How the Belarussian KGB has been targetting the diaspora in Europe
~ Nikita Ivansky ~
In 2023, a scandal broke out when a Belarusian opposition activists signed up for a job to “research” the Belarusian opposition for a special EU commission that was supposedly investigating corruption. The job was posted in one of the oppositional chats and turned out to be a scam created by KGB to collect data. The scammed activist was even paid small sums for his work. The story climaxed with the KGB publicly announcing that the activist was working for them—during one of the security workshops organized by the scammed person.
Last year, a series of video interviews with an opposition journalist for a documentary were published on the web. The person later turned out to be a Belarussian KGB agent working out of Belarus. Parts of the interview were later even published by the state propaganda media to show success in its operations against the diaspora.
In its fourth decade of existence, the Belarusian dictatorship now stands in the shadow of the Kremlin and its war in Ukraine. The horrors the Russian army has visited on occupied territories are quite often much worse than what Belarusian society has to go through. However, the war against any opposition was started by Lukashenko in 1994 and continues to this day. And if repressions of anarchists, antifascists and liberals inside the country quite often ends up in the mainstream media, the targetting of those living in the diaspora rarely attracts attention. With hundreds leaving the country after 2020, authoritarian states are using modern tricks to attack the opposition in “safe” countries.
Some of the regime’s work is ‘classical’ spying. Military intelligence agent Pavel Rubtsov, who was extradited by Poland to Russia in August 2024 as part of a prisoner exchange, transmitted information about the Belarusian opposition in Warsaw to Moscow. According to the newspaper Wyborcza, Rubtsov, who was working undercover as Spanish journalist Pablo Gonzalez, informed the leadership in 2020 that he had met with members of the Coordination Council of the Belarusian opposition, and handed over data about the old and new offices of the “Belarus House” foundation.
But on the internet, the Belarusian regime’s operations on the internet can sometimes resemble the activity of scam groups. In the past years, Belarusian political police has been running several phishing campaigns online, trying to gather information via unsuspecting activists. The fake EU seminar is a case in point: for months, the KGB was getting locations of different oppositional events and names of participants.
In the 1990s, some oppositional politicians were recruited before leaving, and started to pass information back as soon as they ended up in some western country. This old-school tactic of recruiting people from society instead of trying to infiltrate oppositional circles continued through all these 30 years. Scandals around different activists who signed papers to work for the KGB continue on a regular basis now in exiled opposition circles. One example is the case of Fyodor Garbachou, the husband of a Belarusian journalist, who was found to have an agent passport in the name of Viktar Makeev issued before the protests of 2020. And even though it is unknown what Fiodor/Viktar was doing abroad, it is clear that he was recruited at some point in the past to work for KGB (while still officially working for the Wargaming development company).
This tactic was used by the Tsarist and Soviet secret police for many generations, not only to be able to control dissidents in exile, but also to spread paranoia and mistrust within activists circles.
Olga Semashko and Fyodor Gorbachev. Photo: social networks
Pressure points on activists can also be arrests on drug charges or some other offenses, but also retaliation against their family members. These days it is quite common for relatives of activists who are living abroad and continuing political work to be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to years in a penal colony on made-up charges. Through the control of relatives within the country, the Belarusian political police and KGB can control people outside of it, whether through preventing them from doing political work at all, or making them work for the regime to collect information on other activists. This is the case for many anarchists and antifascists who left the country in the past years. One of the anarchists from Belarus who died fighting in Ukraine is still listed as anonymous due to possible revenge prosecution of the relatives
Taking these examples into account, we can only imagine the scale of operations of authoritarian regimes that have much bigger coffers, whether Russia, Iran or China. Quite often, western activists see those living in exile as a bit over-paranoid, with vivid imagination. However, as authoritarianism becomes more pervasive, it is crucial that we fully understand the dangers coming not only from within the state we are living in, but from outside as well.
Top photo: Protest in Minsk, 2020. Wikimedia.
