Family history from Australia.
A Russian-born Australian army soldier and her husband have been arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia and China.
Kira Koroleva, a 40-year-old private in the Australian army, and her husband Igor Korolev, 62, appeared in court in Brisbane on one count of conspiracy to commit espionage, which carries a maximum jail term of 15 years.
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Rhys Kershaw said the pair had lived in Australia for over a decade before the alleged offence and became citizens several years ago.
Kershaw alleges that Koroleva secretly travelled to Russia while on leave from the ADF and then instructed Igor to access her work account and send classified materials so that she could forward them to the Russian authorities.
Meanwhile in Germany.
The federal prosecutor’s office in Leipzig took into custody Yaki H., a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, who is suspected of working for the Chinese secret service. While working at the Leipzig-Halle airport, she passed on information, in particular, about the transportation of military equipment to another suspected agent, whose name is Jian G., the prosecutor’s office said.
At the same time, Jian G. is a former employee of one of the Alternative for Germany party leaders, Maximilian Kra, who was arrested in April on suspicion of espionage. It is reported that he also spied on members of the Chinese opposition in Germany and passed information on negotiations and decisions in the European Parliament to the Secret Service.
It is alleged that the detainee Yaki H. worked for a logistics company and provided Jian G. with information about cargo and passenger flights at the airport in 2023-2024.
How to counteract?
Some Western companies are trying to dismiss personnel from the risk group. The software developer ABBYY has massively dismissed Russians from its offices in Cyprus, Hungary and Serbia. Russians complain that only holders of Russian passports were affected by the cuts. Over a hundred people, whom the company previously helped to move from Russia, lost their jobs.
Those who were fired told how they learned about the dismissal: they were invited to a meeting in the evening, where they were forbidden to write in the chat, and they turned off the video and microphones, after which the dismissal was announced. Their corporate access was immediately disabled.
Germany has increased the number of Russian deportations. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany, 32 citizens were deported to Russia between January and August this year. For comparison, last year, there were only seven such people.
After the full-scale Russian military invasion of Ukraine, deportations from Germany to the Russian Federation were largely suspended, mainly due to the almost complete suspension of interstate relations, as well as the lack of direct air connections. At the beginning of last year, for the first time after a long break, two Russians were deported from Bavaria to Russia: they were first sent to Serbia, from where they were able to reach Moscow.
The countries of the West should urgently develop a strategy to counter espionage activities and be more careful with those arriving from Russia and China, as well as with their own citizens who are ethnically related to them. The world has already entered a new World Cold War. It was necessary to respond to calls yesterday.
