Central Europe is more vulnerable than it appears

Photo: Presidential Press and Information Office (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

At that time, there were also a series of demonstrations pushing for this goal. In a pro-separatist demonstration staged on Budapest’s Heroes’ Square in 2015, the extreme-right movement HVIM, with strong links to Jobbik, expressed its gratitude to the leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, for releasing ethnic Hungarian troops of the Ukrainian army in the eastern front. A Facebook post issued by the same organisation in May 2014, titled “Patriotic Support for Russia”, explicitly states that Transcarpathia (like Crimea) is not part of Ukraine, and adding that Transylvania is not part of Romania either. Furthermore, the same organisation called for a boycott of Roshen chocolates (the company that is owned by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko).

Not only coincidence

Since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, far-right and extremist organisations – most of which had previously focused predominantly on ethnic, religious and sexual minorities as their main enemies – redirected their attention to geopolitical issues. They not only agitate against NATO and the European Union, but also share a particular sympathy towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which they regard as an ideological and political model. At the same time, they have expressed a deep hatred of Ukraine’s leadership following the Revolution of Dignity. While authoritarian, ultraconservative, anti-western, anti-American far-right movements in Central and Eastern Europe find reason to feel some ideological sympathy towards Russia and its leader, it sometimes leads to the abandonment of their anti-communist roots.

In addition, there is much more political alignment between the actors than shared values alone. Parallel political goals and actions are easily identified with open sources and documented ties. A recent research project focusing on five countries in Central Eastern Europe conducted by Political Capital (a Budapest-based research institute) illustrates how these links are not only accidental and coincidental. They are based on numerous ideological and personal co-operations between Russian businessmen, politicians, diplomats and local organisations. These ties perfectly fit into the broader efforts by the Kremlin to undermine the region’s stability in general, and bilateral links with Ukraine in particular, by supporting the real “troublemakers” throughout the region: secessionists, revisionists and ultranationalist organisations.

Bargaining with territorial disintegration and supporting secessionist movements 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 Hungarian 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 Gerasimov, the Russian chief of armed forces who oversees the activities of military intelligence, who said: “The information space opens wide asymmetrical possibilities for reducing the fighting potential of the enemy”. In this case, the obvious enemy is Ukraine.

Violent love

At 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 “little 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-documented 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 extensive ties to Russian secret services, killed a policeman in Hungary in October 2016. 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 operation, spread false news that Hungarian tanks were being transferred to Ukraine, citing a statement of the Russian foreign ministry as “proof”. Zsolt Dér, a Yugoslav 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 undermining 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 organisation 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 allegedly taken part in the 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.

In Prague, the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic opened a “consulate” in September 2016 with the help of Czech far-right actors, including the National Home Guard, a paramilitary group not recognised by the Czech authorities. The annual report of the Czech Security Information Service (BIS) also refers to widespread connections between extremist forces and Russia. The aim of this co-operation is to test and undermine trust in various states and their law enforcement bodies. Sometimes the goal of these organisations is to challenge the legitimacy of elected governments in their home countries and Ukraine in parallel. In Eurasian Disunion: Russia’s Vulnerable Flanks, authors Janusz Bugajski and Margarita Assenova correctly describe the Kremlin’s strategy, writing that Moscow “endeavours to benefit from political, ethnic, religious and social turbulence in East Central Europe in order to keep governments off balance. Any democratic regression in ECE combined with the growth of nationalism and populism can favour Russia’s regional objectives by weakening democratic institutions, engendering EU divisions and undermining NATO’s effectiveness.”

Fertile soil

The Kremlin has found natural allies in extremist movements whose voices are amplified by a strong pro-Russian media network, which spreads fake news and conspiracy theories predominantly on social media. These outlets often call for the secession of minorities living in Ukraine. They also exploit the widespread, albeit not dominant, mistrust of the West with the aim of turning the countries of the region against each other and, most importantly, against the Euro-Atlantic establishment.

Of course these extremist organisations (while having some ideological support from mainstream players) are usually marginal. This raises the question as to why so much attention should be paid to them. The answer is simple: in extraordinary times, non-extraordinary people and organisations can make history. Russia does its best to maintain the extraordinariness. Who would have thought, for example, that before the Ukrainian conflict, Alexander Zakharchenko, now the separatist leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, is someone who should be taken seriously?

Russia also knows that openly irredentist calls (“take up the flag and go for it!”) are rarely welcome in mainstream discourse. “Soft” irredentism, however, falls on fertile soil. Nostalgic feelings of past greatness are widespread in many Central and Eastern European countries. A sizeable number in these states want to make their nations “great again”. As a Pew Research Center poll from 2009 noted, revisionist and expansionist tendencies enjoy considerable support. Sixty-six per cent of Bulgarians, 61 per cent of Hungarians, 51 per cent of Poles and 40 per cent of Czechs agree that parts of their respective neighbouring countries belong to them. In light of these figures, it is no longer astonishing to know that 58 per cent of Russians feel the same way about Crimea. In this way, the irredentism is haunting Central Europe since Russia evoked it with the Crimean annexation.

While border revision is out of the question in mainstream discourse, politicians do know subtle ways to manipulate voters’ emotions. János Lázár, the de facto second most powerful man in Hungary, said in a speech that while rewriting borders is not an option and that ethnic tensions and armed conflict should be prevented in Europe, neighbouring countries and the West in general deserve to be blamed for the injustice at Trianon, repeating the well-known revisionist slogan: “Justice for Hungary!” The pro-Russian propaganda machine quickly jumped on this issue recalling Putin’s statement on the changeableness of the Romanian-Hungarian border.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in a speech during the summer of 2014 in Baile Tusnád, on the territory of Transylvania, vaguely referred to the historic opportunities: “Instead of seclusion, fear and withdrawal I recommend courage, prospective thinking, and rational but brave action to the Hungarian communities in the Carpathian Basin but also throughout the world. As anything can happen, it can easily happen that our time will come”. In his inauguration speech, two months earlier, Orbán was even more concrete, calling for the (cultural) autonomy of Transcarpathia – in a period when the Kremlin and its proxies did their best to undermine the territorial integrity of Ukraine. While Orbán did not defend the Crimean annexation (in fact he condemned the attack), it was not enough to ease suspicions in the region. After his remarks, the Ukrainian foreign ministry summoned the Hungarian ambassador.

Countering the threats

While some have argued that Crimea was the start of Russia’s neo-imperialism, it rather proved to be a road sign in the re-establishment of Russia’s presence and dominance in the former Soviet sphere of influence. Vladimir Putin, who has called the breakup of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century”, has consistently built up political and intelligence capacities since 2000 in pursuing Russia’s interests across the region. While the full force and complexity of Russian military and disinformation caught Eastern European governments completely off guard in 2014, the national security exposure to paramilitary ultra-nationalist organisations still lacks an adequate official response. Poland and the Czech Republic, at the moment, are investing resources into military and disinformation resilience.

Hungary, however, (and its western neighbour Austria, for example) is weak in reacting to or acknowledging Russian disinformation and destabilisation efforts. Countering foreign influence on paramilitary organisations and radical groups is made even more difficult by the increasingly pro-Russian policies of the Orbán government and the lack of motivation to defend its national security interests. The government’s rhetoric also features ideological elements and conspiracy theories originating in Russian propaganda that attempt to weaken western liberal values. Slovakia is taking some steps (such as employing 12 new experts to counter Russian disinformation) but with an ambivalent commitment. Only the Czech Republic has raised the issue of hybrid threats from Russia; they can be found in publically available state security documents and strategic reports. The Slovakian government has promised to include something similar in the future.

Generally, the response of Central European countries to the threat of malicious Russian influence has been reluctant, half-hearted and really only emerging from lower levels. Most of this is due to the fact that some leading politicians, such as Viktor Orbán, Robert Fico and Miloš Zeman, do not want to dampen their business and political relations with Russia. Nationalist politicians, otherwise posing as defenders of their nations, tend to remain silent when it comes to obvious incidents, even violent ones, of Russia trying to undermine national sovereignty. Their diplomatic silence and “pragmatic” economic and political ties to Russia encourage them further. Law enforcement agencies and secret services are still infiltrated by Russian secret services which make it more difficult for countering threats.

This situation emphasises why Central Europe’s vulnerability and susceptibility should remain a serious concern for the EU and NATO. Instead, the main debate within NATO continues to focus on what country is paying its “fair share”. While this is an important issue, it is relatively short-sighted. The main question, when it comes to the post-socialist states, is not their commitment to NATO but their resistance to aggressive Russian influence. The fact that some influential players, and even law enforcement institutions, remain passive towards the Kremlin and its extremist destabilisation, reduces the capacity of many countries in Central and Eastern Europe to defend Europe if the situation in Ukraine escalates.

There is ample evidence that Russia is supporting political and paramilitary forces poised to take Europe back to where it was between the two world wars: namely, to have a group of quarrelling, frustrated small states ready to turn against each other. One thing is certain: as persistent as the United States has been in strengthening and exporting democracy around the world throughout the 20th century, Putin’s Russia is similarly determined to export violent, illiberal autocracy (weakly aligned in these efforts with China, Turkey and Iran) in the 21st century.

Péter Krekó is a senior affiliate at the Political Capital Institute in Budapest. He is also an assistant professor at the Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences in Budapest.

Edit Zgut is a foreign policy analyst at the Political Capital Institute. She is also a guest lecturer at Pázmány Péter Catholic University.

Lóránt Győri is a geopolitical analyst at the Political Capital Institute.

Central Europe, Russian influence