News & Investigations

Excerpt from a book currently in preparation Russia’s embassy serves as the center of its legal intelligence activities in any country. It houses the residencies of all special services (the 5th Service of the FSB, the SVR, the GRU, and Rossotrudnichestvo), which are only formally subordinate to the ambassador. During the Soviet era, 60 to 80% of embassy diplomatic staff were intelligence officers. As John Barron wrote, «Because the KGB fills many Soviet embassies with such a

Geneva and Vienna have long served as convenient platforms for Russian intelligence in Europe, because there are many international organizations there in which there are many Russian representatives. Positions in secretariats, translation and protocol services, access to databases and diplomatic infrastructure give the Russian Federation’s special services an opportunity to embed their agents without hindrance. And then these structures begin to function not as platforms for

On May 9, 2025, a day sacred to Putin’s propaganda, a group of five members of the European Parliament arrived in Moscow. The group included: Ruth Firmenich and Michael von der Schulenburg from Germany, members of the left-wing party «Sandra Wagenknecht’s Alliance.» Ľuboš Blaha from Slovakia, a member of the ruling Smer party. Ondřej Dostál, an independent MP from the Czech Republic. Fidias Panayiotou, an independent member of the Republic of Cyprus. The Russian media covered

Operation Zorro: Russian special services begin destabilizing Cyprus ahead of elections A covert phase of the parliamentary election campaign has begun in Cyprus—not through political programs and debates, but through Russian-language propaganda and street leaflets. On October 2, 2025, the pro-Kremlin website Cyprus Butterfly published a manifesto calling for an «uprising» against the Cypriot authorities. Leaflets with the same content were distributed in Nicosia the day befo

Russian embassies in most countries around the world differ from diplomatic missions of other countries in their inexplicably bloated...

In late April, European media reported that a 59-year-old Georgian native with Greek citizenship was arrested in the Greek city of...

Dmitry Khmelnitsky Boris Demash On October fifth, 2023, a diplomatic scandal broke out in Cyprus. Rossiyskaya Gazeta correspondent...

For Soviet and Russian security services, recruitment of foreign nationals was the most important method  of work. This practice, which...

A new political party "Elpis" has been established in Cyprus. The party sees one of its main tasks in the active development of ties with...