Italy soft target for Russian hybrid warfare

 ROME — An estate agent and an insurance broker from Monza make for an incongruous pair of Russian spies, but according to prosecutors they were working on an ingenious plan to provide Russian intelligence with videos recorded on taxi dash-cams, create a network of safe houses in Milan and identify the city’s “grey zones” not covered by security cameras.

 Prosecutors say Pericle Santoro and Iginio Felice Carlomagno were paid an initial €2,000 fee in cryptocurrency by the FSB. They were also allegedly tasked with procuring classified NATO documents on the war in Ukraine and photographing potential military targets in Italy.

 Their activities, which began in late 2023 and were cut short by investigators in the first half of 2024, are said to have started after Santoro offered his services to the successors of the KGB in a message sent in Italian, English and Russian over the Telegram messaging service.

 Married to a woman from Moldova, Santoro said he wanted to collaborate with Russian intelligence in the cause of peace. A judge is due to rule in February on whether he and his associate should face trial for being corrupted by a foreign power, with the aim of undermining Italy’s democratic order.
 
 With fragile infrastructure, politicians, media and public opinion harbouring a soft spot for Vladimir Putin, suspicions of NATO dating back to the cold war, and some of the most powerful mafia organisations in Europe, Italy is seen as an easy target for Russian hybrid warfare.

 The threat was highlighted at a recent a conference in Rome on “The Kremlin’s weaponisation of organised crime and the criminalisation of Russia’s special services”.

 “Of all the countries in Europe, certainly Italy is one of the most tempting targets for Russian foreign policy,” said Donald Jensen, a former US diplomat and a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Washington.

 “It’s attractive because there are several things about Italian society which make it vulnerable to Kremlin exploitation. You’ve seen scandals with certain banks in this country with direct links to either Russian organised crime or Kremlin ties. Some political parties get Russian money,” Jensen told the conference, organised by the Gino Germani Institute, a strategic studies think tank.

 Jensen, a fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, cited Vladimir Putin’s decision to entrust peace negotiations on Ukraine to the diplomatically inexperienced Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund who is married to a close friend of one of Putin’s daughters, as evidence of Russia’s “patrimonial system”.

 “Money and power are inter-related. If you have money you have political power, and if you have political power you usually have money. So what we consider to be corruption in Russia is how the system works. It is the system.”

 Jensen said Russia’s commercial approach to diplomacy had been evident in the Ukraine talks, where peace, money and natural resources are interlinked and where the United States is represented by Steve Witkoff, a business friend of Donald Trump, and by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

 “Putin in the last 20 years has taken the mafia state, the mafia world, and integrated it, centralised it and put it much more directly under Kremlin control,” Jensen said. “So organised crime is not just a threat, it’s a way to get policy implemented.” Money and corruption were now central to Putin’s hybrid war strategy, he added.

 Support for the victims of Russian aggression has been spearheaded in Italy by the president, Sergio Mattarella, and the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. But radical Catholic pacifism, left-wing hostility to the United States and right-wing admiration for Putin the conservative strongman has sapped support for the war.

 Reluctance to continue funding the defence of Ukraine has been expressed by the leader of the Five Star party, Giuseppe Conte, by left-wing leaders who prefer to spend money on welfare, and by Matteo Salvini, the leader of the anti-immigrant League. Now a deputy premier and minister for infrastructure, in past years Salvini appeared on Moscow’s Red Square sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with Putin’s image, telling the world he preferred Putin as a statesman to Italy’s own Mattarella, widely respected by most other Italians these days.

 Aldo Giannuli, a historian and author, attributes pro-Russian sympathies to historical, cultural and trade ties dating back centuries. “The port of Genoa has ties to Russia dating back to the middle ages, while its post-war mayor, Gelasio Adamoli, was a communist and head of the Italy-USSR friendship association for 40 years,” Giannuli said.

 “The Republic of Venice was historically present in Crimea, while St Nicholas of Bari created a link to the Orthodox Church in Russia. A similar concentration of ties to Russia doesn’t exist in any other European country,” Giannuli said.

 An expert on the manipulation of terrorism during the cold war in Italy, Giannuli said the scions of what was once the biggest communist party in the west tended to sympathise with Russia, while exponents of the extreme right were attracted by Putin’s authoritarianism. Putin’s ideologist, Alexander Dugin, was responsible for introducing the writings of the Italian fascist philosopher Julius Evola to Russia, he added.

 “Putin has financed the European right for the last 20 years. What is unusual in Italy is that there is also a part of the left that is pro-Putin,” he said.

 Giannuli said there was little evidence so far that Russian organised crime had established direct ties with Italy’s mafias, but such a connection could easily be brokered by crime groups in the Balkans. “The most likely link would be the Puglia mafia, which has links to the Turkish, Kosovar and Albanian mafias,” he said.

 Federico Varese, an author and professor of criminology at Oxford University, also played down the mafia connection. Russia had used low level criminal operatives for some of its recent intelligence and sabotage operations in Europe, he said.

 A 2023 operation to facilitate the escape from Italy of a Russian businessman wanted in the United States for sanctions violations, Artem Uss, was facilitated by suspects recruited in the Balkans, rather than by local Italian operatives, according to Italian prosecutors.

 Varese, who studies Russian organised crime, expressed concern at the way family and business connections were coming to dominate American foreign policy, mirroring what has been the norm in Moscow for decades.

 “It’s extraordinary how many people are pro-Russian in the US administration,” he said. The result could be a reluctance on the part of the CIA and FBI to monitor their Russian adversaries effectively and pass unwelcome news up the hierarchy to the White House — a major loss for western intelligence.

 “Bureaucracies realign, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were to stifle their reporting,” Varese said.

 “What motivates Putin is that he is terrified that Russian society could evolve in a way that meant they could get rid of him. There were demonstrations against corrupt elections for the Duma (Russian parliament) and the presidency, after which the state became very authoritarian. He’s terrified that a country like Ukraine could become a model for Russia.”