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At First, I Thought I Was Imagining It, and Now It Seems ‘They’ Really Are Watching

Agents from the Kremlin are hiding in plain sight and even letting many in their new communities know they exist.

B Kean
4 min readSep 23, 2024
Photo by Johan Mouchet on Unsplash

It was reported today in The New York Times that Russian agents are spreading out all over Europe, using the freedoms of normal countries, to harass the millions of Russians who decided that the Kremlin’s war of genocide was a pill too bitter to swallow.

But it’s not just them who are in danger. There are also the hundreds of thousands of Russians who left home because they did not want to have anything to do with Vladimir Putin’s war — or were forced out, accused of not embracing it enough. These low-profile dissenters are subjected to surveillance and kidnappings, too. Yet their repression happens in silence — away from the spotlight and often with the tacit consent, or inadequate prevention, of the countries to which they have fled.

It’s a terrifying thing: The Kremlin is hunting down ordinary people across the world, and nobody seems to care (Putin Is Doing Something).

I have written in the past about the Russians in our community we suspect of being agents, but I also thought maybe I was just being paranoid. When you spend any time with…

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B Kean
B Kean

Written by B Kean

The past holds the answers to today’s problems. “Be curious, not judgmental,” at least until you have all the facts. Think and stop watching cable news.

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