Window on Eurasia: FSB Denounces Finnish Journalist as Western Intelligence Agent

03.01.06

Vienna, January 3 - The Russian Federation's Federal Security Service (FSB) has charged that a Finnish journalist during a September visit to the Mari Republic in the Middle Volga not only gathered "negative" information about conditions there but transferred money and instructions to opposition groups there.

Thus, the News12.ru website reported, the FSB concluded that Ville Ropponen was in fact working as an agent of one or another Western intelligence service. And on the basis of that, the site said, the Russian Foreign Ministry was justified in denying the Helsinki journalist a visa to make a return trip (http://www.News12.ru, December 28).

According to this site, which regularly defends Mari El President Leonid Markelov and denounces his democratic-minded opponents, Estonian and Finnish journalists have been using their visits to Finno-Ugric regions in the Middle Volga to gather "negative information about the situation in Russia."

In addition, the site said, these journalists have been used by Western intelligence agencies to pass money (in the form of foreign currency) and instructions to "the leaders of Finno-Ugric nationalist organizations," actions that President Vladimir Putin had recently decried.

Russian officials both in the Middle Volga and in Moscow have taken an increasingly hard line on this issue (See the report posted in English at the end of December at http://www.vapaasana.net/keskustelu/?topic_id=29228.) But the attack on Rapponen is the most far reaching to date.

According to News12.ru, Rapponen met with the leaders of the Mari opposition during a September 2004 visit to that republic. During these meetings, the site said, he handed over significant amounts of money in order to allow the opposition to engage in acts of civil disobedience.

Moreover, the site said, Rapponen organized things so that such actions by the Mari opposition would have the greatest possible impact on the preparation of a report about the status of the Finno-Ugric peoples that Estonian official Katrin Saks was preparing for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

When the local officials of the FSB got wind of what Rapponen was doing, the News12.ru site said, they called him in for what it described as "a conversation." But despite that, the Finnish journalist ignored their advice and moved on to another Finno-Ugric republic, Mordovia.

Upon returning to Helsinki, Rapponen published a series of articles in the Finnish press about Russian repression of the Finno-Ugric peoples, articles that News12.ru suggested failed to point out that the journalist had had no difficulties in meeting with the nationalist leaders he claimed were being repressed.

By tracking Rapponen's activities and getting the Foreign Ministry to deny him a return visa, the site said, the FSB has effectively blocked yet another channel of "foreign financing of nationalist organizations inside Russia."

At one level, of course, these latest charges are simply a reflection of the paranoia of Markelov and other Russian officials in Mari El and elsewhere. But at another, they are a deeply disturbing indication that officials in regions far from the attention of the media in Moscow are now behaving even worse than those in the Russian capital. 

Paul Goble