Killings, coups and chaos: inside Putin’s secret spy war on Europe

Whether it be daylight assassinations or attempted coups, both the scale and the scope of Russia’s covert operations abroad have now reached a level not seen since the height of the Cold War. Nearly every week a new covert operation bearing Russian fingerprints is uncovered. “And those are just the ones we know about,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former special adviser to the head of Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service. “Those operations that come to light are just a tiny fraction of the total number. It’s not necessarily that they are operating in a different way but the scale has grown hugely.” As both a corollary and a testament to that, recruitment among the security service is known to have gone into overdrive, said Danylyuk, an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, adding that there was a heavy focus on students, both at home and abroad in countries sympathetic to Russia, such as Serbia.