COLUMN-Kremlin seen stepping up disruptive ops from Arctic to Africa

Throughout 2023, Moldovan and Western officials briefed multiple media outlets on what they said appeared to be a major Russian information operations campaign to undermine the government of President Maia Sandu, who last year claimed the Kremlin was possibly planning a coup. Such reports have been circulating since 2022, with suggestions Russia had hoped to create conditions for a military intervention in Moldova then, but needed to prioritise Ukraine.

A week after Russian prosecutors added her and other Baltic officials to a "wanted" list for supposedly encouraging the desecration of Soviet war graves, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas announced her intelligence services had broken up a ring of Russian-sponsored disruptors within the Baltic states. "We know the Kremlin is targeting all of our democratic societies," Kallas said in a post on X, previously known as Twitter.

Those who track Kremlin efforts to destabilise the rest of Europe say Moscow temporarily lost traction after Vladimir Putin's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine when dozens of its diplomats were deported and Russia's security machine was forced to refocus on the war. But reports this week from the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) say the Kremlin is rebuilding its foreign influence. As well as the Baltic states, targets appear to be Ukrainian neighbour Moldova, Africa and the Middle East.

Based on briefings from Ukrainian and other security officials, RUSI suggested the Kremlin was looking to recruit and develop networks among Russians who had moved abroad since 2022, often due to their reluctance to fight in the invasion. Some, it suggested, were being encouraged to seek asylum in the West and develop contacts with Russian and other dissidents whom they could then keep an eye on and exploit at will on behalf of the Russian state.

The complexity of some of these suspected operations appears to vary. On the other side of the Gulf of Finland, NATO's newest member complains it is on the receiving end of a different form of what officials there describe as hybrid warfare, one also used against the Baltic states and Poland from 2022. They complain illegal migrants from Africa and the Middle East are being pushed across the border or given mountain bikes to get there.

As along the Lithuanian and Polish border with Belarus, Finnish authorities are now erecting fencing and considering asking the EU to change immigration rules to make it legal to push arriving migrants back. Earlier this year, Russia withdrew from its previous long-running border deal with Finland, seen as deliberate retaliation for its NATO membership. In Estonia, the domestic security agency said it arrested 10 suspects between December and February it suggested were taking part in an operation intended to "spread fear and create tension in Estonian society".

They included individuals believed to have broken windows belonging to a car of Interior Minister Lauri Laanemets as well as another belonging to a journalist. As with adding Prime Minister Kallas to a "wanted" list, the primary purpose appeared to be to intimidate, to remind Estonian citizens – who were part of the Soviet Union since 1991 – that the Kremlin can still threaten them with ease.

The death last week in prison of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, some suggest, might also have deliberately coincided with the start of the Munich Security Conference, traditionally one of the largest gatherings of Western defence experts. The news sent shockwaves through the first day of the meeting and, coupled with U.S. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump's comments on potentially not supporting NATO allies, left many European defence figures openly admitting they felt depressed over the trajectory of events.

The Kremlin denied involvement in Navalny's death. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also described Estonian allegations of a local Russian-run operation as part of a "theatre of the absurd", designed to distract from Estonian support for the "terrorism" of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. MOLDOVA WORRIES

Both RUSI and ISW suggested the Kremlin was also particularly interested in Moldova, which is neither a NATO nor EU member but has embraced the West much more closely since early 2022. Russia and Moldova have an ongoing territorial dispute over the Transnistria region, where Moscow has kept peacekeeping troops since the fall of the USSR. Throughout 2023, Moldovan and Western officials briefed multiple media outlets on what they said appeared to be a major Russian information operations campaign to undermine the government of President Maia Sandu, who last year claimed the Kremlin was possibly planning a coup.

Such reports have been circulating since 2022, with suggestions Russia had hoped to create conditions for a military intervention in Moldova then, but needed to prioritise Ukraine. That would fit prior Kremlin behaviour, analysts say. In February 2017, Montenegrin officials accused Russia of attempting to mount a coup the previous year intended to stop the country joining NATO, another charge denied by Moscow.

Russia has also been linked with coups within West Africa, including military takeovers in Mali and Burkina Faso. Western officials appear to have kept tightlipped on a potential Moldova coup, but they did conduct multiple briefings last year alleging the existence of sophisticated Russian information operations amplifying online criticism – particularly of Moldova's economy – and fermenting violence and political opposition.

The Daily Beast quoted Michael Carpenter, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, as saying last year the aim of the operations appeared to be "trying to create uncertainty ... to create headwinds for the government". In May and June, U.S. and European authorities sanctioned almost a dozen primarily Russian individuals for "engaging in destabilising activities against the government of Moldova", part of what the U.S. Treasury described as "Russia's attempts to use covert operatives to subvert democracy".

The ISW said such efforts appeared to be continuing, including claims from a Russian military blogger that Moldova was "militarising" to "forcibly integrate" Transnistria into the Moldovan state and suggested Russia might need to respond militarily. Reported increased Russian military activity in the disputed enclave might also be a precursor to a possibly more aggressive "Russian hybrid operation" against Moldova, the U.S. think tank suggested, although it said it was impossible to assess the timing.

AFRICA AND MIDEAST AUDIENCES Until relations with the Kremlin and wider Russian military collapsed last year in the run-up to Yevgeny Prigozhin's failed coup, the private Wagner Group he founded had been a Kremlin tool of outreach in both the Middle East and Africa.

Initially becoming a player in the wars in Libya and Syria, it also provided "regime protection" services in the Central African Republic and built relations with other West African states. This was accompanied by mounting military cooperation and Kremlin-organised trips to Moscow for what RUSI describes as "second-tier African politicians" and stepped up connections with African graduates of Russian and Soviet universities.

By the time of the Ukraine invasion in February 2022, pro-Russian army officers had seized power in Mali, and others were becoming increasingly powerful in a string of other nations. According to RUSI, following the failed Wagner coup, the Kremlin moved fast to split up the Wagner empire, with domestic business interests passing to the Federal Security Bureau while foreign assets came directly under the control of GRU military intelligence. Wagner interests in Ukraine were then also split off separately, while the GRU prepared to take more direct control of other operations outside Russia's borders.

What the Russian defence ministry now offers African clients, the RUSI report said, citing internal Russian documents, is what the GRU calls a "regime survival package" in which Russian military support is tailored to keeping particular governments in power. In Mali, mining law is being changed to allow foreign assets to be expropriated and handed to Russian firms to fund this, while in other countries other agreements have been struck.

With Wagner gone, the Kremlin also appears to be attempting to build up Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov as more of an international player, painting him as a "hero of Islam" and critic of Israel, particularly since Israel's offensive into Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion. Chechen-linked charitable foundations have conducted outreach in Syria and the Balkans, where they give Russia the means of building influence amongst Muslim populations as well as Russia's traditional Serb allies.

None of these fronts is as important to the Kremlin as what happens in Ukraine. As events there appear to be going more Russia's way, or even if they don't, the temptation may grow for the Kremlin to step up action on other fronts. * Peter Apps is a Reuters columnist writing on defence and security issues. He joined Reuters in 2003, reporting from southern Africa and Sri Lanka and on global defence issues. He is also the founder of a think-tank, the Project for Study of the 21st Century, and, since 2016, has been a Labour Party activist and British Army reservist. (Editing by Nick Macfie)

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