77the real “troublemakers” throughout the region: secessionists, revisionists and
ultranationalist organisations.
Bargaining with territorial disintegration and supporting secessionist move-
ments is not new to the Kremlin’s playbook. Russia has been involved in similar
activities throughout the West, assisting groups like the Italian Lega Nord and the
Californian secessionist movement. But the Central European region has a special
importance. Not only is it close to Ukraine, but the countries were also members
of the Soviet bloc before 1990. Even Putin himself has made surprisingly revealing
statements about Moscow’s destabilising intentions in the region in one interview:
“Someone wants to start revisiting the results of the Second World War, well, let’s
try to debate that topic. But then we need to debate
not only Kaliningrad, but the whole thing from the
eastern part of Germany to Lviv, which was a part of
Poland, and so on and so forth. There’s also Hungary
and Romania... Take up the flag and go for it.”
The above-mentioned political actions by Hungar-
ian ultra-nationalists were all foretold in documents
written by or for Kremlin proxies. Some less well-
known parts of the leaked emails of Moscow’s chief
strategist Vladislav Surkov, the mastermind behind
the Crimean annexation, prove that a grand destabilisation strategy was laid down
in 2014, aiming to achieve the autonomy of Transcarpathia and the federalisation
of Ukraine by provoking conflict between the Rusyn and Hungarian minorities
and the Ukrainian far-right. They emphasised the use of secessionist-nationalist
organisations in Ukraine, Hungary and Romania as instruments. We also know
from leaked e-mails that Alexander Usovsky, a pro-Kremlin activist from Belarus,
organised rallies against Ukraine and for the secession of Ukrainian territories,
paying local nationalist movements in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and
Hungary. Financial support came from Konstantin Malofeev, sometimes called
“Putin’s Soros”, an orthodox and ultra-nationalist oligarch close to the Kremlin
who also supports pro-Russian “rebels” in Ukraine.
The recent “laundromat” scandal also reveals that Mateusz Piskorski – the leader
of the Polish Zmiana (Change) party and supporter of pro-Kremlin and pro-Russian
separatists, who has helped organise fake election observation missions – received
money from the Kremlin between 2012 and 2014. He has been detained by the
Polish authorities for espionage since May 2016.
All of these examples perfectly fit the infamous ideas expressed by Valery Ger-
asimov, the Russian chief of armed forces who oversees the activities of military
intelligence, who said: “The information space opens wide asymmetrical possi-
Bargaining
with territorial
disintegration and
supporting secessionist
movements is not
new to the Kremlin’s
playbook.Central Europe is more vulnerable than it appears, Péter Krekó, Edit Zgut and Lóránt Győri Opinion & Analysis