Moscow creating ‘new Comintern’ spy network in Europe, Prague says

“Russia is creating in Europe an ideological structure” that resembles “the Comintern created and directed by the Soviet Union” between 1919 and 1943, according to a new report by Czech counterintelligence. The “ideological basis” of this new grouping, the Czech Security and Information Service says, is not socialism but the neo-Eurasian ideas of Aleksandr Dugin, whose pastiche of Russian nationalism, populism, and anti-Americanism provides the basis for appealing to people across the entire spectrum of European political thought. Like the Third International or Comintern, however, the report says, the new structure has three interrelated goals, all of which make use of Russian special services and the local agents of influence Moscow has been cultivating in the Czech Republic and other European countries for many years. First, the new group seeks to promote Russian foreign policy goals by disseminating Moscow’s views on this or that issue. Second, it seeks to create the impression that these are shared by the population of the countries in which this institution operates by getting what are ostensibly local people to promote those views via the media and especially the Internet. And third, and again just like the Comintern, it seeks to recruit agents and spies who will provide Moscow with the kind of intelligence it can use against the governments involved as well as against NATO and the EU and against businesses on their territories. That involves the gathering of political and economic intelligence and its transmission to Moscow. According to the report, Moscow is devoting particular attention to the Russian-speaking communities in these countries and has stepped up its activities both among them and in the surrounding non-Russian populations because of the crisis in Ukraine and Moscow’s hopes to undercut European support for Kyiv.