One's A Communist, One's A Fascist— Both Are Putinists
Over the last week, I’ve been hearing more and more Members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, referring to Marjorie Traitor Greene as “Moscow Marge.” That’s because so much of what she says sounds like it was written in the Kremlin, even if by way of Mar-a-Lago. She and Ohio’s J.D. Vance come across, more than anyone else in Congress, as agents of the FSB (the new KGB, which was the new Cheka, which had been the new Okhrana)… in other words a kind of Russian version of the CIA + FBI, focussing on spying, counterintelligence, internal security and cybersecurity.
No one has been calling her America’s Tatjana Ždanoka, primarily because so few Americans even know anything about her country, Latvia, let alone her or the European Parliament in which she serves. So… let me bring you up to date. Latvia was one of three 3 tiny captive Baltic nations during Soviet times, which broke free in 1991 when the Soviet Union imploded. Almost a quarter of the population is Russian-speaking. Ždanoka, a Latvian-born ethnic Russian, became a prominent and controversial Latvia politicians representing ethnic Russians in the Riga city council and, more recently (since 2004), in the European Parliament. Like Traitor Greene, she is a controversial and polarizing figure. She’s been credibly accused of being an FSB agent, a spy, is under an active criminal investigation in Riga and she was sanctioned this week by the European Parliament. On 2 March 2022, she was one of 13 MEPs who voted against condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Like Traitor Greene, she was spreading Kremlin propaganda from her official perch. In late January, The Insider exposed Ždanoka’s connection to the FSB, referring to her as “a trusted asset of Russian intelligence since at least 2005,” after a multi-nation media investigation. “Leaked emails between Ždanoka and her two known Russian case officers include explicit, detailed reports from Ždanoka to her handlers describing her work as a European legislator, particularly as those official duties relate to fostering pro-Kremlin sentiment in her native Baltic region. Other correspondence involves arranging physical meetings in Moscow or Brussels between Zdanoka and her Russian handler, along with requests for funding from Russian sources to underwrite her political activities in Latvia and the European Parliament... The Insider has confirmed that Ždanoka's two documented handlers have been officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB. According to the emails, her first case officer was a veteran FSB cadre from the St. Petersburg central directorate, Dmitry Gladey, 74, who ran Ždanoka from approximately 2004 to 2013. After 2013, Ždanoka was in regular contact with Sergei Beltyukov, an FSB operative since 1993.”
Alice Bah Kuhnke, an MEP from Sweden’s Green Party and the former Minister of Culture and Democracy in Stockholm, is vice president of the Greens/European Free Alliance to which Ždanoka belonged until April 2022. Kuhnke said news of Zdanoka’s espionage struck her as “terrible [but] unsurprising. After all, we [both] receive ongoing reports in the European Parliament, as parliamentarians. And I know, since I was a minister in the government of Sweden, about how Russia and Putin's agents work, and they have networks everywhere.”
In a comment to The Insider, German politician and former MEP Rebecca Harms, who served as president of the Greens/European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament from 2010 until 2016, said: “One of my real failures as a co-chair of Greens/EFA [was that] I was not able to convince the Greens and EFA MEPs that [Ždanoka's] obvious support for Putin and Assad (the illegal referendum in Crimea, the bombing of Aleppo, the events in [the European Parliament] with Russian nationalists) was totally unacceptable for a member of the Greens/EFA faction. In this case, my group mistrusted me and my 'Russophobia' more than the member of a party financed by Putin, an MEP who again and again supported dictators, war crimes, and crimes against international law.”
…Despite holding a Latvian passport, Ždanoka has nevertheless built a career opposing its existence as a sovereign country. Indeed, Ždanoka has been outspoken in her support of Latvia’s eastern neighbor, Russia, along with that former colonial master’s well-documented, ongoing efforts to interfere in the Baltics. In 2009, the Moscow City Council sent Russian diplomat Georgy Muradov as an envoy to Riga. Muradov’s visit coincided with preparations for that year’s European Parliamentary elections, and his activities on the ground in the Latvian capital included lobbying ethnic Russians there to vote for Ždanoka, in part by disbursing money to Russian World War II veterans to incentivize their support.
Тoday Muradov serves as the deputy head of Rossotrudnichestvo in occupied Crimea. Officially, that body serves as the cultural arm of the Russian Foreign Ministry; unofficially, at least according to Western intelligence services, it is a none-too-subtle clearinghouse for Russian espionage. According to a source from one of those Western services, Muradov himself is a spy. A review of Muradov’s data footprint shows several links between the “diplomat” and the FSB, including his residential address— Michurinsky Prospect 29/1, which is located on a Moscow block of multi-storeyed apartment buildings primarily inhabited by FSB and, less frequently, SVR officers. One of Muradov’s neighbors at this Moscow address is Alexei Alexandrov, a member of the FSB assassination team that poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with the military-grade nerve agent Novichok in 2020.
In 2014, five years after Muradov’s trip to Riga, Ždanoka traveled to Crimea to serve as an “international observer” in the illegitimate referendum that paved the way for Russia’s illegal annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula. At this time Muradov himself was stationed in Crimea, serving as the so-called representative of occupied Crimea to the Kremlin. Two years later, in 2016, Ždanoka traveled to Syria, where she held talks with its dictator, Bashar al-Assad. At the time of the MEP’s visit to Damascus, Russia’s direct military intervention was already propping up the Assad regime in its struggle for survival against Western-backed rebel forces. The European Parliament refused to pay for MEP Zdanoka’s travel, as Assad and his entourage were under European Union sanctions. Unsurprisingly, on March 2, 2022, Ždanoka was one of only 13 MEPs who voted against the European Parliament’s resolution condemning Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
For most Latvians, the disclosure of Ždanoka's years-long connivance with Vladimir Putin’s special services will only confirm their worst suspicions about her. She has long been held by the country’s overwhelmingly pro-Western political establishment to be a Russian agent of influence, a conclusion supported by her open support for marginal left-wing political parties. Ždanoka's secret work on behalf of Russian intelligence largely complements her outward politicking: the MEP from Latvia routinely condemns all three Baltic nations for alleged mistreatment of their sizable ethnic Russian diasporas (in Latvia’s case, this ethnic Russian diaspora totals approximately 450,000 people, one quarter of the country’s entire population). The “anti-discrimination” efforts that Ždanoka advocates are often taken up by Kremlin-funded front groups, which take on the guise of non-governmental organizations ostensibly committed to the causes of “human rights,” “anti-fascism,” and “anti-Nazism.” In this context, it is notable that, during Ždanoka's “election monitoring” efforts in Crimea in 2014, several of her international colleagues were bona fide fascists and neo-Nazis from the United Kingdom, Austria, France and Germany.
…In addition to traveling to Russian-controlled Crimea, Ždanoka organized a public hearing on June 26 at the European Parliament. The topic was the Estonian authorities’ response to violent protests in Tallinn following the relocation of a Soviet-era World War II monument from a busy central intersection to a nearby veterans’ cemetery— the so-called “Bronze Soldier” affair of April 2007, which had coincided with a series of cyberattacks on Estonia that were subsequently found to have emanated from Russia. Ždanoka reported to Gladey that the hearing had received coverage in Russia, Estonia and Latvia partly thanks to the efforts of her “intern,” Ivan Engashev, who reported on the story for Russian language newspapers published in Latvia.
Ždanoka also set up a three-day training camp for “anti-fascist” Latvian and Estonian pro-Russian organizations, including the Estonia-based Night Watch movement, which was set up in the wake of the removal of the Bronze Soldier. As Harrys Puusepp, the Head of Bureau at Estonia’s KaPo Internal Security Service, told The Insider, “Ždanoka's activities in Estonia are part of a Kremlin-coordinated divisive operation. We first mentioned the divisive activities associated with her in our annual review 20 years ago. The Baltics are treated as a single region by the Kremlin, using the same template to divide, often involving the same people and organizations.”
Ždanoka even launched a radio show called “The Hour of the Russian School” in Latvia, which warned Russians in the country of the “possible problems of sending children from Russian families to Latvian [language] schools.” She also noted that she was putting together a forthcoming exhibition in the European Parliament, titled “Russians of Latvia,” to promote the ahistorical idea that ethnic Russians were the true indigenous population of Latvia.
Before Mona Charen launched her career as a devout Never Trumper, she was best known as a deranged right-wing political commentator. She wrote a couple of imbecilic books— Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got it Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First (2003) and Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us) (2005)— and there was little to distinguish her from your garden variety always-wrong-about-everything right-wing loud-mouth. Then she made a career out of opposing The Donald and is often mistaken by moderates and even leftists as a normal person, instead of a lunatic possibly evolving and sometimes espousing sane views. Her latest was to declare her own party the party of Putin.
“Stories,’ she wrote this morning, “leak out that Speaker Mike Johnson, apparently influenced by high-level briefings he’s received since capturing the gavel, has changed his posture and wants to approve the aid. But Johnson leads, or is at least is the titular congressional chief, of a party that contains a passionate ‘Putin wing,’ and so he dithers. This week, Volodomyr Zelensky has warned that Ukraine will lose the war if the aid is not approved. Yet Johnson is heading not to Kyiv but to Mar-a-Lago. Pause on that for a moment. The Republican party is now poised to let a brave, democratic ally be defeated by the power that the last GOP presidential nominee save one called ‘without question, our number one greatest geopolitical foe.’ One member of Congress has sworn to introduce a resolution to vacate the speaker’s chair if Johnson puts aid for Ukraine on the floor. And the entertainment wing of conservatism— most egregiously Tucker Carlson— has gone into full truckling mode toward the ex-KGB colonel in the Kremlin. It’s worth exploring how the Republican party, the party of ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’ became the party that now credulously traffics in blatant Russian disinformation while it flirts with betraying an important ally— along with all of its principles.”
Most Republican officeholders are not sociopaths, but they take their marching orders from one and have adjusted their consciences accordingly. The talking point J.D. Vance and his ilk favor is that they cannot be concerned about Ukraine’s border when our southern border is also being invaded. Of course it’s absurd to compare immigrants looking for work or safety to tanks, bombs, and missiles, but that’s what passes for Republican reasoning these days. In any case, it was revealed to be hollow when Biden and the Democrats offered an extremely strict border bill to sweeten aid for Ukraine, and the GOP turned it down flat.
Russia’s fingerprints are all over the Republicans’ failed attempt to impeach (in all senses of the word) Joe Biden. Their star witness, Alexander Smirnov— who alleged that Hunter and Joe Biden had been paid $5 million in bribes by Burisma— was indicted in February for making false statements. High-ranking Russians appear to be his sources.
Whether the subject is Ukraine, Biden’s so-called corruption, or NATO, Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history. If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the GOP than anyone other than Trump. GOP propagandists indulge fictions that even many Russians can see through: Ukraine is governed by Nazis; Russia is a religious, Christian nation; Russia is fighting “wokeness.”
Republicans are not so much isolationist as pro-authoritarian. They’ve made Hungary’s Viktor Orbán a pinup and they mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin must be pinching himself.
