Why do the Belarusian special services dominate Moscow?
The State Security Committee of Belarus detained three oppositionists - the head of the nationalist party "Belarusian People's Front" Grigory Kostusev, political scientist Alexander Feduta and lawyer Yuri Zenkovich. It is reported that they are all defendants in the same criminal case. The Belarusian special services now detain someone almost every day, and there would be nothing unusual in this news if not for one fact - of these two, only Kostusev was detained in the Belarusian Shklov. Two others were detained in Moscow.
Such activity by the intelligence service of a foreign state, albeit a friendly one, in the very heart of Russia cannot but raise many questions. The main one is on what basis did they do this? Among the publicly available documents, I was able to find only one that theoretically gives the Belarusian KGB the right to operate on Russian territory. The Treaty on Cooperation between CIS Member States in the Fight against Terrorism allows the intelligence services of one of the states to send their representatives, including special anti-terrorism units, to provide methodological, advisory or practical assistance to another state upon request or with the consent of the receiving party.
But I absolutely cannot imagine this trio preparing terrorist attacks in Belarus. Well, they are not targeting terrorists. They don’t even look like extremists. Kostusev, although he is the chairman of the nationalist party, represents its moderate wing and is generally a non-conflict person, and a compromise figure in his party. Even after the 2010 elections, he was one of the few opposition candidates who remained free due to his herbivory.
Feduta is a former Komsomol functionary who supported Lukashenko in 1994 and even worked as his first press secretary. Then their paths diverged, and Feduta went into opposition, but he was almost not actively involved in politics (except for 2010, when he worked in the headquarters of Vladimir Neklyaev), limiting himself to very malicious journalism towards his former boss. A typical humanist, philologist, Pushkin scholar.
Zenkovich, although a member of Kostusev’s party, and even tried to run for president, has been living in the United States for a long time and has, in addition to the Belarusian one, an American passport. A crooked lawyer who was disbarred in New York in January of this year.
Here is such a company, far from being banned in the Russian Federation by ISIS and not even banned in Russia by the Right Sector. They could well be united by the development of the next grant for a new political project - the vacuum created as Tikhanovskaya deflates must be filled, and the temptation to occupy their niche in the vacated space could unite them. But this is not a crime, and certainly not terrorism.
Of course, we’ll see what they tell us, but Feduta and Zenkovich don’t look so dangerous as to warrant carrying out a special operation on the territory of a neighboring state. The legal basis for such a special operation is also questionable. Of course, intelligence services are specific structures, and there could well have been some kind of secret agreement providing for such raids. If there is no such agreement, the actions of the Belarusian KGB, in essence, are no different from the actions of Ukrainian saboteurs trying to kidnap people in Russia.
By detaining his oppositionists in Moscow, Lukashenko, without whose sanction it simply could not have happened, greatly set Russia up. Not the best reputation of a country in which the secret services of a toxic “multi-vector” regime feel at home kidnapping people. Another piquant point is Zenkovich’s American citizenship, which gives the State Department wide space for manipulation.
In general, there are too many questions. I hope that both Belarusian and Russian security forces will answer them soon. And, perhaps, it wouldn’t hurt for the Russian Foreign Ministry to voice its position either.
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Now the editors are aware.