How Putin's international spy network operates

Russia’s espionage has always stood out. The KGB (Soviet espionage) managed to infiltrate many countries. Even today Russia has a global spy network capable of disclosing secrets from many Western governments.

The Russian president has even confessed, during a televised interview in 2017, to running an “illegal” spy network abroad while he served as an officer of the KGB​.

According to the Daily Mirror, the British government suspects there are approximately 1,000 Russian spies in the UK.

Image: Anthony Delanoix/Unsplash

The Daily Mirror quotes a source from the British secret services who assures that, among the Russian informants, there are waiters, taxi drivers, members of the administration and even the government.

Image: Tadas Petrokas/Unsplash

That intelligence source cited by the Mirror also alerts about the possible infiltration of Russian agents in unions and other associations that can manipulate in favor of the interests of the Kremlin.

Not surprisingly, London is called Londongrad because many Russian oligarchs chose the British capital as their place of residence.

Image: Alexander London/Unsplash

But it’s not only the former USSR ultra-rich who live in the UK. There are more than 73,000 Russians on British soil, according to estimates by The Office for National Statistics.

Photo: Marcin Nowak/Unsplash

The old KGB managed to infiltrate a good number of spies in different British establishments. The case of the "Cambridge Five", Cold War spies with communist ideals who served Moscow for years, is well known.

But the most famous is probably that of Kim Philby, a double agent who worked for MI6 (British espionage) although, in reality, he served the Kremlin.

But there are other countries where Putin has his shadow pawns. In Norway, a Russian citizen was arrested in October 2022. His name is Mikhail Mikushin and he was posing as a Brazilian researcher at the University of Tromsø.

The arrest of two brothers (Peyman Kia, 42, and Payam Kia, 35) who allegedly spied for Russia, was also reported from Sweden. If the charges are proven, they could be sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

Furthermore, the BBC reported in the summer of 2022 that a Russian spy was caught trying to infiltrate the International Criminal Court.

More difficult perhaps would be for the Russians to infiltrate agents in the United States. However, in Mexico, a stone’s throw away from US territory, there’s an important Russian espionage base.

According to Glen D. VanHerck, a military in command of the United States “Currently, most of the GRU (Russian spy agency) troops in the world are in Mexico.”

However, Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador denied the US General’s claims, according to the Associated Press.

It is unknown whether Russian intelligence has really been able to infiltrate agents in the United States at levels of the administration that may be relevant. Of course, there have been more or less recent cases of spies who seemed like good Americans.

The Netflix series 'The Americans' featured an American-looking couple who actually worked for the 1980s KGB. In the 2010s there was a case that looked very similar to the series…

Richard and Cynthia Murphy were arrested by the FBI at their New Jersey home. Their names were actually Vladimir and Lydia Guryev, and they had been spying for Russia since 1990.

Photo: Chasing News

However, in a world like today, intelligence work, information theft or covert propaganda no longer need to be done on the ground. The territory of the virtual allows remote work that, according to most analysts, Russia has been dominating for years.

Image: Chris Yang/Unsplash

Cyberattacks or interference in the internal politics of a country through campaigns directed from abroad are much more effective intelligence work than the old theft of microfilms of old movies.

Be that as it may, the figure of the spy continues to exist. And, as revealed in the press with each arrest, Putin's network of agents abroad is a close reality.