At least four Russians released in prisoner exchange with West are verified ‘illegals’
August 5, 2024 2 Comments
AT LEAST FOUR OF the eight Russians released by the United States and its allies last week, in exchange for 16 people held in Russian prisons, are verified ‘illegals’ —the term used to describe Russian non-official-cover intelligence personnel. All four operated using third country identity documents, including passports. In every case but one, these identity documents had been illegally acquired.
In intelligence parlance, the term ‘illegals’ emerged during the Cold War to describe Russian intelligence personnel who operated without any formal association with Russian diplomatic facilities. In many cases, these operatives used third country passports. This enabled them to operate with an unusual degree of flexibility and evade the attention of rival intelligence services. At the same time, however, the absence of diplomatic credentials prevented these operatives from claiming diplomatic immunity if caught. It thus exposed them to the possibility of lengthy prison terms upon discovery.
THE TWO GRU ILLEGALS
Among the prisoners exchanged last week was Pavel Alekseyevich Rubtsov. Rubtsov was born in the Soviet Union as the grandson of a Spanish evacuee, who had been taken to Moscow as a child by the leftist Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. At the age of 9, Rubtsov moved with his mother to Spain, where he had his name legally changed to Pablo González Yagüe and grew up in Catalonia and the Basque Country. He was arrested in Poland in 2022 and charged with participating in foreign intelligence activities against Poland on behalf of the Main Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces’ General Staff, which is commonly known as GRU.
IntelNews has previously reported on the case of Mikhail Valeryevich Mikushin, who was also released and returned to Russia on Thursday. Mikushin lived for several years in Canada and Norway using a Brazilian passport under the name of José Assis Giammaria. When he was arrested by Norwegian authorities, Mikushin was working as a researcher on arctic security affairs for the Arctic University of Norway. Among other things, Mikushin was a volunteer researcher for a UiT GreyZone, a scholarly project that studies contemporary hybrid threats and grey zone warfare. Like Yagüe, Mikushin is also believed to have been employed by the GRU.
THE TWO SVR ILLEGALS
Arguably the most unusual case of illegals among those unveiled last week is that of Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva. The couple moved from Argentina to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in 2017. They brought with them their two young children, a boy and a girl, both of whom appear to have been born in Argentina. Artem Dultsev’s Argentinian passport bore the name Ludvig Gisch, born in 1984 in the West African country of Namibia. Dultsev posed as an information technology executive. His wife, Anna Dultseva, who operated an art gallery, used the cover name Maria Rosa Mayer Munos and went by Mayer. Read more of this post
AUTHORITIES IN GERMANY and Poland have charged three individuals with working on behalf of Russian military intelligence in planning acts of sabotage and assassination on European soil. One of the plots allegedly involved an effort to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Another aimed to sabotage commercial airport facilities that are being managed by the United States military.
DURING THE COLD WAR, Poland hosted the Eastern Bloc’s only known intelligence training facility for operations officers situated outside of the Soviet Union. The highly secretive training facility operated out of a heavily guarded compound located near the northern Polish village of Stare Kiejkuty in Gmina Szczytno county, approximately 65 miles from the Polish-Soviet border. Today, 50 years after its establishment, the facility continues to train the operations officers of post-communist Poland’s intelligence services.
AUTHORITIES IN POLAND HAVE seized an abandoned school building in the Polish capital Warsaw, allegedly because it was being used as a base for espionage activities by the Russian government. Following the seizure of the building complex, Russian officials issued stern but vague warnings, saying that action will be taken in response to what they termed as an “act of provocation” by the Polish government.
CENTRAL FIGURES OF POLAND’S opposition coalition, which narrowly lost the 2019 parliamentary election, had their cell phones hacked with a surveillance software used by the country’s spy services, according to a new report. A major target of the hacks was Krzysztof Brejza, a member of the lower chamber of the Polish parliament and campaign director of the Civic Coalition, a centrist-liberal alliance. In the parliamentary election of 2019, the Civic Coalition challenged the all-powerful Law and Justice Party (PiS), which has ruled Poland for much of the past decade.
SEVERAL EASTERN EUROPEAN STATES announced plans to expel Russian diplomats this week, as Moscow declared an Italian diplomat persona non grata in a tit-for-tat dispute with Rome over espionage allegations. Earlier this month, the Czech Republic 
Military forces around the world are scrambling to contain the impact of COVID-19 on military readiness, as the virus continues to infect troops and commanders at an alarming rate. On Tuesday, the Polish government 
The Polish government has authorized the release on bail of a former counterintelligence officer who was charged in January of this year with spying for China. The man has been identified in media reports as Piotr Durbajlo and is believed to have served as deputy director of the Internal Security Agency, Poland’s domestic counterintelligence service. A cyber security expert, Durbajlo also served in Poland’s Office of Electronic Communications with a top security clearance and unrestricted access to classified systems of Poland and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, of which Poland is a member.
The Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei has fired one of its employees who was arrested last week in Poland on charges of spying for China, 
Authorities in Poland have charged three high-level military intelligence officials with acting in the interests of Russia. The three include two former directors of Polish military intelligence and are facing sentences of up to 10 years in prison. The news broke on December 6, when Polish authorities announced the arrest of Piotr Pytel, who was director of Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW) from 2014 to 2015. It soon emerged that two more arrests had taken place, that of Pytel’s predecessor, Janusz Nosek, and Krzysztof Dusza, Pytel’s chief of staff during his tenure as SKW director.
The former director of Poland’s military counterintelligence agency has been questioned by the country’s military police, over allegedly illegal cooperation with Russian intelligence. From 2006 to 2012, General Piotr Pytel was head of Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service (MCS), which is responsible for domestic security and for ensuring the war-readiness of Poland’s armed forces. According to government prosecutors, General Pytel struck an illegal agreement with the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, in 2010. The alleged agreement concerned the return to Poland of troops who had been sent to serve in Afghanistan with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Several hundred Polish troops participated in ISAF, a NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan, established by the United Nations Security Council in 2001.
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Reuters publishes details about alleged Russian airline sabotage plot
April 7, 2025 by Joseph Fitsanakis 4 Comments
It is now understood that the explosions occurred on July 19, 20 and 21, 2024, and that at least two of them took place in facilities belonging to DHL, a German logistics firm headquartered in Bonn. Affected facilities are reportedly located in Leipzig, Warsaw, and Birmingham. All three explosions were caused by rudimentary incendiary devices hidden inside commercial shipments. European officials said at the time that the explosions were part of a broader wider campaign by Russian intelligence to sabotage Western European transportation and shipping networks.
Now the Reuters news agency claims that the explosions were meant to test security systems in preparation for a major sabotage operation. The operation aimed to detonate explosive mechanisms in mid-air on cargo flights from Europe to the United States and Canada. Moreover, a fourth incendiary device, which was found at a Warsaw shipping facility, failed to explode and has been forensically examined by bomb experts, Reuters said. Citing “interviews with more than a dozen European security officials”, including a person familiar with the case in Poland, the news agency said it was able to provide “the most granular account yet of the alleged plot”.
The report claims the incendiary devices were concealed inside pillows, bottles of cosmetics, and sex toys. They were ignited with the use of remote timers taken from cheap Chinese electronic goods. Once detonated, the timers sparked explosions with the help of gelled flammable cocktails that included compounds such as nitromethane—a highly flammable liquid chemical used in industrial applications. All ingredients used in the incendiary devices, including nitromethane, are easily accessible to consumers at a relatively low cost.
According to Reuters, the procedures followed in the DHL attacks fit the profile of similar operations that have been carried out in recent years by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Forces’ General Staff, known as GRU. Such procedures include hiring disposable agents, most of which are not Russian citizens, for one-off operations. In the case of the DHL attacks, the agents were allegedly hired on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram and paid with the use of cryptocurrencies, or in cash.
Among the alleged suspects in the case is a Ukrainian man identified by Reuters as Vladyslav Dekravets, who was recruited in southern Poland and is now facing extradition to Poland from Bosnia. Another suspect, identified in the Reuters report as Alexander Bezrukavyi, allegedly packaged parcels containing sneaker shoes for shipment to the United States and Canada. The shipments were intended to help the GRU “gather information about parcel-processing methods and timing”. During the operation, the two men came in contact with individuals who appeared to be GRU officers, using the cryptonyms WARRIOR and MARY.
The DHL cases remain at a pre-trial stage in several European countries, Reuters said. They involve the pending extradition of suspects from elsewhere in Europe. The trials are going to feature evidence gathered from criminal investigators and intelligence agencies, according to the report.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 07 April 2025 | Permalink
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Alexander Bezrukavyi, DHL Group, Germany, GRU, News, Poland, Russia, sabotage, transportation security, UK, Vladyslav Dekravets