While European governments confront the escalation of Russian sabotage activities, the FSB has stepped up its efforts on another, less-observed front – the targeting of Russian exiles. Less than two weeks after the US revealed a Russian plot to assassinate dissidents in Washington, the FSB turned its crosshairs on London.
On September 28, the FSB announced the launch of a criminal investigation on terrorism charges against Ksenia Maximova, leader of the Russian Democratic Society UK. At the end of the communique, the service added an ominous line: “Russia’s FSB will continue its efforts to neutralize terrorist activities instigated by London using Russian expatriates.”
Russian news agencies joined the campaign by showing an FSB video the same day. In it, an unidentified FSB officer made several direct statements, using Maximova’s story as a pretext:
- That the FSB believes groups representing the Russian opposition abroad are controlled by foreign intelligence agencies;
- That the service knows the UK is behind the efforts to consolidate the Russian opposition abroad, and that London in particular “seeks to create the illusion that an alternative capable of replacing the Russian government is emerging within the Russian émigré community”;
- That from now on, the FSB will refer to the Russian opposition abroad as Vlasovtsy 2.0. This politically charged name is used to refer to thousands of Red Army soldiers who switched sides to the Germans during World War Two;
- The FSB stated that Lubyanka is aware of the identities of what it calls “relocants”, who “have chosen to tie their fate to London and desire Russia’s defeat”;
- And finally, that the FSB won’t repeat Nikita Khrushchev’s “mistake” of pardoning “Banderites” (the word the Kremlin uses to attack all those on the Ukrainian side as Nazis).
The message deserves to be taken seriously: the last time Russian intelligence made such a video was in October 2023, when unidentified officers of the Russian military intelligence vowed to find and kill Maxim Kuzminov, a Russian helicopter pilot who had defected to Ukraine. He was, indeed, found and killed in a parking garage in Spain in February 2024.
The use of the word Vlasovtsy is even more important. For Russian exiles — it reflects a significant escalation: in 2022, the Kremlin began using the word Vlasovtsy extensively, but only referring to Russians fighting on the Ukrainian side, promising to hunt them down. Putin himself vowed in March 2024: “We will punish them without a statute of limitations, wherever they are.”
The unusual public brutality of the operation against Kuzminov, and the use of the word Vlasovtsy at that time, were explained as an expression of Kremlin paranoia triggered by historical trauma.
Since the Russian Revolution in 1917, Russia has produced a disproportionately high number of defections, which amounted to many thousands of Red Army soldiers switching sides to the Germans during World War Two. Fears that the war with Ukraine could provoke a haemorrhage of defectors were extensively discussed among the security services in Moscow at the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
That is why, as early as the summer of 2022, the Duma added an amendment to the Criminal Code designating any act of “switching to the enemy’s side during military operations” as high treason, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Ever since, the FSB has extensively used that amendment to harass young people — in particular, it launched a large-scale operation enticing youngsters to communicate with Ukrainians, or with Russian units fighting alongside the Ukrainian armed forces, and then accused them of helping the enemy.
The FSB’s latest step equates the armed men fighting alongside Ukrainian troops on the battlefield in Ukraine with the Russian political opposition abroad, most of it US- or Europe-based.
This is not a mere temporary or emotional outburst. Preparatory work had been underway since 2022, when the Kremlin first used treason charges against the anti-war opposition. Vladimir Kara-Murza was the first victim of this new approach. But while the Kremlin attacked and imprisoned Russian opposition leaders, it had never branded them traitors before 2022.
The FSB’s deep obsession with the bloody history of 20th-century Russia, of regime collapse and regime change, makes its threats extremely serious, as they are deeply emotionally charged.
The reference to Nikita Khrushev serves the same purpose — the officers of the FSB are vowing that there will never be another thaw in relations. Instead, they are more than happy to live according to the revived modus operandi of Stalin’s security services.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book , Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, was published in 2025.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
