MOSCOW, November 12. /TASS/. The spy row will not fundamentally affect relations between Moscow and Vienna but will make them less friendly, the deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Europe, Vladislav Belov, told TASS on Monday in comments on the situation around a retired Austrian officer suspected of leaking state secrets to Russia.
"Austria holds the European Union presidency until the end of the year, and its relations with Russia are very good. Thus, it was necessary to mar these relations, and those who initiated this scandal will manage to cool down relations between Moscow and Vienna for a certain period of time," the expert said.
"This is a chess game, and the top public officials of both states will react adequately, but a row is a row. It won’t mar the essence of our relations, but will certainly tell on their positive state," the expert said.
"All countries are engaged in intelligence activity, and of course it is not limited to analytics - everybody is trying to obtain necessary information through all means available within the framework of intelligence activity," Belov said.
"When certain things surface, the state counter-intelligence agencies have different possibilities to react, and we often don’t even learn about this - there are certain things that are settled routinely [between the secret services of the two states]," he went on to say.
"However, here the situation was upgraded to a scandal, and this was not done by the Austrians, as it is clear that external services had provided information: somebody points at Germany, others speak about the UK," the expert said. He did not rule out that this could have been done by London or countries close to the UK "in order to continue a scandal around the Skripal case," he added.
He believes "Vienna was put in a situation in which it had to react publicly". "Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl, President Alexander Van der Bellen - all top officials of the state were involved, and even the refusal of the Austrian foreign minister to pay a visit to Russia was linked with that scandal, although there could have been absolutely different reasons behind that," Belov stressed.
He believes that Austria will likely stop short at verbal censure, not to deteriorate bilateral relations. "The only minus in our relations is that the Russian-Austrian public forum ‘Sochi dialogue’ has not been launched as of yet," he said of the forum organized in a similar way as the Russian-German Petersburg Dialogue. An agreement on the forum was reached in Vienna in June 2018. "However, there are more organizational issues than political ones to that. So, I don’t see any real consequences apart from condemnation," the expert said.
Austria-Russia spy row
The Salzburg public prosecutor’s office is verifying charges advanced by the Austrian defense ministry against a 70-year-old retired officer who is suspected of leaking state secrets, a spokesman for the Salzburg public prosecutor’s office told TASS on Friday.
In case the information is proved to be correct, the man may face a term of up to ten years behind bars. According to the Austrian defense ministry, the retired colonel is suspected of working for Russian intelligence since the 1990s and providing Moscow with information about Austria’s air force, artillery and the migration crisis. The suspect is said to have received 300,000 euro for his 20-year service.
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said on Friday that Austria’s law enforcement agencies were probing into a case of a retired Austrian colonel who was suspected of spying for Russia. Foreign Minister Kneissl has cancelled her visit to Russia and summoned Russian diplomats to clarify the situation over the spying allegations. The Austrian top diplomat planned to visit Russia on December 2-3. She warned that the incident could tell adversely on relations between the two countries.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said he was unpleasantly surprised to see no request from Vienna for explanations over the affair.