Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Victor Lavrinenko
[REGNUM] Spy mania is not abating in the Baltics. In recent weeks, new information has been received related to the cases of "Russian spies" caught in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The bona fides of these cases raise serious doubts, but they fulfill their main function.
This kind of news helps to keep local Russian communities in fear. In a situation where no one is sure that he or she will not be declared the next "spy", few dare to loudly protest against the policy of oppression.
"Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!"
EXPLOSIVES IN THE GARAGE
The Riga Regional Court recently sentenced a 72-year-old Russian citizen who permanently resides in Latvia to eight years in prison. The man's name has not been released, but it is known that he once served in the Soviet Army. After Latvia left the USSR, the retired officer, like over 700,000 other Russian speakers living there, did not receive local citizenship - and then he applied for Russian citizenship.
He was detained on December 20, 2023 - the Latvian State Security Service opened a criminal case on "espionage in favor of the Russian Federation", the LETA agency reported, citing the prosecutor's office.
According to the prosecutor's office, the man " received publicly available information about political processes in Latvia, critical infrastructure and military facilities in the area of the Riga airport, and also inspected the area around the 17th battalion of the Zemessardze (local territorial militia. - Ed. Regnum )." It is alleged that the man passed this information on to a representative of Russian intelligence, who personally came to meet him in Kaliningrad.
The Latvian prosecutor's office admits that it was "difficult for them to determine the specific volume of information transmitted," since " the espionage was carried out over a long period of time, and the defendant transmitted the information he received by personally visiting the Russian Federation."
It is also claimed that explosives were found in the pensioner’s garage: a hexogen briquette weighing 975 grams and four TNT briquettes with a total weight of 759.4 grams, as well as 136 rounds of ammunition.
The details voiced raise questions.
Why would a Russian intelligence officer need to meet with a pensioner for the sake of “publicly available information about political processes in Latvia”? After all, this same information can be obtained from the Internet. And the stories about explosives found on the pensioner are vividly reminiscent of other similar cases that have taken place in recent years.
Thus, in 2002, the Latvian secret police accused opposition activist Vladimir Linderman (an associate of Eduard Limonov ) of preparing an assassination attempt on then-President Vaira Vike-Freiberga. They presented 200 grams of TNT and two detonator caps, allegedly hidden by Linderman in his armchair at home. The activist took refuge in Russia, but in 2008 Linderman was extradited to Latvia – in the spirit of the Russian Federation’s understanding of the “good-neighborliness policy” at that time.
However, the evidence presented against the opposition activist turned out to be so thin that the Latvian court acquitted Linderman in 2009. True, back then the times were much freer than now.
In 2017, a case was opened in Latvia against opposition journalist Yuri Alekseyev, editor of the Imhoclub portal, who had long been an eyesore for officials.
He was accused, among other things, of illegal possession of ammunition. Alekseyev himself claimed that the cartridges were planted on him - and indeed, his fingerprints and genetic material were not found on them. The Latvian court initially decided to remove these cartridges from the indictment, but pressure from above came, and they appeared there again.
Alekseyev, who was also accused of writing anti-Latvian comments on the Internet and “possessing child pornography” (photos of the journalist’s children bathing were considered child pornography), recently fled to Belarus. According to Alekseyev himself, they wanted to jail him for up to ten years.
The stories of Linderman and Alekseev give reason to doubt the integrity of the case opened against the still unknown pensioner - if in order to finally "drown" him, it was necessary to resort again to such a trick as the alleged explosives found on him.
It is also worth noting that on January 28, a Latvian court will begin hearing the cases of two more people accused of espionage. The first of them is Riga taxi driver Sergei Sidorov, who was caught in correspondence with several political emigrants from Latvia who created the Telegram channel “Anti-Fascists of the Baltics” in Russia. Sidorov sent them photos of objects like the Riga airport or the seaport, taken from angles accessible to everyone.
The second is Latvian Svetlana Nikolaeva, who brought Sidorov money for a lawyer from his sister, who lives in Russia. The seriously ill Nikolaeva is effectively deprived of access to medical care and is slowly dying in a Latvian prison. According to investigators, Sidorov and Nikolaeva illegally collected and transmitted to Russia undisclosed information about other suspected spies who are in custody in Latvia.
THE MYSTERIOUS STORY OF EDUARD MANOVAS
In December last year, Lithuanian special services reported the capture of a "Russian spy". The corresponding suspicion was brought against 82-year-old Eduards Manovas. Manovas, who holds dual Russian-Lithuanian citizenship, was an activist of the conservative party "Fatherland Union - Lithuanian Christian Democrats" (SO-KhDL), which lost power in the country as a result of the autumn elections.
In addition, Manovas is a member of the influential Union of Political Prisoners and Exiles in the country. This is due to the fact that he was born into a family of Lithuanian residents who were deported by the Soviet government at the time - and in recent years he actively indulged in memories of his childhood in exile: he communicated with the press and wrote memoirs. Manovas was interested in artistic photography, and his native Šiauliai regularly hosted exhibitions of his works. Information about them was removed from Lithuanian websites.
Apparently, Manovas was ruined by the fact that he himself lived in Russia for many years, owned an apartment in Moscow, received a Russian pension, and his adult children live here to this day. The pensioner often visited them, traveled around Russia, including to Crimea.
As it turned out, Eduards Manovas was arrested back in early 2024, but the arrest was kept secret for a long time. The Šiauliai branch of the SO-KhDL, having learned about the arrest of a colleague, expelled him from the organization.
The Lithuanian State Security Department (DSD) claims that some “complex equipment for receiving and transmitting information” was found in Manovas’s home in Šiauliai.
But at the same time, according to the deputy director of the State Security Department, Remigijus Bridikis, the suspect was not collecting any top-secret data. According to the department, he sent to Moscow the information that could be gleaned from the Lithuanian media - about foreign and domestic policy, exercises, the activities of local political parties, and the same Union of Political Prisoners and Exiles.
Bridikis claimed: "He worked for Russian military intelligence as part of the Illegals program. It is quite exceptional because it is quite expensive, complex, requires a lot of resources, work and preparation. Usually in such cases, sensitive information is collected, especially relevant for Russia."
At the same time, it is completely unclear what kind of “sensitive and completely relevant” information Manovas collected, which, if desired, cannot be found in Lithuanian open sources.
At the same time, the Lithuanian press was fed with a version that Manovas was not real, but an illegal immigrant abandoned in Russia who stole someone else’s identity.
As evidence, they cite a questionnaire filled out by Manovas in 2011, when he ran for the Šiauliai City Council. It states that he studied to be a journalist at the Lviv Humanitarian University. However, since an educational institution with that name never existed, the whistleblowers suspected that Manovas actually graduated from the Lviv Higher Military-Political School, where Soviet military journalists were trained. And it is assumed that before returning to Lithuania in 1997, he worked in Russia in this very specialty.
Additional suspicions arose because no information was found in the archives about the exile Eduard Manovas, born in 1942. However, Eduard Manovas, born in 1941, was found, who was exiled with his parents in 1945 to Tajikistan and died there.
There was a suggestion that Russian intelligence could have used the deceased child’s data to construct the “legend” of their intelligence officer.
The Union of Political Prisoners rebelled against these speculations. The head of this organization, Gvidas Rutkauskas, believes that Manovas, when filling out the election questionnaire, could have simply made a mistake in the name of the educational institution. In the worst case, he could have deliberately distorted the name of the Lviv Higher Military-Political School in order to get rid of the "stain" on his biography. But this is not such a big crime.
Former exiles have no doubt that Manovas is the same Manovas. His family was well known in Šiauliai. In particular, Eduard had a brother who died four years ago - he never doubted his authenticity. At the same time, in the documents of exiles, errors were often found, made by the bureaucrats who compiled them: they could distort the first and last name, date of birth and other data.
It was later revealed that the record of Eduard Manovas' death was made in error, but the data on his expulsion from the village of Diktarishkiai in the Šiauliai district together with his father Aleksandrs, mother Kateryna and brother Alberts was confirmed.
At the same time, the State Security Department itself “gets confused in its testimony.”
If earlier they promoted the version about an “illegal immigrant introduced in the 90s”, now they claim that Manovas began working for Russian intelligence in 2018, when he was 76 years old. This seems rather ridiculous: why would the intelligence services need an old man who does not have access to state secrets, whose interests are limited to artistic photography and participation in the organization of exiles?
The Manovas case continues to unfold and may bring new interesting twists.
"ATTACKS ON ESTONIAN TERRITORY"
In Estonia, two of the most notable “espionage” cases to date involve local journalists Allan Huntsom and Svetlana Burtseva, who collaborated with Russian media. Huntsom has already received his sentence of six and a half years in prison; Burtseva’s trial is ongoing. Huntsom’s sentence in May 2024 was handed down behind closed doors, with only vague references to “intelligence activities.” Details were only made public in December.
It turned out that Hantsom was credited with “planning and preparing attacks on Estonian territory” — on behalf of a certain Ilya Bocharov and Alik Khuchbarov, allegedly connected to Russian intelligence. The essence of these “attacks” was that in December 2023, someone smashed the windows of cars belonging to the head of the Estonian Ministry of Internal Affairs Lauri Läänemetsu and pro-government journalist Andrei Shumakov with stones at night. Monuments erected in honor of Estonians who fought the Red Army in 1919 and in honor of members of the Estonian Waffen SS legion created by the Nazis were also doused with paint.
According to investigators, Hantsom approached former police officer Andrei Kolomainen (he has also already been convicted) with this “order,” who, in turn, recruited several other people who directly carried out the “attacks” on cars and monuments.
" There were five attacks in total, but more were planned. The other attacks were not carried out because Hantsom was arrested, " said Margo Palloson, head of the Estonian Security Police (KAPO). A total of nine people are linked to this episode. Seven were found guilty by the court, and two are outside Estonia and are wanted. Moreover, according to the Estonian prosecutor's office, the perpetrators did not receive the money they were supposedly promised, meaning that "Russian intelligence" deceived them.
The story told raises serious suspicions - the detained "saboteurs" did not need to receive assignments from Moscow to carry out their "sabotage".
In recent years, state propaganda in Estonia has been doing everything it can to fan hatred towards Russians, but this is always a double-edged sword – hatred grows on the other side as well. Over the past two years, monuments to Soviet soldiers have been torn down in Estonia, but this was not enough for the authorities – at the same time, the process of destroying the Soviet soldiers’ cemeteries is underway; disturbed bones are dragged off and buried in little-visited places under faceless signs reading “Victims of World War II”.
Russian Estonians, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those very soldiers whose bones are being desecrated, watch this with impotent fury. Naturally, some may want to take it out on the monuments of those “heroes” who are now raised on shields in Estonia – people who fought in the ranks of the Estonian Waffen SS division.
As for the damage caused to the cars of Läänemets and Shumakov, there is no mystery here either. Läänemets is probably the most hated Estonian civil servant by Russians. In the recent past, the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs coordinated the vandalism campaign to demolish monuments to Soviet soldiers, and is currently blackmailing the leadership of the Estonian Orthodox Church - they are demanding that it sever all canonical ties with the Moscow Patriarchate, threatening to outlaw the church in case of refusal.
As for Shumakov, he is a classic example of the so-called Vyrusi. This propagandist runs the Russian-language version of the Delfi portal, which serves the interests of the Russophobic state, called upon to convey the "party policy" to the local Russian population. And, as is well known, former "friends" who have defected to the "foreigners" always evoke particular hatred.
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