Recent Developments Around Russia (2)

A person working for the German intelligence service has been arrested for spying for Russia!

One of the most important examples for understanding the significance of the matter and Russia’s activities in the Western world was surely this news we received in the last days of 2022.

According to a Euronews report, Carsten L., a German citizen working for the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), was arrested on charges of spying for Russia. A written statement from the Federal Prosecutor General said that Carsten L., who had been taken into custody, was accused of treason. The statement said that Carsten L., who worked for the BND, had passed information obtained in the course of his professional activity in 2022 to a Russian intelligence service, and announced that the information passed on was classified as a state secret.

Suspicious Deaths

This striking development gave us an updated picture of Russia’s activities in other countries. It is no secret that, in a process beginning in the Cold War years, it has continued its intelligence activities without pause, especially against the Western world and above all the United States, and has even tried to carry out various covert operations. Especially in recent years, as Putin has become more authoritarian, we see that he has had prominent figures who oppose him followed all over the world and that these people have died in suspicious ways. It is also frequently said that these deaths are in fact assassinations and that Putin is behind them.

The words in a report on the subject are as follows: “Around two dozen prominent Russians lost their lives in mysterious and gruesome ways in 2022. The bodies of Leonid Shulman and Alexander Tyulakov, leading figures in the gas sector, were found at the beginning of the year together with suicide notes. Then, within a month, three Russian company executives, Vasily Melnikov, Vladislav Avayev and Sergey Protosenya, fell victim, together with their wives and children, to murders staged as suicides. In May, Russian officials found the body of Andrei Krukovsky, owner of a resort in Sochi, at the foot of a cliff; a week later it was claimed that Alexander Subbotin, an executive of a Russian gas company, had been killed with toad venom in a house belonging to a shaman in Moscow.

The list goes on and on. In July 2022 Yuri Voronov, an executive of an energy company, was found floating in his swimming pool near St Petersburg with a bullet wound to the head. In August, Latvian-born Putin critic Dan Rapoport fell from the window of his home in Washington, D.C., a mile from the White House, shortly before Ravil Maganov, an executive of a Russian oil company, fell six floors from a window in Moscow. Earlier this month, Grigory Kochenov, an executive of an IT company, fell from a balcony. On the French Riviera, a Russian real estate investor died after tumbling down the stairs.

Although these deaths differ in form, they are all part of the same overarching plan: to instil the idea that the Russian state is a deadly, all-powerful octopus whose sticky tentacles can find and seize any dissident anywhere.”

In this context, although threats are not very effective in relations with civilised states, it can be said that threats and intimidation at the level of individuals are always effective in people’s lives. But this practice is a method preferred more by mafias and criminal organisations than by states.

Is Russia really a country of unhappy people?

It is a fact that people are unhappy in countries where human beings have no value, the rule of law does not function and government develops in an autocratic way. Various factors such as economic conditions, natural disasters, epidemics, weather conditions and the like also affect human psychology. But suicide rates in Russia are strikingly high compared with global statistics. In other words, it is also a fact that there really is a problem of unhappiness and hopelessness in Russia and that many people choose suicide.

That in some rankings former socialist countries, especially former Soviet republics, stand out among the countries with the highest suicide rates is a subject that deserves to be researched and questioned.

Although Russia tries to manipulate suicide reports and related statistics, global statistics reveal how grave the situation in Russia is.

For example, a report on the subject says: “According to World Health Organization data, the country with the most suicides has been identified. Russia, where 48 in every 100,000 men take their own lives, ranks first in the world for suicide.” But it must also be said that the rate among women is much lower.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Russia’s current state can be assessed as that of a country that cannot adequately ensure the welfare of its own people and does not use its resources effectively and efficiently for peace and prosperity, but is quite skilled at affecting world peace negatively. It can also be called a dictatorship moving further from democracy every day, in which the interests of the state fall behind those of the small minority that runs it. Anyone who objects to or criticises Putin’s rule can become a target of this policy.

(To be continued)