Messages Published: FSB Agent Monitored Belarusians

What has become known?

At the disposal of the publication Medusa were the messages by FSB Department for the Protection of the Constitutional Order Sergei Dubov for the period from December 2007 (when he was still a student) to April 2022.

According to the publication, Dubov began his career in the special service by spying on "national minorities". Under the guise of a student or an "interested listener", the guy came to events attended by representatives of the Belarusian and Ukrainian diaspora. He not only listened to their speeches, but also collected a database of useful contacts.

Among them was the Chairman of the public organization Federal National and Cultural Autonomy of Belarusians of Russia (FNCA) Sergei Kandybovich.

The authors of the article claim that Kandybovich knew that Dubov worked in the special service.

For many years, Kandybovich sent him his working correspondence with familiar Belarusians and coordinated with him the texts of his speeches on the relations between the two countries.

In response, the FSB officer complained that both Russia and Belarus "promote European values", stressed that Russians and Belarusians are "one people" and asked Kandybovich to speak more often publicly about "attempts by nationalist forces to falsify the historical past".

"My task is to prevent the erosion of the idea of building a "union state",” the authors quote Dubov's messages.

In March 2018, Dubov and Kandybovich agreed on the text of a denunciation against the Polish journalist Tomasz Maciejczuk, who stood out for his pro-Ukrainian speeches during a talk show on Russian channels. At the time of the denunciation, Dubov himself had an expert opinion on Maciejczuk's posts on VKontakte social media. The specialist who drafted the document also coordinated the text on Facebook.

As a result, Maciejczuk’s place in Russia was searched a few months later, and the journalist himself was banned from entering Russia.

The publication notes that Dubov has repeatedly received direct information from the administration of VKontakte about the contacts he was interested in.

The FSB officer also introduced other people he met to the work on the "protection" of the constitutional order. For example, he instructed a little-known journalist near Moscow, Ivan Anisimov, to gain confidence in the Belarusian Ivan Sopov, who under the nickname "Genrikh Litvin" was the administrator of such VKontakte community as "Historical and Political Disputes" and "Baltic-Black Sea Union".

“Can you become his pen-friend, firstly? Touch the inside of this swindler? If you sneak up on them, it will be gorgeous," the publication quotes an excerpt from Dubov's correspondence with Anisimov in January 2015.

True, the operation quickly failed. As Anisimov admitted in one of his emails, he got drunk and began to write various nonsense to Sopov. As a result, he was banned. But this did not affect the outcome of the case. In May 2016, Sopov was detained. Later, he was included in the "list of terrorists and extremists", but then excluded.