2023-08-20 20:00:02
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It’s hard not to spot this slightly flashy white house clinging to the side of this hill in Nacka, a residential suburb of Stockholm. On the ground floor, several windows have been veiled in plastic as panes, the scars of an event from which the inhabitants of the sector are struggling to recover. On November 22, 2022, at dawn, in a snowy setting, two helicopters and police units burst in here, breaking doors and windows. Lars, a 48-year-old neighbor, remembers seeing the inscription « FBI » on the backs of certain agents, present alongside the Swedish police.
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That morning, Sergei Skvortsov and Elena Koulkova, 59 and 58, and their son, were still asleep. Since then, the couple has been accused of “illegal acquisition of technology for the benefit of the Russian military industry”. Skvortsov was in a relationship with “the Russian military intelligence services, the GRU”says the prosecutor in charge of cases relating to national security, Henrik Olin.
Six months have passed. This May 23, when we arrive on site, the snow has disappeared. Two rings of the doorbell are enough for Elena Koulkova to come and open. Unlike her husband, she was released, but remains prosecuted for complicity. Obviously, she is no longer quite the woman of old, always ready to spread out her comfortable life on social networks. Pale, dressed in jeans and a white blouse, she wears a wool vest while it is hot. His round glasses adorn a fine, worried but combative face.
As in “The Americans”
On the defensive, his voice betrayed no weakness. The tone is dry, the verb clear. “I have my passport, I can travel. This is proof that I am not who you think. » The exchange is brief, but courteous. She ends up entering this bourgeois interior spread over two floors that they had built, in 2015, for 11 million Swedish crowns (nearly 1 million euros).
At the end of 2022, Sweden discovered, amazed, its first “illegals”. These Russian agents infiltrated long-term in foreign countries under false identity or false quality, as in the hit television series The Americans. Having become dual nationals – in 2010 for Madame, in 2012 for Monsieur – they both come from the Perm region, in the Urals. They studied engineering in Moscow, and came to settle in Sweden at the end of the 1990s. Justice suspects them of being, at the head of their import-export companies of electronic components and advanced technologies, the Swedish link in a network of industrial espionage managed by the GRU.
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