While Sweden hunts down Russian intruders

Clinging to the side of a hill in Stockholm’s residential suburb of Nacka, the White House is hard to spot. On the ground floor, many windows are boarded up with plastic, scars of an event that the people of the sector are struggling to recover from. On November 22, 2022, at dawn, in a snowy setting, two helicopters and police units entered here, breaking down doors and windows. Lars, a 48-year-old neighbor, remembers seeing the inscription “The FBI” On the backs of some agents, along with the Swedish police.

That morning, Sergey Skvortsov and Elena Kolkova, 59 and 58, and their son were still sleeping. Since then, the couple has been charged with “illegal acquisition of technology for the benefit of the Russian military sector.” Skvortsov was in a relationship “Russian Military Intelligence Services, GRU”Henrik Olin, a lawyer in charge of cases related to national security, says:

Six months have passed. This May 23, when we arrived at the site, the snow had disappeared. Two rings of the doorbell are enough for Elena Kolkova to come and open it. Unlike her husband, she was acquitted but is being prosecuted for complicity. Apparently, she is no longer the old woman and is always ready to spread her comfortable life on social networks. She wears pale, jeans and a white blouse, and wears a woolen vest when it’s warm. His round glasses adorn a fine, worried but combative face.

Like “Americans”.

In his defense, his voice betrayed no weakness. The tone is dry, the verb clear. “I have a passport and I can travel. This is proof that I am not what you think. » The exchange was brief, but polite. She steps into this capitalist interior, spread over two floors, which they built in 2015 for 11 million Swedish crowns (almost 1 million euros).

At the end of 2022, Sweden discovered its first “illegals”, surprised. These Russian agents have long infiltrated foreign countries under false identities or false standards, as in the hit TV series Americans. They both hail from the Perm region in the Urals region – dual citizens – madam in 2010 and monsieur in 2012. They studied engineering in Moscow and settled in Sweden in the late 1990s. The courts suspect them of being the head of an import-export company for electronic components and advanced technologies, the Swedish link in an industrial espionage network. Administered by the GRU.

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