Another setback for Putin, ex-Russian spy flees to Estonia

Another blow to the Kremlin. Artem Zinchenko, a former Russian spy arrested in 2016 and released in 2017 as part of a prisoner exchange between Estonia and Russia, has now sought asylum in the same country that exposed and jailed him for spying.

In 2016, Artem Zinchenko, who was working as a Russian military intelligence agent, was arrested by the Estonian Internal Security Service on charges of spying not only on the country, but also on NATO allies. The following year he was released and returned to Moscow as part of a prisoner exchange: in exchange for Zinchenko, Estonia brought back businessman Raivo Susu,

Now, as reported by Yahoo News, Zinchenko is fleeing Russia and has sought asylum in Estonia. The news has so far not been publicly disclosed by either side. And it’s a major setback for the Kremlin.

Zinchenko fled to Estonia because of his opposition to the Russian war in Ukraine. The former Russian spy’s decision “was motivated as much by the Kremlin’s brutality at home and abroad as by Estonia’s humanity towards him, an enemy agent”. Zinchenko has many relatives in Ukraine and many of them are fighting on the front lines for Kiev. Speaking of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he explained that “the dire situation that took place on February 24th is the worst imaginable scenario in my mind, and not only because my relatives live there, but also because of the large number of innocent victims.

Upon his return home from the prisoner exchange between Russia and Estonia, “everything changed radically”. Zinchenko says he saw the Putin regime as having “all aspects of totalitarianism” and says he greatly admires Alexei Navalny, Putin’s main political opponent, now in prison. Zinchenko says that, together with his wife and children, he took part in demonstrations in defense of Navalny in St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, Russia invaded Ukraine and completely eliminated dissent from the Kremlin’s work. Hence the decision to sell his apartment in St. Petersburg and send his wife and children to Estonia, in order to join them there as soon as possible.

During the conversation with the Yahoo News reporter, Zinchenko said that neither his wife nor his parents were aware of his spying activity on behalf of Russia. When asked how he was recruited, Zinchenko says it all started when he was about to graduate from St. Petersburg Polytechnic University in global economics. He says he tried to avoid mandatory military service by enrolling in courses that would have allowed him to graduate as a lieutenant, a workaround used by many Russian students at the time to avoid the annual draft.

Zinchenko says he had no idea which agency his recruiter worked for: “No one told you that you were recruited into Russian military intelligence. Nobody shows you a badge or ID.” About his activity, Zinchenko explains that “whoever thinks of doing such a thing should not think twice, but 10 times”, and even today he wonders why the Kremlin was willing to do it everything to bring him home, perhaps because Russia wanted to know more about how he was discovered.