Hot Estonian spy

On September 16, an officer of the Estonian Security Police (KAPO), Eston Kohver, who was detained by Russian special services at the border and taken to Moscow, unexpectedly refused the lawyers hired by Estonia - Mark Feigin and Nikolai Polozov. The Estonian Foreign Ministry suspects that he did not do it voluntarily. Other versions: Kohver may be preparing to confess.

On September 17, the Lefortovo Court was supposed to consider the petition of Kohver's lawyers, but due to his written refusal to serve Polozov and Feygin, the meeting did not take place. In Tallinn, they say that Kohver decided to use the services of a lawyer appointed by Russia. In any case, Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet suggested that Kohver was somehow forced to change lawyers.

According to Moscow, FSB officers detained Kohver on the morning of September 5 in a section of the area on the Russian side of the control line between Estonia and Russia - a border treaty between the two countries has not yet been concluded, which means there is no official border.

However, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Pskov Region issued its own version of the circumstances of Kohver's capture: allegedly 36-year-old Estonian citizen Eston Kohver was detained in Pskov, in one of the garages on Novatorov Street, where he ended up on the occasion of a visit to Pskov relatives.

In turn, the Estonian security police claims that FSB agents simply kidnapped Kohver on Estonian territory, eight kilometers from the Luhamaa/Shumilkino border checkpoint. According to the Kapo, Kohver, investigating the smuggling case, was forced to be in the immediate vicinity of the control line - that's where the ambush awaited him. Kapo insists: Kohver is an experienced operative and could not be on the territory of Russia.

The Kapo version is supported by the fact that on September 5, the day Kohver was captured, representatives of the border services of Estonia and Russia signed a note in which they mutually acknowledged the violation of the line of control by the Russian side. But the Russian representative subsequently withdrew his signature.

The secret services, of course, sometimes catch scouts and spies in their own country. It's worse when they do it in another state. And it’s completely unheard of when on the territory of another state they catch not an intelligence officer or a spy, but an operative with experience and an impeccable reputation, specializing in smuggling and combating organized crime. “Kohver is known as an expert on cross-border corruption. His kidnapping is the case that the pros are talking about gamechanger,” one Kapo officer told the author of these lines. “This should serve as a warning not only to all countries bordering Russia, but also to all Western intelligence agencies.”

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For the FSB, this was, of course, a "jackpot": the capture of an Estonian security police officer two days after Barack Obama's visit to Tallinn

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According to Kaarel Kaas, editor-in-chief of the influential Estonian magazine Diplomacy, on that fateful day for himself, Kohver most likely should have met with his informant and was waiting for him on the control line. “Everything indicates that his capture was a well-planned FSB operation,” Kaas is convinced. However, he admits that Kohver's informant could be an agent (or double agent) of the FSB, which started this operation in order to lure Kohver or some other Kapo employee into a trap.

The version is not unfounded, if we recall that the Latvian special services have repeatedly stated that they have data indicating that the FSB is recruiting smugglers involved in the illegal transportation of cigarettes from Russia, where they are much cheaper.

In this regard, however, another version is also in use: Kohver could have hit the trail of smugglers, who, in turn, were connected with the FSB by commercial relations.

The FSB could not help but know that Kohver was not a spy. The FSB knows Kohver very well. He repeatedly met with Russian operatives involved in cross-border crime. Some employees of the Pskov FSB know him personally.

Then why all this? Why did Russia need a spy scandal at the peak of the cooling of relations with the West?

I'm afraid those who gave the order to capture Kohver have a homespun logic. For the FSB, this was, of course, a “jackpot”: the capture of a security police officer two days after the visit of US President Barack Obama to Tallinn, and even more so during the NATO summit, where the issue of deploying parts of the Alliance in the areas bordering Russia was discussed. And isn't this the most convincing proof of the intensification of NATO's actions against Russia?

One former Kapo officer described the possible logic of the FSB officials from a slightly different angle - they say, Obama promised you three boxes, NATO members promised at the summit - and so, look, we do whatever we want with you, and no Obama will tell us.

However, the KAPO does not rule out that the story with Kohver is the revenge of the FSB. After all, over the past five years, Kapo caught four traitors to the motherland: Herman Simm, a high-ranking employee of the Ministry of Defense, worked for the SVR, and KaP members Vladimir Veitman and Aleksey Dressen with his wife worked for the FSB. But Estonian spies during this time in Russia did not plant a single one. So it's not fair.

One way or another, while the Russian media, including federal TV channels, pay surprisingly little attention to Kohver. But it's not evening yet. Quite possibly, we are waiting for Kohver's "sincere confession" in front of television cameras and the corresponding "anatomical documentary".