THERE'S A DELICIOUS IRONY...:

[B]eginning with the US presidential elections, important changes are taking place -- and it's hard to know what to call them or how to describe them. Externally, we see that people who were supposed to communicate with "the Russians" are losing their positions. And this is accompanied by public scandals. It's not the case that these people cooperated with some questionable goals in mind, but they'd come into contact with a taboo -- zashkvar in Russian criminal slang.

No one doubted the loyalty of US national security adviser Michael Flynn, but he resigned because of his "contacts" with the Russians. A few days ago, the vice-speaker of Lithuania's parliament resigned. Mindaugas Bastys left because the Lithuanian security services refused him access to secret data. But the list of Russian citizens whom Bastys had contact with over the years doesn't contain anything particularly shocking -- representatives of Russian state corporations in Lithuania, the usual suspicious Russian businessmen and so on.

The recent hack of the email account of hitherto unknown Alexander Usovsky, who was working for the Kremlin in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Balkans, shows that Konstantin Malofeev, an Orthodox Russian businessman known for financing separatists in the Donbas, discussed or in fact conducted operations against elections in Bosnia and Poland.

Malofeev's activities are an extreme example of Russia's openly subversive actions in other states. But when you look at Usovsky's emails, and you're aware of the state Russian affairs in Europe, you realise that Malofeev's strategy and tactics are no different from the actions of dozens and hundreds of similar actors beyond Russia's borders. Before Crimea, for those who cooperated with the "Russians", these activities looked like "supporting Russia's interests". Now these people are beginning to figure out what this really meant.

"What have we got ourselves involved in?" they asked themselves -- people who'd performed one-off services or participated in "Petersburg Dialogue" (a German-Russian public form), the Valdai Club, the "Dialogue of Civilisations" (another public forum) and the dozens of other programmes where Russian money was involved.

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