Le Monde: Russian intelligence agencies are trying to recruit the French through classified ad sites
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The Monde newspaper, citing an anonymous source in the country’s Interior Ministry, claims that over the past years, Russian intelligence has made about 12 attempts to recruit French citizens using popular classified ad sites.
As an example, an anonymous source of the newspaper named the sites to which the well-known leboncoin.fr belongs. According to the publication, the alleged employees of the SVR, who occupy various diplomatic positions in the Russian embassy, responded to advertisements for private classes in mathematics and French.
According to an unnamed representative of the French Directorate-General for Internal Security (DGSI, a division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), Russian intelligence officers were trying to establish contact with students and young professionals with the potential to make a public career.
Assuming to show a positive example of the described strategy, Monde recalled how in the fall of 2020 an employee of the Russian Embassy, Valentin Zakharov, was expelled, who was accused of recruiting an employee of a large French technological institute and receiving information from him about research in the field of artificial intelligence.
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