The Russ­ian Way in Transna­tion­al Repression

Not so long ago, most critics of various autocratic or dictatorial governments could base themselves in foreign states and campaign against their home regime in relative safety. This safety is now in question. Regimes are pursuing their exiled political enemies or critics with significant enthusiasm. A recent Freedom House report indicated that 44 countries have been caught conducting what are known as ‘transnational repression’ operations in some 100 target countries over the last decade. Transnational repression is a set of tactics which are concerned with harassing exiled opponents of a regime - political activists, journalists and regime insiders – into silence and renunciation of political activity. These tactics are frequently conducted by those nations' intelligence and security agencies. Russia’s agencies occupy a prominent place on the list of those engaged in transnational repression. Whilst many of the states on Freedom House’s report are relative newcomers to the business, Russia is certainly not. The war in Ukraine forced many critics of the Kremlin into exile and most of them resettled in the West. They may be pursuing their opponents abroad today with increased vigour, but transnational repression is an age-old practice of Russian and Soviet secret statecraft.

Institutional legacy of Russian transnational repression

Joseph Conrad, a former citizen of the Russian Empire, devoted two of his finest novels – The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes – to the transnational repression operations of the Tsar’s secret agencies aimed at the Russian revolutionaries in exile in the West at the end of the 19th century (in the UK and Switzerland respectively).  After the destruction of the Russian revolution in 1917, the Bolshevik secret police happily picked up the methods of their Tsarist predecessors – sometimes literally using the veterans of the Tsarist anti-émigré operations as their mentors. In the 1920s, the Soviet secret police carried out a series of astonishingly successful false-flag operations under the codename ‘Trust’ to lure politically active émigrés to the Soviet Union under the pretext of helping a fake anti-Bolshevik organisation. To help devise the plan of the operation, the Bolsheviks used a former Chief of the Gendarmes, General Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, who himself had supervised provocation operations against the revolutionaries under the Tsar. 

The Soviet political regime never stopped worrying about political emigration. The Communist masters at the Kremlin, most of them former political émigrés themselves, came to believe that emigration posed an existential threat to the political regime in the country. Their logic was simple: if one group of émigrés could have taken power in the country, why would another group not try? The passing of generations in the Kremlin and in Lubyanka (the headquarters of the Federal Security Service [FSB] in Russia) has not weakened that attitude. On the contrary, the Cold War increased paranoia. Moscow believed, correctly, that Western governments actively helped the Russian émigré groups to subvert the regime. Fifty years before, the West had tolerated émigré groups, even when Tsarist agents had tried to change that attitude by organising a false-flag attack on the Royal Observatory and presenting Russian revolutionaries as culprits.  

It is, therefore, hardly a surprise that all iterations of the country’s intelligence services during the Soviet 70-year long period had transnational repression as a top priority. At the height of its power in the late 1970s to early 1980s, the KGB had five departments dealing with the émigrés issue. Soviet military intelligence was also involved in operations against defectors. Vladimir Putin not only reintroduced political emigration when he forced the first group of his opponents – the oligarchs who controlled television channels – out of the country immediately after he installed himself in the Kremlin. He also reintroduced transnational repression as a method of dealing with the opposition in exile. The poisonings of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB operative, in 2006, and Sergei Skripal, a former military intelligence officer, in 2018 in the UK are just two of the most outrageous examples of such operations. The full-scale war in Ukraine only raised the stakes when most Russian opposition leaders ended up either in prison or in exile.

Russian agencies involved in transnational repression

The Russian security agency FSB – a combination of political police, counterintelligence, intelligence and counterterrorism operatives, a direct and proud successor to the KGB  – comes first to mind as the principal actor conducting transnational repression today. We found that at least nine departments of the FSB have been involved in transnational repression. Some may be broadly familiar to readers, others less so:

• The Operative Information and International Relations Service (The Fifth Service) is a foreign intelligence branch of the FSB. One of the tasks of the department is to oversee and monitor Russian diasporas. It is the officers of the Fifth Service that are given positions in international organisations abroad, compatriots’ organszations, the Russian houses and cultural centres and Russian embassies.  
• The Counterintelligence Service (The First Service) targets potential defectors in Russia and those who are suspected of providing help to Western agencies and Ukrainian organisations of all sorts. That includes Russian nationals now living abroad who were found to be providing help to Ukraine. It was this FSB department which targeted Ksenia Karelina, an American-Russian dual citizen who was arrested in Ekaterinburg when she visited her 90-year-old grandmother. She was sentenced to 12 years for helping Ukraine. 
• The Service to Protect the Constitutional System and Combat Terrorism (The Second Service) is essentially the secret police in charge of suppressing all kinds of political dissent. Russian political organisations abroad are within its scope because they could have connections/supporters in Russia. The main goal of this department is to prevent another revolution (i.e. prosecuting another Lenin in exile is of key importance). 
• The Department of Military Counterintelligence is involved in most investigations of attacks on Russian infrastructure. Part of the job of its officers is to identify connections between any threats or attacks with Russian political organisations abroad.
• The Investigative Directorate  – the main investigative body of the FSB  – prosecutes those accused of high treason and helping the enemy, and these days that means the Russians who stood up against the invasion of Ukraine.
• The Directorate of Internal Security is in charge of identifying the inside sources of Russian journalists in exile. One of the authors of this article was added on the Russian wanted list after the report of that directorate of the FSB. 
• The Border Troops control the Russian borders, collects data on dual citizenship, foreign countries’ permanent residence permits, and harasses and conducts interrogations of Russians coming and leaving the country.
• The Center of Operational and Technical Activities (Twelfth Centre) and Center of Information Security (Eighteenth Centre) are the two FSB centers which conduct electronic surveillance and monitor the messengers, social media use, and other electronic communications used by Russian émigrés to stay in touch with the Russians who remain the country. Those departments also engage in offensive cyber operations, including against Russian opposition journalists and activists in exile.  

The FSB is the principal, but hardly the only, government agency involved in transnational repression. Russian law enforcement agencies are also involved in transnational repression. The Ministry of Justice is busy designating Russian organisations in exile as “undesirable” – that status means that any cooperation, and even contacts with such entities, including the media, could lead to a prison term. The Investigative Committee, the Russian version of the FBI, provides legal grounds for harassing exiles and their relatives (arrests of assets, raids of apartments, interrogations of relatives), and it also helps the FSB with its operations.

The Interior Ministry, via the Chief Directorate of Fighting Extremism, runs a recruitment effort among activists and then assigns them, in cooperation with the FSB, to resettle abroad to spy on the émigré organisations. This is what happened to Vsevolod Osipov, who had been recruited in 2021 and then sent to Georgia to penetrate Russian opposition groups in exile. Once abroad, he contacted opposition media and told his story.

The Russian Foreign Ministry provides operational support to transnational repression operations. For instance, in January 2024 the Russian anti-war rock band Bi-2 was detained in Thailand after its performance there for working in the country without a permit. Fortunately, two days later the band members were allowed to leave the Thailand. Dmitri Gudkov, a Russian opposition politician who had been involved in the successful release of musicians, explained on social media that the crisis had been orchestrated by Russian diplomats and the consul in Thailand, Vladimir Sosnov had personally intervened to try to have the musicians deported to Russia. 

Finally, Roskomnadzor, the Russian Internet Censorship agency, blocks the websites and social media channels of exiles and also engages in identifying troublemakers online using online monitoring systems.  

Of course there are also non-state actors involved in Russian transnational repression – the media and accounts in social media which happily publish leaked personal data on anti-war activists active abroad and participate in campaigns of intimidation and harassment. As this list illustrates, Russia devotes very significant resources and energy to identifying and pursuing threats abroad.

Cooperation with foreign law enforcement agencies

After the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin realised that using the Red Notice – the Interpol procedure of search and arrest of the Russians abroad to extradite them back to the motherland – started getting more difficult. The Interpol procedure had long been abused by the Russian authorities. For example, in May 2018 Bill Browder, a financier turned anti-corruption campaigner and critic of the Kremlin, was arrested by Spanish authorities on a Russian Interpol warrant. He was released two hours later, after Interpol confirmed that it was a political case. Despite the blatant abuse of the procedure that cases like Browder’s demonstrated, it was only from February 2022 that Interpol has been treating Russian requests for extradition of activists and journalists as politically motivated.

To fix the problem, the Kremlin focused instead on bilateral cooperation with willing countries to secure help in extraditing Russians on the grounds of the Prosecutor General’s Office requests. In the last three years Russia signed Prosecutor’s agreements with Algeria, Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, China, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Angola, Venezuela, Egypt, Cambodia, North Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Cuba, Laos, Morocco, Thailand, Central African Republic and Chile.

That trend includes not only long-term allies of Russia, like China and North Korea, but also NATO member Türkiye. An agreement between Russia and Türkiye on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Cases and Extradition has been in place since 2017 when the prosecutor generals of the two countries signed a 2-year cooperation programme. The text of the document was not made public, but Russian Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov pointedly said "it was Türkiye that became the key in Russia’s extradition procedures and transit of criminals extradited to Russia by third countries”. This statement caused significant alarm among Russian émigrés settled in Türkiye, and those who use Türkiye as a transit hub on their way to and from Europe. This was only the beginning of a new era of cooperation between Moscow and Ankara. In March 2023, the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office claimed that Russia and Türkiye had worked out a new method of transferring extradited criminals via third countries and Türkiye to Russia. In July 2024, Krasnov had another meeting with his Turkish counterpart Muhsin Senturk in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Krasnov was apparently very happy with the way cooperation was going:

The same month, Türkiye detained and deported a Russian, Yevgeny N. Serebryakov, who had been suspected of detonating a car bomb in Moscow targeting a Russian military officer. Back in Moscow, Serebryakov was paraded by the FSB and admitted on camera he had acted on the orders of the Ukrainian security agency SBU. The FSB claimed a huge success, claiming that it had identified Serebryakov, had him detained, and then sent to Moscow within two days of the bomb attack.

The future of Russian transnational repression

The increasing transnational repression activities of the Russian state mean that for those Russians who stood up against the Kremlin and who now live in exile the world is becoming a much smaller place to live and travel in. It is getting much more dangerous. That ominous trend is unlikely to change in 2025.