Nicolás de Pedro is a senior fellow at the Institute for Statecraft in London, where he works on issues related to Russia, Eurasia, and hybrid threats. He is also an analyst at the Centre for International Security at the Francisco de Vitoria University in Madrid, and he is a columnist for El Español. He has been part of election observation missions of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine. He has travelled extensively in central Asia and China, including a three-year academic stay in Kazakhstan. Past appointments include membership in the EU-Russia Experts Network on Foreign Policy (EUREN), initiated by the Delegation of the European Union to Russia, and the Russia expert group of the European Centre of Excellence for Combating Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) in Helsinki. He is currently an associate professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and at the Universidad Pontificia de Comillas in Madrid.
You have been investigating the relationship between Russia and Catalan separatism for a long time. To what extent has the Kremlin supported independence in Spain?
At the moment, we only know the surface of everything that has happened. That is already scary, and it points to the fact that Russian infiltration of Catalan separatism is very high. This separatism is endogenous, generated by our own internal roots, i.e., Putin has not created it—what he has done is support it when the movement has grown. It has been supported first through organised crime, which has been present in Spain since the 1990s and which is one more structure of the Kremlin’s power. Then, from 2015 onwards, when Russia began to see separatism as a potential destabiliser, they deployed a series of actors more or less related to the Kremlin who follow the Russian narrative. This was very clearly seen in the Russian media’s sympathy towards Catalan separatism, which informs the Russian audience that it is a just cause and which charges Spain with the black legend, Franco, etc. Support for separatism became the Kremlin’s official narrative.
Other media covered the independence process with a certain sympathy.
Yes, it is news in all the major international media. But in the English-language media, ignorance—and the work done by Catalan separatism with a very effective narrative—weighs more heavily: “We just want to vote.” If you don’t know the reality of Spain, it is easy to fall into the deception. Afterwards, many international media corrected their initial news reports, such as the claim of 1,000 injured, when there was only one serious injury, although these rectifications did not have nearly the same impact as the initial report. In contrast, the Russian media did not change their narrative and furthermore announced that a violent confrontation was going to take place. Another thing that caught my attention—and also caught the attention of our government, who did not understand why this was happening—was the massive activity on social media, an activity that was generated from Russia and Venezuela. My working hypothesis at the time was that the Russians were observing the conflict and pouring gasoline on it, but later, what encouraged me to investigate further was Juan Antonio de Castro’s book on what happened in Catalonia and its relationship with Soros. Why was there so much effort to construct a narrative to hide this issue? Subsequently, the investigations by the judiciary and the Guardia Civil are providing new and increasingly serious evidence of Russian interference.
The fact that there may be funding or support for separatism from, for example, Soros, does not exclude that there may be funding or support from other actors, such as the Kremlin.
Exactly, and if there is interference from others, I want to know. But so far, as far as I have seen, there is nothing to suggest that the Open Society, as an organisation, had an interest in supporting this. The only thing that I have seen was the granting of some €25,000 to Diplocat (the Catalan government’s foreign relations agency) for a seminar on “xenophobic right-wing extremism.” But that is not the same as funding Diplocat, which costs around one and a half million euros and is paid for with public money. Of course, if there is anything, it is desirable that it comes to light, but there is nothing remotely close to the importance of Russian influence.
Is it Junts, Puigdemont’s party, that favours this relationship?
Yes, within separatism (divided into two large parties that detest each other), Junts was more inclined to throw itself into the arms of the Russians, while Esquerra preferred to seek recognition from Germany, the EU, the UK, or the U.S., because they truly believed that their cause was legitimate and democratic. And then there was the CUP, which had the backing of Venezuela. ERC, which wanted the backing of Berlin, Brussels, or London, did not like the idea of the Catalan republic having the visible support of Putin and Maduro. That is why it is Junts—through Víctor Terradellas, who was the head of diplomatic relations, president of the CATmón foundation, and very close to Puigdemont—that began to establish relations with Russia. Terradellas is in contact with the GRU (Military Intelligence Service), and members of that organisation have been appearing in Barcelona since the end of 2015. This includes people like the members of the famous unit 29155—famous because it is responsible for the poisoning of the ex-spy Sergey Skripal; it specialises in sabotage and assassinations—as well as Russian computer engineers.
Josep Lluis Alay, head of Puigdemont’s office, held several meetings in Moscow to discuss issues related to the “creation of an independent state,” but the most concerning element is Puigdemont’s meeting with the Russian ex-diplomat Nikolai Sadovnikov, an individual recognised by French intelligence as a high representative of the Kremlin’s parallel diplomacy. Russia is not like Spain or other democracies; it is a country that works with many informal mechanisms, and what counts is access to the Kremlin. If you have it, you are more important than if you were a minister plenipotentiary or an ambassador. This meeting is very important because it took place on 26 October, the day before the unilateral declaration of independence, in an atmosphere of maximum tension. Being told in this context that you have Russia’s support by a representative of the Kremlin, who claims to be Putin’s personal emissary, can have a decisive influence on your decision-making.
We don’t know what would have happened if Puigdemont had not fled, but what we did have at the time was a Russian media campaign talking about an imminent outbreak of violence and elements of the GRU in Barcelona. When we did have violence, it was two years later, with the Tsunami Democratic generating violence in the streets and trying to take over the Prat airport, a critical infrastructure. That is why it is so important to continue the investigation.
Did Puigdemont deny the existence of this meeting?
Yes, he did. For a long time, the separatists denied these contacts and scoffed at all the news about them. Then they claimed that ‘you have to talk to everyone,’ to finally acknowledge the meetings; in other words, they have been changing their story. On 17 March 2022, Puigdemont published an article in the newspaper La Vanguardia on the internationalisation of the pro-independence process, in which he said that he had not met with anyone who spoke on behalf of the Russian Federation. A month and a half later, in May, it was published that Puigdemont had met with Nikolai Sadovnikov, and Puigdemont then admitted that the meeting had taken place. After years of saying that it was all lies invented by the Guardia Civil and the CNI (Secret Service), they had to admit the existence of the contacts, which allowed investigations to be launched in Brussels as well.
It is very important that these connections and implications are known in detail because Spain won the diplomatic battle in 2017, but in terms of public opinion and influential voices in many countries, the game was at best evenly matched. In general, there was some sympathy for the separatist narrative for a number of reasons, mainly because of the Catalan government’s efforts to disseminate its narrative but also because of the absence of a counter-narrative from the state. For example, there were several articles by influential people in some think tanks who bought the separatist narrative, and that is very bad for Spain. The only way to avoid this is to have a presence in these areas so as not to allow false narratives to get through; victimhood and indignation are of no use. There is much room for improvement in this respect. We must be permanently present in Brussels, in London, and in the European capitals.
That’s why Puigdemont is going to Waterloo.
Of course, he was not going to Moscow. Puigdemont is going to Brussels because Europe is subject to legal certainty; it does not work like Russia. Legal certainty is an asset to be preserved, even if there are cases like Puigdemont’s, who uses it surreptitiously and, in fact, has greatly damaged the concept of the Euro-order. In Brussels. one can have influence, while going to Moscow would have been like shooting oneself in the foot. Nevertheless, the Russians offered him asylum through Zhirinovski.
Zhirinovski was the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, who demonstrated with Esteladas (Catalonian separatist flags) in front of the Spanish consulate in Moscow.
Yes, but his party was neither liberal nor democratic. He died in April 2022, and it was always said that he was an asset of the KGB (now FSB) to control Russian nationalism. The truth is that all his life he has served the Russian government and exercised a false opposition. Zhirinovsky demonstrated in front of the Spanish consulate in 2017, calling for “freedom for the peoples of Spain.” When he offered asylum to Puigdemont, it was at a time when the separatist leader was at some risk of extradition, and the Russians were offering him a way out.
This is yet another indication of his relations with the Kremlin, and yet there are many who dismiss the importance of this plot, or, like the separatists, they claim that it is a set-up. Just bear in mind that Puigdemont has not accepted the amnesty offered by the socialist government because it does not protect him from the charge of treason.
The case of Latvian MEP Tatjana Zdanoka, who has been linked to the FSB since 2005 and who has supported Catalan and Basque separatists—such as Arnaldo Otegui, whom she visited in prison in 2013—has also been uncovered.
There are a lot of indications, such as this one, that point in the same direction. This shows the Kremlin’s interest in having pawns under control everywhere. They are pursuing their agenda, which is a geopolitical agenda. Russia does not see this case through the prism of Catalonia having the right to self-determination. What it sees is that Spain is a southern European country, a member of the EU and NATO, and a bridge to Latin America. To destabilise Spain is to destabilise the EU and NATO.
However, despite this information, many in Spain continue to see Putin as a kind of saviour in the face of wokism.
There is an ideological bias in many media, and there is a culture of cancellation, but there are still spaces and there are still conservative media. By contrast, the Kremlin does not allow any criticism, and the price to pay is jail or worse. Russia also sells itself as a bastion of traditional values to reach a conservative audience in the West; there are many who, mostly out of ignorance, believe it. But there is no country more nihilistic than Russia in every sense: there is no country with more abortion, more alcoholism, more broken families, more domestic violence, and, above all, more lack of empathy and interest in all this. But we must recognise that they have been able to sell their opposite version of reality very well.
