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When in March 2018 news broke that former Russian
double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia may have been
poisoned with a nerve agent called Novichok by spies working for
Russia's GRU, Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev became alarmed.
Three years earlier, in April 2015, he had been in
a coma after being poisoned with an unknown substance. His son and
an employee of his company also fell ill and were treated in
intensive care. Although the Bulgarian authorities opened an
investigation into the matter, they closed it in 2016 for lack of
any progress.
Feeling that the Skripal case was similar to what
he went through, Gebrev alerted the Bulgarian authorities. He
believed he had been attacked because of his intention to buy a
stake in a Bulgarian arms factory and that Russian GRU agents,
potentially linked to a competitor, were involved in his poisoning.
The Bulgarian law enforcement agencies and the
government were slow to respond and so was the prosecution under the
leadership of General Prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov, who was said to
have close relations with his Russian counterpart, Yuri Chaika.
Unlike most other European Union and NATO members
and Western Balkan countries like Albania, North Macedonia and
Montenegro, Bulgaria refused to expel Russian diplomats over the
Skripal case. "Usually these cases are not what they seem to be,"
commented Prime Minister Boyko Borisov in Brussels at the time.
But now Sofia is changing tack. On January 23,
2020, the prosecution under the new prosecutor general, Ivan Geshev,
charged three Russian citizens believed to be GRU agents with
attempted murder. A day later, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
ordered a first secretary at the Russian Federation's embassy as
well as an employee at the trade bureau to leave the country. It had
already expelled another Russian diplomat in October.
A report released in November by the investigative
websites Bellingcat and The Insider claimed that one of the GRU
agents who was involved in Gebrev's poisoning was Sergey Fedotov
(real name Denis Sergeev), who coordinated the Salisbury hit squad.
He had booked a hotel room close to Gebrev's office and was caught
on security cameras walking around in its car park.
The revelations surrounding the 2015 incident come
on the heels of a string of spying scandals in the Balkans involving
Russian citizens over the past five years. It is no secret that the
region has long been a stomping ground for the Kremlin's security
services.
Though Russia has no troops on the ground, it has
waged a war against the West and its influence on the Balkans by
other means - from propaganda and disinformation to assistance to
nationalist and far-right groups, all the way to targeted
assassinations.
In October 2016, the Montenegrin authorities
uncovered a plot hatched by Serb ultranationalists and rogue
security officers to overthrow the Montenegrin government. According
to the prosecutors, they acted in league with two GRU agents, Eduard
Shirokov and Vladimir Popov. Both were sentenced in absentia in May
2019.
Bellingcat and The Insider established that
"Popov" (real name Vladimir Moiseev) frequently visited Bulgaria in
2014, possibly preparing for the attack against Emilian Gebrev.
Russian agents also sought to torpedo efforts by
Greece and North Macedonia to settle their long-standing name
dispute. In July 2018, weeks after the landmark Prespa Agreement was
signed settling the issue, Athens expelled two Russian diplomats for
stoking opposition against the deal in the northern regions. The
move came despite the fact that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had
refused to do the same in reaction to the Skripal affair four months
earlier.
At about the same time North Macedonia's prime
minister, Zoran Zaev, pointed a finger at a Greek-Russian
businessman for paying Slav Macedonian nationalists to attack the
Prespa agreement.
Russian spies have stirred trouble in Serbia, a
close partner of Moscow, as well. In November 2019, President
Aleksander Vucic accused a former assistant military attache at the
Russian embassy of bribing a retired officer in order to obtain
confidential information. He was forced to speak up publicly about
it after a video of the encounter was posted on YouTube and caused
outrage among the Serbian public.
The recurrent spy scandals, however, are unlikely
to disrupt Russia's close ties to the region. On the whole, Balkan
governments believe in engagement and in recent months they have all
showed a willingness to maintain close relations with Russia,
despite the spying incidents.
In February 2019, a few months before he was
elected prime minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis travelled to
Moscow to meet a number of top-level Russian officials and express
his support for close bilateral ties.
Then, in November last year, North Macedonia held
a joint business forum with Russia, headlined by Zaev and Aleksei
Gruzdev, the Russian deputy minister of industry and trade.
And earlier this year, Bulgarian Prime Minister
Borisov and President Vucic of Serbia were side by side with Russian
President Vladimir Putin at the inauguration of the TurkStream
natural gas pipeline in Turkey.
No leader seems interested in ramping up rhetoric
against the Kremlin at this point. At a time when French President
Emmanuel Macron is vociferously arguing for a diplomatic reset with
Russia and German Chancellor Angela Merkel is defending the
Nordstream 2 pipeline, the Balkans has no reason to strain its
relations with the Kremlin.
Yet a pushback against Moscow by the security and
the law enforcement agencies is a fact. Russia has gone too far in
its disruptive tactics, with GRU's daredevil mindset doing the
greatest harm. Western states are no doubt encouraging local efforts
to resist infiltration.
GRU operatives will surely continue to roam the
neighbourhood but they will be watched closely.
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