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Russia has been secretly backing a Catalan separatist movement which conducted an illegal referendum some years ago and is now key for maintaining Spain’s socialists in power, according to Spanish authorities investigating activities in Spain’s northeast region by Russian intelligence services seeking to destabilize Europe.
Catalonia has long been a money laundering hub for Russian mafia figures connected with his regime.
This week, a Spanish high court revealed connections between Russia and Catalan nationalist politicians as Spain’s parliament prepared to vote on an amnesty bill that would clear Catalonia’s exiled president Carles Puigdemont and other pro-independence leaders from various charges including terrorism.The seven representatives from Puigdemont’s Together for Catalonia party (JXCat) provide Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez with the slim voting majority that keeps him in power.
The Russian connection could add “treason” to the charges facing Puigdemont, for which there is no amnesty, according to a Spanish judge investigating the case based on rules of the European Union.“By backing the independence process, Russia would first destabilize Spanish democracy and open a back door for infiltrating all the democracies of western Europe,” said judge Joaquin Aguirre in an interview on German TV.(READ MORE from Martin Arostegui:
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Russia’s military intelligence service (GRU) conducted covert operations supporting Catalonia’s regional government, the Generalitat, when it declared independence in 2017 following a local referendum that led to violent clashes with Spanish national authorities who declared the vote unconstitutional.
High level Russian intelligence agents whose movements in Catalonia’s capital, Barcelona, were traced by European security services, may have included general Denis Sergeev, chief of the GRU’s covert action unit 29155 specializing in black operations.
A false passport on which Sergeev entered the UK to plan the poisoning of GRU defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in 2018 was used to enter Barcelona on two occasions in the weeks prior to Catalonia’s independence bid, according to investigators.
Several GRU colonels and majors were active in Catalonia, according to Spain’s internal security unit, the Guardia Civil, which tracked some of their contacts with independence activists.
The Russian spies set up headquarters at a Barcelona apartment complex and may have also used facilities of a consulate opened by the Georgian pro-Russian breakaway republic of South Osetia (occupied militarily by Russia in 2008) days prior to the October 1 independence referendum.
The Russians discussed laundering funds to finance Catalan separatists through crypto currency, offered arms and even 10,000 troops to support a future independent republic, according to Spanish intelligence reports.At one point, police caught a Russian national driving a car registered in Belorus containing a backpack with Russian army standard M-75 hand grenades.
The Russians orchestrated an elaborate cyber war to support Catalan separatists, using a troll farm located in the outskirts of St.Petersburg under the company name of Internet Research (IR) linked to
Putin’s now deceased former associate Yevgeny Prigozhin.
It’s believed to have formed part of his paramilitary Wagner group, which has conducted propaganda and disinformation campaigns to support rebellions and coups in eastern Europe and Africa.(READ MORE: Zelensky Responds to Putin’s Missile War)
IR flooded social media with hundreds of thousands of robot accounts boosting the Catalan independence movement, exaggerating support for Puigdemont, and highlighting repression by Spain’s security services.The fake news often got aired on Russian state media such as RT and Sputnik which claimed, for example, that hundreds of Catalans had been wounded in fights with police during the referendum.Fact checks with local hospitals indicated that the number treated for injuries was in the single digits.
Russian efforts to control the narrative went so far as to hack websites and email accounts of journalists opposing separation from Spain.
Prominent Catalan journalist Eric Encinas, who publishes the digital magazine Mediterraneo, received recurrent POP3 Google notifications of “unusual detected activity” in his Hotmail and Gmail, traced to a location near St.Petersburg.“The Russians were serious about setting up an information environment for a possible intervention in support of a radically nationalist state in Catalonia,” says Encinas.
Russian agents have kept in touch with Puigdemont since his escape from Spain.His closest aide, Jose Maria Alay, has visited Moscow on several occasions.
“An independent Catalonia will be a friend of Russia,” said Puigdemont in an interview broadcast on Russian state television, which has closely covered his exile.
A Lithuanian member of the European Parliament with known ties to the Kremlin has been highly involved with Catalan independence groups over recent years, participating in meetings of the separatist umbrella organizations Omnium Cultural, visiting leading activists in prison, and possibly meeting with a far left member of Sánchez’s newly formed cabinet.
Putin’s support for Catalan nationalism had been developing for some time.Catalonia has long been a money laundering hub for Russian mafia figures connected with his regime, according to Spanish law enforcement officials.A Russian oligarch and crime boss who has been a close associate of Putin since the early days of his political career, Gennady Petrov, operated out of Catalonia where he financed radical parties which in 2013 tried to appoint the corrupt mayor of a Catalan resort town, who often traveled to
Moscow, to the post of Generalitat security commissioner.The Guardia Civil exposed that mayor’s close connection with Petrov and broke up the scheme.
Venezuela’s socialist regime has also hosted radical Catalan politicians, assigning one of its leading election technology experts and a military attaché to a recently enlarged consulate in Barcelona.But despite all the backing from Russia, its allies as well as Soros-funded groups, popular support for Catalan independence has been declining.Pro-independence parties polled less than 40 percent of the Catalan vote in last year’s elections.(READ MORE:
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“Sánchez may be breathing new life into a dying movement by enhancing the stature of Puigdemont and the separatists by offering constitutionally questionable concessions that have outraged much of Spain,” says Ramon Peralta, professor of international law at the Complutense University of Madrid.
Despite Sánchez’s efforts to redefine terrorism in a custom made amnesty for the separatist leaders accused of heading the illegal referendum and violent 2019 disturbances, which culminated in attempts to sabotage Barcelona’s airport and other key facilities, JXCat voted against the amnesty bill on Wednesday because they deemed it insufficient to cover their alleged crimes.
The European Union has come down hard on Hungary’s Viktor Orbán for his pro-Russian tilt on Ukraine, but so far it has said nothing about Sánchez’s effort to bend the law so that accomplices of Putin can keep his “progressive coalition” in power..
