Kremlin Funding Catalan Movement via Network in the Urals, URA News Agency Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 11 – Moscow is providing funds to the Catalan independence movement in order to destabilize Spain and is doing so through a complex network of state-related firms to hide what it is doing and via Yekaterinburg to make it harder for outsiders to trace, according to Spanish court documents the URA news agency has examined.

            Konstantin Dzhultayev follows the money as it flows among Russian state entities, criminal groups, and nominally independent firms and then to individuals and groups in Catalonia. It is a web of such complexity that one can understand why those behind it assumed that no one, especially abroad, would be able to unravel it (ura.news/articles/1036279257).

            The Spanish document Dzhultayev describes provides compelling evidence of this nefarious Russian plot, and the details matter to investigators.  But what is especially noteworthy is that in the highly-centralized Russian state, the Kremlin is choosing to orchestrate such actions via individuals and groups far from Moscow.

            Using similar networks in the Russian capital or even in St. Petersburg where there are large numbers of foreigners and Russians interested in exposing the criminality of the Putin regime would have been far more problematic: such activities almost certainly would have been exposed far more quickly and confirmed far more easily.

            But setting one up in the Urals where foreigners and anti-corruption activists are far fewer gives Moscow an advantage. It is an advantage, however, that the Kremlin can no longer count on to the degree that it did because of remarkable news and investigation sites like URA.news or Nakanune, to name just two of the best.

            Those concerned with Moscow’s efforts to subvert other countries need to look beyond the ring road. Dzhultayev’s article is an example of what they can find.