00:00Next, here in France, police have arrested four people accused of spying for Russia.
00:07One of the detainees, a dual French-Russian national, ran a non-profit called the SOS Donbass Group.
00:14It purports to be helping people in eastern Ukraine, but is suspected by intelligence services of acting as a relay for Russian influence operations.
00:24It comes amid warnings from French authorities that Russian intelligence services are expanding covert operations on European soil, ranging from cyber attacks to online propaganda.
00:36Well, let's bring in Rigo Nishniko, who is a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.
00:44Rigo, thank you so much for joining us on the programme.
00:47So I want to first of all ask you about this group, SOS Donbass Association.
00:53I said there that it purports to be helping people in eastern Ukraine, but it's come out to actually be suspected of spying on French authorities.
01:05Tell us if you think there are many associations like that existing in Europe at the moment.
01:11Oh, absolutely.
01:13We do have to understand that this fits well the way how the Russian secret services operate.
01:19They usually need a cover, they need a kind of a good shield for their operations.
01:25And of course, organisations that do especially humanitarian tasks are usually well used since Soviet times.
01:34One of the suspects identified as Anna N allegedly approached executives at various French companies to obtain information about French economic interests.
01:44What do you think she used that information for in your mind?
01:47I think, you know, this is a question of what information she received.
01:53But since, again, even before the full-scale invasion, all type of secrets, including actually not just military secrets,
02:03but any type of technological secrets of what French companies are working on, planning to do, and so on and so forth,
02:12has been extremely valuable data for Russians.
02:14Now, when Russia is cut off from Western technology, this is even more valuable.
02:20So this is what she obviously is, and the Russian, the Russian basically handlers want people to do, and her as well.
02:31And French President Emmanuel Macron already warned earlier this week of a state of hybrid confrontation in Russia at the moment.
02:39And of course, these arrests are the latest sign of that, isn't it?
02:42Absolutely.
02:43We do have to say that what Russians think is that they are de facto at war with Europe,
02:54even if they also want to avoid military escalations and confrontations.
02:59But there are all other kinds of means, from this industrial espionage to underwater sea cables being cut.
03:08So this is just going to be only getting worse.
03:12How would you say countries can go about protecting themselves from foreign influence, from Russia, from foreign interference?
03:22Look, what Russians are doing is, on one hand, they are going after their textbooks, which were written, obviously, again, in Soviet times.
03:31But the other one is they are going after other vulnerabilities, societal, state, and so on.
03:37And so, obviously, trying to look at this, trying to actually building up resilience of our societies and avoiding unnecessary inner confrontations
03:51would be a good deal of preventing Russians being efficient.
03:55But first and for all, we have to understand what Russians are doing.
03:58And in this regard, what they are particularly interested in right now is exactly how Europe is helping Ukraine,
04:08and also how they want to undermine this assistance of all kinds of means.
04:14So this is, to us, task number one, understand what they need and what they can do.
04:19Well, Rigo, I do want to ask you about a separate story that's making headlines today.
04:23Reports of Trump's special envoy, Steve Wyckoff, allegedly advising Russians on their negotiating strategy.
04:31Where do we go from here when we have top dogs, let's say, in global diplomacy, effectively in cahoots with the Russians and coaching the Russians?
04:41Look, this is the problem, obviously.
04:45We can't say that he is working for Russians and so on.
04:50But we can definitely say that Russians are extremely efficient at corrupting Western officials, Western businessmen.
05:00And Whitaker falls in this category nicely.
05:02When you really want to have deals with Russians, when you're really eager to engage in all kinds of schemes, that's where Russians come handy.
05:13So what Whitaker has been promised from the future U.S.-Russia cooperation, to me, is the main question.
05:21And to me, this is the main motivator for people like Whitaker, even if I'm not saying that he is exactly part of that.
05:28But this category of people can be very much co-opted and bought by Russians exactly by the promise of huge, lavish deals now and in the future.
05:39We've also had a second leaked call suggesting that Russia itself drafted major parts of that contentious 28-point peace plan that came out last week, that was leaked last week.
05:50It's not really a surprise, is it to us, that Russia had a very big role in making that peace plan?
05:58It looks like what exactly Russia wants.
06:02And we have to say that when Donald Trump really wants to end the war at any terms, and specifically at the cost of the weaker party, which is obviously Ukraine, we should not be surprised that such plans appear.
06:16And they don't appear, in essence, even if this is very concrete, but the same type of a deal has been talked about during Alaska, also in May, during the Oval Office spat.
06:29So, and I expect when this deal basically is doomed, that in the few months we'll see another attempt of a similar type of a deal.
06:37Thank you so much for joining us on the programme, Rigor.
06:41Great to have you, and thank you so much for giving us your thoughts on this.
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