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Shkruar nga Kristo Grozev, Michael Weiss & Roman Dobrokhotov
Leaked emails between Ždanoka and two Russian agents include frank and detailed reports from Ždanoka to her superiors. They describe her work as a European legislator, especially on official duties related to the promotion of pro-Kremlin sentiment in her home region of Batik.
Tatjana Ždanoka, a Latvian member of the European Parliament, has been a trusted collaborator of the Russian secret service since at least 2005. This was revealed by The Insider portal in cooperation with the Delfi Estonia news site, Latvian investigative journalism center "Re :Baltica" and the Swedish newspaper "Expressen".
Leaked emails between Ždanoka and two Russian agents include frank and detailed reports from Ždanoka to her superiors. They describe her work as a European legislator, especially on official duties related to the promotion of pro-Kremlin sentiment in her home region of Batik.
Other correspondence in our possession includes the arrangement of physical meetings in Moscow or Brussels between Ždanoka and the Russian agent, along with requests for funding from Russian sources to secure her political activities in Latvia and the European Parliament. At least once she asked for money to organize a rally to commemorate the victory of the Red Army in World War II.
In an e-mailed response to The Insider, Ždanoka said: "I cannot consider this text to be a question to me, as it is based on information that you are supposed to have and that you are not legally supposed to have. you have". We have confirmed that 2 of Ždanoka's contacts were officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.
According to the e-mails, her first case officer was an FSB veteran from the St. Petersburg headquarters, Dmitry Gladey, 74. He mentored Ždanoka from approximately 2004 to 2013. Thereafter, Ždanoka was in regular contact with Sergei Beltyukov, an FSB operative since 1993.
Ždanoka further emphasized to "The Insider" that he has met "thousands of people", and does not remember anyone named Beltyukov. This is because the latter communicated with him using the fake name "Sergey Krasin". Meanwhile, he confirmed that he had known Gladey for decades, having met in the early 1970s at a resort in the North Caucasus, where they were learning to ski.
However, she added that she did not know that Gladley is a Russian spy. "The only people with whom I sat at the same table and with the certainty that they were officers of the Russian FSB, are Vladimir Putin and Sergei Naryshkin" - said Ždanoka. (Naryshkin is the current head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the successor to the KGB's First Directorate.)
Alice Bah Kuhnke, an MEP from Sweden's Green Party and former Culture Minister in Stockholm, is today the vice-president of the Greens/European Free Alliance, to which Zhdanoka belonged until April 2022. Kuhnke said the news about the spying of Ždanoka is terrifying but not surprising.
" Finally, as parliamentarians, we both receive constant reports in the European Parliament. And I know, since I was a minister in the Swedish government, how the agents of Russia and Putin work. They have their networks everywhere ," she says.
Meanwhile, in a comment for "The Insider", the German politician and former MP Rebecca Harms, who was the leader of the Greens/European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament in 2010-2016, said: " One of my failures as co-chair of the alliance was that I failed to convince the Greens and the EFA MEPs that Ždanoka's apparent support for Putin and Assad (the illegal referendum in Crimea, the bombing of Aleppo, the activities in the European Parliament with the Russian nationalists) were completely unacceptable to a member of the Greens/EFA faction. In this case, my group did not believe me and my 'Russophobia' but a member of a party funded by Putin, an MEP who has consistently supported dictators, war crimes and crimes against international law. "
Like nearly a quarter of Latvia's population, Ždanoka is of Russian origin. Her family moved to Latvia, which was illegally annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, in the middle of World War II. She received Latvian citizenship in 1996, 5 years after the Baltic state regained full independence from Moscow.
Despite holding such a passport, Ždanoka has built a career opposing Latvia's existence as a sovereign country. It has openly supported Latvia's eastern neighbor Russia, along with Moscow's well-documented and ongoing efforts to intervene in the Baltics.
In 2009, the Moscow City Council sent the Russian diplomat Georgy Muradov to Riga. His visit coincided with preparations for the European Parliament elections that year. Activities in the Latvian capital included lobbying ethnic Russians to vote for Ždanoka, even handing out envelopes of money to Russian World War II veterans to drum up support.
Today Muradov serves as deputy chairman of Rossotrudnichestvo in Russian-occupied Crimea. Officially, this body serves as the cultural arm of the Russian Foreign Ministry. While not officially, at least according to Western secret services, it is not a branch of Russian espionage.
According to a source from the Western services, Muradov himself is a spy. The records show several connections between the "diplomat" and the FSB, including his residential address - Michurinsky Prospect 29/1, which is located in a block of high-rise buildings in Moscow, and apartments inhabited mainly by the FSB, and less by SVR officers.
In 2014, Ždanoka went to Crimea as an "international observer" in the illegal referendum that paved the way for the illegal annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula by Russia. At this time, Muradov himself was stationed in Crimea, and was the representative of occupied Crimea in the Kremlin.
Two years later, in 2016, Ždanoka traveled to Syria, where he held talks with dictator Bashar Al-Assad. At the time of the MEP's visit to Damascus, Russia was militarily supporting the Assad regime in its fight for survival against Western-backed rebel forces.
The European Parliament refused to pay the Latvian MEP's travel expenses, as Assad and his men were under European Union sanctions. And on March 2, 2022, Ždanoka was among only 13 MEPs who voted against the European Parliament resolution condemning Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ždanoka's secret work on behalf of the Russian secret service largely complements Russian foreign policy. The MEP from Latvia repeatedly condemns the 3 Baltic countries for the alleged mistreatment of their sizable ethnic Russian minorities.
One of the main themes of her campaign in the European Parliament is the "persecution" of the Russian language by Latvia. In March 2015, she participated in an event organized by the organization "Latvia without Nazism", co-founded by Ždanoka in Belgium. The head of the State Security Service of Latvia, Normunds Mežviets, said that the activity was financed by the Kremlin and that it captured the figure of 25,000 euros. "It is very clear that these people are fulfilling Russia's interests," Mežviets said at the time.
In addition to the trip to Russian-controlled Crimea, Ždanoka organized a public hearing in the European Parliament on June 26. The topic was the Estonian authorities' response to violent protests in Tallinn following the removal of a Soviet-era World War II monument.
She also organized a 3-day training for Latvian and Estonian pro-Russian "anti-fascist" organizations, including the Estonian-based "Night Watch" movement, which was created after the departure of the Bronze Soldier. Harrys Puusepp, Bureau Chief at the Internal Security Service, KaPo, in Estonia tells "The Insider" that "Ždanoka's activities in Estonia are part of a disruptive operation coordinated by the Kremlin."/ Adapted "Pamphlet" from "The insider"
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