After invasion of Ukraine, a reckoning on Russian influence in Austria
VIENNA — “Polizei!” barked the officers who stormed a third-floor apartment in the Austrian capital, moving to intercept a thickset man standing near a kitchen nook. The suspect — a long-serving official in Austria’s security services — sprang toward his cellphone and tried to break it in two, according to Austrian police reports.
The phone data from last year’s raid, along with a laptop, USB sticks and a mother lode of documents, is now proving critical to an explosive case that has gained newfound urgency in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it is fueling questions about the extent to which Moscow’s influence came to permeate this European nation.
Egisto Ott managed undercover agents in the Austrian domestic security service and also served in Turkey and Italy as an intelligence officer, and he is suspected of having sold state secrets to Russia, as well as providing information on perceived enemies of the Kremlin in the West, according to European security officials and Austrian investigative documents.
The still-developing Ott case, security officials say, is one of many internal problems that contributed to last year’s dissolution of Austria’s domestic intelligence agency — the BVT — and has led other European agencies to curtail their links with Vienna or cut it out of intelligence sharing on some matters relating to Russia.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/after-invasion-of-ukraine-a-reckoning-on-russian-influence-in-austria/ar-AAZcVVL