The Russian Duma is about to adopt a law permitting the extraterritorial engagement of the armed forces to free Russian citizens arrested or detained by foreign courts. The government commission on legislation has just approved the respective draft legislation.
The language of the draft law is that of dense Russian bureaucratese, but once deciphered, its meaning is clear. It would legitimize armed attacks on Western legal facilities, including courts and detention centers. Perhaps the clearest motivation is Vladimir Putin’s fear of finding himself in The Hague if arrested on the 2023 warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The ICC is also seeking to detain his former Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and the General Staff chief, Valery Gerasimov, for their roles in committing atrocities during the war in Ukraine. Although Russia rejected the ICC’s jurisdiction and repeatedly denied allegations of war crimes, the warrants caused outrage in the Kremlin, since they made Putin look like an international pariah and imposed a severe travel risk for the 73-year-old despot. The message that no one is completely safe will have been underlined by January’s US operation to seize the Venezuelan dictator, Nicolás Maduro.
But while there may be a personal element to the new Russian law, it would be an oversimplification to see it merely as an emotional response.
The Kremlin has used this tactic before. Exactly 20 years ago, Vladimir Putin legalized the use of Russian special forces in offensive operations abroad for the first time, a move that at the time was presented to the world as an emotional response to the attack on a group of five Russian diplomats in Baghdad in June 2006.
Local insurgents stopped the diplomats’ car, killed one on the spot, and kidnapped the other four. Three weeks later, footage was released showing one Russian diplomat being beheaded, another shot dead, and the body of a third lying nearby. Soon, Russia confirmed that all four diplomats had been killed.
Three days later, Putin ordered Russia’s security services to find and kill those responsible for the slaughter.
True, Putin’s intelligence agencies had carried out operations abroad before June 2006. The most notorious attack was conducted in Qatar in 2004, when Russian military intelligence agents blew a Chechen warlord to pieces. But the Kremlin now wanted to turn such actions into policy rather than the occasional operation.
The brutal murder of the diplomats in Iraq provided the Kremlin with a convenient excuse. By the time Putin made his emotional speech vowing to avenge their deaths, the legislation allowing him to deploy operatives abroad had already been drafted and had been under discussion in the parliament for several months. The first draft of the bill had been introduced in the Duma in March 2006.
Prompted by Putin’s declaration, it took only a week for the Russian parliament to turn the bill into law. By July 2006, the president had been granted the power to send Spetsnaz units to conduct operations in foreign countries.
What followed looked very much like the implementation of a policy that would become a centerpiece for the Kremlin in the years to come. Only three months after the law was adopted, Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned by Putin’s agents in London with polonium, and a series of mysterious assassinations of Chechen militants then followed in Istanbul.
Putin apparently now wants another established policy, just as in 2006. Russian agencies have already carried out — very successfully — operations aimed at rescuing their people from European justice.
The most audacious operation took place in April 2023, when Artem Uss, a Russian businessman and the son of a former regional governor, was snatched from the house where he had been detained in Milan on charges of smuggling sensitive US military technology to Russia.
An indictment issued by a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, alleged that Uss had illegally trafficked in semiconductors needed to build ballistic missiles being used in the Ukraine war. But while Uss was awaiting extradition to the United States, he was exfiltrated from Italy with the help of a Serbian criminal gang and returned to Russia.
The Kremlin anticipates that more Russian officials and operatives will be detained around the world on the orders of foreign courts and brought to justice for crimes committed by the Russian state.
Once again, the Kremlin seems to be moving away from ad-hoc operations in favor of a consistent policy. In Russian strategic thinking, the new law, once approved, would lead to allocating resources and personnel to the relevant agencies — special forces, including the spetsnaz and SSO, the special operations forces within the military — on a permanent basis, and preparing the ground for body snatching operations in countries that could be most active in detaining Russian officials.
Today, the list of such countries is already quite long, ranging from the Baltic states to Poland, the United Kingdom, and France.
In other words, Moscow is preparing not for a single rescue, but for a system.
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 June.
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.
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