A 20-year-old information technology (IT) student was recruited by Russia to spy against Estonia, but kicked to the curb when he got caught. From behind bars, he tells his tale.
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Every year, dozens of tons of illegal amber from Ukraine find their way into Poland. It is a business worth billions of dollars controlled by Ukrainian mafia. Without the precious raw material smuggled from across the eastern border, there would be no amber jewellery – Poland’s showcase product.
Polish soldiers like to wear national symbols, such as the emblem and flag, in the form of tattoos. They do much more often than civilians. Such patriotic tattoos are supported by every second soldier, but only every fourth Pole.
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Polish journalists created a fictitious expert who managed to obtain sensitive information from the circle of one of the government ministers – using only Twitter and email accounts. The story exposed the weakness of the Polish state, ineffective against the mechanisms of information war.
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This murder has opened many issues not taken care of for a long time. We should never forget Jan Kuciak’s death. It’s a tragic mark in the history of Slovakia. But it has a potential to change something in the country.
The head of Budapest’s public transport was in the way of a Russian metro company’s business, with more than 200 million euros at stake. A KGB-style provokatsiya was utilized to get him fired and force the Hungarian capital to buy malfunctioning and expensive Russian metro cars.
‘Circles close to Kremlin are trying to turn the border city of Przemyśl into Polish Belfast. They are doing it through reviving long standing disagreements between Poland and Ukraine, and with help of the local radical nationalists,” says Marcin Rey, the creator of a Facebook profile „Russian 5th Column in Poland’.
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In 2014 Béla Kovács, a notoriously russophile Hungarian member of the European Parliament, dubbed as KGBéla even by his own far-right comrades, broke the law and made illegal contacts with Russian intelligence officers. The story of Kovács is the most accurate depiction of the complicated nature of Russian influence in Hungary. And it’s not that easy to understand what happened to him and today’s political landscape of Hungary.
