Latest news with #ShaunWalker
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Sabotage and secret identities: Russia's spy network
Shaun Walker is the Guardian's central and eastern Europe correspondent and author of The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West. He tells Helen Pidd about the history of Russia's 'Illegals' programme, and how Russian intelligence operates in western countries today. 'It's become much harder for Russia to send its operatives abroad,' Shaun tells Helen. 'What we're seeing, with those traditional programmes like the illegals and assassins, is a new campaign of sabotage across Europe that actually doesn't require Russia's spies even to leave Russian territory and uses proxies to carry out the act.' They also discuss the impact on the children of Russian illegals. You can read Shaun's Long Read about one of those stories, 'I am not who you think I am': how a deep-cover KGB spy recruited his own son. Shaun will be speaking alongside Christo Grozev and Daniela Richterova at a Guardian Live event on Thursday 22 May 2025. You can buy tickets here. Support the Guardian today:
Scotsman
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Scotsman
The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies by Shaun Walker review
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Readers will leave this book wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the stories of the illegal spies, but also with a new understanding of Russian political history and theory over the last 150 years. To understand the illegals, Shaun Walker explains, we need to go back to Lenin and his party as they worked to overthrow the Tsar. Central to their methodology was the notion of konspiratzia, a word closer in meaning in English to 'subterfuge' than 'conspiracy'. This involved planting 'fifth columnists' into the government's secret services, and crossing between legal and illegal activities, from demonstrations and petitions to crime – theft and killings. This continued when the Soviet Union was established. The Cheka, the founding forerunner of the KGB, used these methods to root out and punish dissent at home, and to infiltrate spies overseas. In the late 1920s and into the 1930s these most secret of spies were not declared to a host nation as embassy-based intelligence officers but infiltrated into the country with a false identity and documents. If discovered, they could not claim diplomatic immunity but faced the full force of the law. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It is when Walker gets into the Cold War period that his book is at its most startling. This is because the key to intelligence research is interview and his skills as an investigative journalist have taken him to several illegals as well as to the intelligence officers who snared them. He has also gone into the KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin's Archive in Cambridge and Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service Records. These approaches, for example, give us the full story of Yuri Linov, who was an illegal in Austria, Belgium, the UK, Ireland, and later in Israel: it was for that assignment that he had to undergo adult circumcision. We meet and get to know a number of illegals and their families, learning more about their recruitment, their role and how lives and relationships were broken. Many retired illegals became alcoholics or had mental breakdowns and spent the rest of their lives in hospitals for the mentally ill. None were fully trusted again when they returned to Russia. Some parents never saw their children grow up, others, the more recent illegals, had children born after they had been implanted in Canada or the USA, these children not knowing that they were Russian, never meeting extended families. What a waste of a life, some of them thought, when their careers ended. The last part of the book deals with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin. Putin is a Chekist, a KGB man through and through, and his job before he became president was as director of the FSB – the domestic arm of the former KGB. Putin is no Leninist, he is more inclined to Stalinism, but he absorbed the konspiratzia mindset which imbued both these predecessors. Under his leadership, not only is the illegals policy is still in place, but it has developed to include what have become known as 'virtual illegals': social media trolls with a range of Western names, sat at computer screens in office blocks in St Petersburg manipulating social media exchanges with voters in elections across the Western world. In Russia itself, the security service is the spine of the new nation, with the illegals celebrated in books and exhibitions, while the glamorous Anna Chapman, one of the illegals captured in New York 15 years ago, became a host on a Moscow TV talk show and is a fashion consultant. The field this book covers is vast and the breadth and depth of the research exceptional, with 52 pages of notes, references, and a bibliography of nearly 250 published works, many of them in Russian. Perhaps the editing down of the secondary material on the early illegals has meant the loss of some nuances, but that is a mere quibble. This is a splendid and most important book.
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
How Trump left Ukraine and Europe reeling
Last Monday, the Guardian's central and eastern European correspondent, Shaun Walker, sat down in Kyiv to interview the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The conversation, Walker explains, was dominated by what Zelenskyy hoped to achieve in any upcoming talks on a ceasefire deal in Ukraine. The president outlined his red lines, too: that the US would have to be involved in some way in securing Ukrainian security once the fighting stopped; and that any negotiations over its future would have to involve Ukraine itself. Yet as Michael Safi hears, barely two days later Donald Trump blew all of that out of the water. The US president said he had called Vladimir Putin directly and begun to discuss how the war in Ukraine might end. If the announcement shocked leaders in Kyiv and across Europe, worse was yet to come – as statements from senior Trump officials began to call into question the very future of any US support for Europe's security, undermining an alliance that came into existence nearly 80 years ago. So, what next for Ukraine? And if the US does intend to withdraw its support for its allies in Europe, how will the continent defend itself in future?
