This is the best summary I could come up with:

When three Bulgarian nationals were charged this week for their part in a spy plot, ripped from the pages of an Ian Fleming novel, it exposed the lengths that Vladimir Putin’s regime has to go to obtain potentially valuable information, and the risks it now has to take.

Ryhor Nizhnikau confirms that Russia needed to “fill the void” of spies at their embassies and “started to wake up some of these sleeper agents” to do work that might usually be done by intelligence operatives at diplomatic missions abroad.

There have been numerous recent examples of Russian agents getting caught red-handed in Europe: from a deep cover “illegal” who tried to infiltrate the International Criminal Court in The Hague; to a guard at the British Embassy in Berlin who was recruited to spy for Moscow, and many more.

“This tricking aspect is extremely important to describe these random individuals who could pass as students, and get acquainted with teachers or secretaries who got funding for a security project” says Maxime Lebrun from the Hybrid CoE.

Another recent case involved a Russian agent who pretended to be from Peru, and  owned a jewelry store in Naples, close to Nato’s Allied Joint Force Command.

Over the course of nearly a decade, she became friends with senior NATO officials and even had an affair with one of them, and was only caught out when her sequential passport number was among a batch leaked in Belarus and attracted the attention of Belingcat investigators.

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