May 24, 2017
They are using
martial art clubs in Germany and dozens more in other EU states, in the Western
Balkans, and in North America.
Russian intelligence
services are reportedly using martial arts clubs to recruit potential
troublemakers in Germany and other EU countries, the internet magazine EU Observer reported, citing several
security experts.
The number of
clubs is higher than previously reported and the “sleeper cells” could stage
violent provocations ahead of the upcoming German elections, the EU Observer
added.
The warnings come
amid concerns by enemies of the Russian state who live in the EU that they
could be harmed for their work, EU Observer writes.
The martial arts
clubs, which teach an offensive style called “systema” have “direct or
indirect” links to the GRU military intelligence or FSB domestic intelligence
services in Russia, according to Dmitrij Chmelnizki, a scholar of Russian
espionage who lives in Berlin.
He said the GRU
is using these clubs to recruit agents in the West as it had done in the former
East Germany during the Cold War.
His investigation
found 63 systema clubs in Germany and dozens more in other EU states, in the
Western Balkans, and in North America.
Chmelnizki said
there were nine systema-type schools whose founders were “all officers of the
GRU or KGB-FSB” and whose “intense” foreign expansion in the past 10 years had
“no visible natural explanation”.
Their expansion
looked like a “well-thought-out, large-scale operation of the secret services
with powerful government funding”, he told EU Observer.
The Systema
Ryabko school and the Systema Siberian Cossack school also had students in
Slovakia.
Eerik Kross, who
used to hunt Russian spies when he led Estonia’s security service, the Kapo,
from 1995 to 2000, said EU authorities should pay more attention to physical
threats posed by Russian intelligence.
Kross noted that
GRU officers recently gave combat training to a neo-Nazi group in Hungary, the
Hungarian National Front, and to similar groups in Slovakia, the Slovak
Conscripts and the Slovak Revival Movement.
Chmelnizki, a
63-year old academic, fled from Russia to what was then West Germany in 1987
after being put on trial for doing research on the KGB, the former name of the
FSB, EU Observer wrote.
He conducted his
investigation of the systema clubs using open sources on the internet and
working in collaboration with Viktor Suvorov, a former GRU officer who was
posted in Geneva, Switzerland, during the Cold War before moving to the UK.
