The double existence, which lasted a decade, of Sergei and Elena-Corriere.it

True, in the end, they figured it out. But a while has passed since then, In the late 90s, they came to Sweden from Moscow as an ordinary married couple. Once established behind a veil of legality, they became “illegal”, Spies for GruRussian military intelligence service: Double Existential Pawns burned at dawn a few days ago.

Around 6 a.m. on November 22, A team of special forces descended from two helicopters on the home of the “targets” in the suburb of Naka.east of Stockholm. And so the sources justified a spectacular blitzkrieg: They had to act quickly to prevent them from removing evidence by flushing it down the toilet or destroying a potential computer’s memory. Investigative ideas to complement what has been collected by Sapo – Swedish counterintelligence – and tips from the US FBI, entangled in a story written by the protagonists, Sergey Skvortsov and his wife, Elena Kolkova: a case that evokes the plot of the extraordinary TV series The Americans And this, above all, is repetition Similar episodes occurred in the West During (and after) the Cold War.

He was born in 1963 in Perm in the Urals and studied energy. She is a year younger than her, and has a degree in Mathematics and Cybernetics from Moscow University. We don’t know if they are real details or relics created by their bosses, the “Legend”, the past tense that hackers abroad should use in their public communications. With those references in your pocket, They moved to the Swedish capital to handle import and export as well as technology. The sleeping couple later sort out their situation with thanks to acquire citizenship: the woman in 2010, the partner two years later. All the steps to make their version of high-level immigrants welcome by a new hospitable homeland more and more credible. To confirm the family image, then, came the birth of a son.

The two lived first in an apartment, then moved into a house, Maintain a confidential profile. Distant kindness with neighbors but no trust, to protect the primary mission: to seek secrets. According to the indictment, they were supposed to be activated long after their arrival – As of 2013 – targeting both the United States and Sweden. And they did their job, but they made a few mistakes along the way.

In 2005, one of their companies got into trouble with the tax authorities for alleged wrongdoing. A stumbling block that would have had worse consequences if the file had ended up in the hands of Sapo: years later it emerged that the company It was part of a network attributed to a company based in Cyprus and linked to a Russian personality, Vladimir Kulemikov. It is not really unknown 007, since in 1981 he was expelled from France on suspicion of espionage and also ended up on a 1983 US Senate report.

Even more interesting are the details revealed by the investigative site Bellingcat. In 1999, the spouses became the owners of an apartment in a Moscow buildingOne of the activists involved in the attack lived in the same building Russian exile Sergei Skripal In Salisbury, Great Britain, in the 2018 e General Andrei Averaniov is considered the commander of unit 29155 of the GRUthe team Responsible for sabotage and assassinations abroad.

In short, home and work. But It was above all folly, given that the spy condominium had been exposed. The idea of ​​concentrating precious items in the same place is poorly understood. But maybe the top management doesn’t care much, the pawns replace each other and they have a lot. Indeed, the arrest of Sergey and Elena follows the indictment again in Sweden of two brothers of Iranian originAnd the Payam and Payman Kia, was recruited by Putin’s military intelligence. One of them belonged to Sapo himself. The fox was already in the chicken coop.