What started as a internal affair of Spain has become a kind of global and epidemic warning. The National Police has intercepted in the last hours three new letters that contained animal parts, addressed on this occasion to the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid already the consulates of Malaga and Barcelona. In total, the number of suspicious packages sent to legations of the Slavic country in a dozen capitals of the world rises already to twenty-oneto which must be added six envelopes with pyrotechnic material addressed, among others, to the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sanchez Yet the US Embassy in Madrid.
“Everything points to an action inspired by the Russian State” in some way, he sentences, without an iota of doubt, Olga Lautman, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for European Policy (CEPA) and an expert in organized crime operations in Russia and Ukraine. Sending animal parts to “journalists, opponents and critical voices” has been a way of acting, a pattern “widely used in Russia since the 90s“, he continues. At first, he maintains, “they were the mafia groups” who resorted to this practice with the aim of intimidating “reporters” who were investigating his criminal activities.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the recipients became “journalists who criticized the second chechen war or the corruption of the Putin regime”, or even “members of the opposition”, he details. The last case of which there is evidence dates back to the month of April, already started the war in Ukraine, when Alexei Venediktovdirector of the closed down liberal station Echo of Moscowwith a Jewish mother, received a pig headwhile on the door of his home the word had been written Judensauan iconography from the Middle Ages that represents Hebrews sucking the nipples or looking at the anus of a pig.
????? They leave a pig’s head and a Ukrainian sticker with the expression ‘Jewish pig’ in the apartment of Alexei Venediktov, editor of the Ekho Moskvy radio station that stopped broadcasting at the beginning of the month due to pressure from the Kremlin to cover the Russian invasion of Ukraine for what it is. https://t.co/OMEWuBv5AX
— Emilio Doménech (@Nanisimo) March 24, 2022
All suspicions about the authorship of the campaign currently fall on the so-called wagner groupthe private mercenary militia led by Yevgeny Prigozhinnicknamed the Putin’s chefand whose Telegram channel recently broadcast the execution by hammering of Yevgeny Nuzhin, a former prisoner recruited by the militia who, once at the front, deserted and offered to fight on the Ukrainian side. “Our group would never be used in stupid and rude antics,” he distanced himself from the macabre missives, however, the leader of the band, in a written message sent to CNN.
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Lautman does not rule out such a hypothesis, although he recalls that it is a intimidation method that have been used by numerous Russian groups and institutions, “from mafias to members of the secret services, including Chechen paramilitaries”. The content of the message, yes, is beyond any doubt: the addressee he has become “a target to be shot” and “should immediately stop what he was doing.” In the case of Denis Korotkovreporter of Novaya Gazetawho four years ago received a note along with a severed head of a billy goatthe shipping background was abundantly clear: when I worked as a reporter for fontankaa St. Petersburg website, had investigated precisely Prigozhin’s activities in depth.
For the moment, the Government has declined raise anti-terrorism alert, and at least as far as the six letters with fireworks are concerned, the investigations were concentrated, a few days ago, in “small groups” of the radical left “with little capacity” that “act on their own.” In some of the macabre letters with pieces of animal, it has emerged that the postmark was not Spanish, unlike the explosive letters, dated in Valladolid.