still under arrest in the west.
The three suspected spies in Britain were arrested in February, two months after “Maria Meyer” and “Ludwig Gisch” were arrested in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Authorities there believe the pair are Russians who were posing as Argentinians were in fact career SVR officers.
“Meyer” ran an art gallery in Ljubljana and used her cover job for frequent travel, including to Britain. It is not known whether she carried out espionage tasks in Britain, and there is no public evidence linking her or other Russian operatives to the three Bulgarians charged.
