Using two shady diamond traders from St. Petersburg to burn down the key witness in a lawsuit against you, you just have to do it. But this is exactly what Austrian ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz appears to have done: using Russian witnesses to discredit a former top official. This man testified last four months before a court in Vienna against “mein Kanzler” in exchange for a reduced sentence. The judge did not believe the Russians because their story was shaky on all sides. He sentenced Kurz to eight months’ probation on February 23. The former chancellor denies everythingaccuses the Justice Department of a “political process” and appeals.
The lawsuit revolves around the question of whether Kurz lied in 2020 to a parliamentary inquiry committee into corruption in his first government (2017-2019). But this could be more than just another Austrian corruption case. While European government leaders are once again fluttering in all directions because French President Macron “does not rule out” ground troops going to Ukraine – thus deploying a strategic ambiguity that is common in wartime – Kurz’s remarkable Russian ‘witnesses’ also illustrate that war may be closer than many people think.
A hybrid war has long been raging, with disinformation and sabotage to disrupt democracies. Far-right politicians are bribed, companies defrauded, dating sites infiltrated by Russian spies. Is justice also a target? “The Kremlin can… hearts and minds of Europeans,” European Commissioner Vera Jourova said this week. “That’s why it looks for front men.”
Until his fall in 2021, Sebastian Kurz was considered Wunderkind of the European conservatives: he became chancellor at the age of thirty, extremely popular. In Vienna everyone knew how he operated: by running a parallel system with young, loyal party friends in government institutions and companies who reported directly to Kurz over the heads of directors and ensured that his will was carried out. This network communicated via chats. After Kurz’s government with the far-right FPÖ was brought down by scandals, tens of thousands of those chats ended up in the hands of the law. They led to the spider in Kurz’s web, Thomas Schmid, a former top finance official who, presumably thanks to Kurz, became CEO of the powerful state holding company ÖBAG – without having the credentials to do so. Schmid was so damaged by those chats that he resigned and moved to Amsterdam. Now he is helping the justice department against Kurz. His statements are damning. He uses the chats as evidence. Both men are resentful. Kurz fights doggedly for political rehabilitation.
During the trial, Kurz (who now works in AI and security) first produced a tape recording of a phone call between him and Schmid, which seemed so contrived to the judge that he set it aside. And at the end of the process he suddenly came up with the two Russians. They stated that they had given Schmid a job interview in an Amsterdam hotel. Schmid is said to have told them that the justice system in Vienna was full of opponents of Kurz who wanted as many bad stories about the former chancellor from him as possible.
The judge did not trust the Russians’ statements. He wanted to hear them for himself. Because they did not have a Schengen visa, this was done via Zoom. The Russians were in the Austrian embassy in Tiblisi. They contradicted their own witness statements. Schmid had not defamed the judiciary, the statement had been written by Kurz’s lawyer, and so on. They hardly seemed to understand what the matter was about. The judge convicted Kurz.
What exactly happened here remains unclear. Who made the contact? Who was behind this? The Russians have now disappeared into the wild. The world focuses on Navalny’s funeral, Macron’s ground troops and Putin’s nuclear threat. But again, in everyday life the war seems to have long since seeped into Europe.