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bilities for reducing the fighting potential of the enemy”. In this case, the obvious
enemy is Ukraine.Violent loveAt the same time, we can see more than information warfare taking place.
Russian efforts to fuel violence are usually associated with the actions of the “lit-
tle green men” in Crimea, Russia’s proxies in eastern Ukraine or troops in frozen
conflicts such as Transnistria or South Ossetia. Attempts to fuel nationalism in
Serbia are also well documented. Yet supporting extremist, sometimes violent
movements (well beyond nationalist parties), seem to be a concentrated effort in
Central Europe as well.
Some extremist organisations have such blatantly obvious and well-document-
ed links to Russia that it would seem there are no real efforts to keep the strategy
secret. The leader of MNA 1989, an extremist movement in Hungary with ex-
tensive ties to Russian secret services, killed a policeman in Hungary in October- There is evidence that Russian military intelligence (GRU) officers disguised
as Russian diplomats have also participated in joint airsoft drills with members of
this organisation. The former website of the MNA, in a 2014 active-measure op-
eration, spread false news that Hungarian tanks were being transferred to Ukraine,
citing a statement of the Russian foreign ministry as “proof ”. Zsolt Dér, a Yugo-
slav war veteran who serves as a paramilitary trainer for the pro-Russian “Army of
Outlaws” and member of the HVIM, was called upon by the separatists of eastern
Ukraine to fight with them in 2015. The threat of destabilisation was so real that in
2015 the extreme right-wing Ukrainian paramilitary organisation, Karpatska Sich,
threatened to annihilate Jobbik and HVIM activists who they accused of under-
mining the Ukrainian state and destabilising the region along ethnic fault lines in
western Ukraine and Subcarpathia.
There are also Slovak far-right paramilitary figures fighting in eastern Ukraine
and promoting the separatists’ case in Slovakia. This includes Martin Keprta, a
former member of the Slovak Conscripts (Slovenskí Branci-SB), whose organisa-
tion had previously received training from ex-members of Spetsnaz, the Russian
military intelligence’s special forces. Beyond arresting Piskorski, Polish counter-
intelligence is also investigating former activists of the Polish Congress of the New
Right (KNP) on charges of espionage on behalf of Russia. The KNP had alleged-
ly taken part in so-called “active measures” on the territory of Ukraine in 2014 in
order to provoke an ethnic conflict between Polish minorities and Ukrainians in
western Ukraine.
Opinion & Analysis Central Europe is more vulnerable than it appears, Péter Krekó, Edit Zgut and Lóránt Győri