In Vilnius, the small door of the former Bernardine convent, hidden in the middle of a large white facade, is a reminder that this place was once dedicated to discretion. This quality is perfectly suited to the Vilnius Russia Forum, a conference which, on this May day, brought together the main political opponents of Vladimir Putin's regime. The organizers wanted to protect the forum's participants from current threats: potential infiltration by Russian agents, destabilization, or poisoning attempts orchestrated from Moscow or Minsk, the capital of neighboring Belarus, a Kremlin ally. This explained the identity checks, the police van and plainclothes officers stationed at the entrance to the convent.

In a room with vaulted ceilings, academics and experts conversed with various personalities: relatives of lawyer and political opponent Alexei Navalny, detained in Russia; former chess champion Garry Kasparov; ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, released at the end of 2013 after a decade in his country's prisons; Ian Ratchinsky, president of Memorial, the Russian NGO awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize for its work on crimes committed during the Soviet era; and representatives of Belarusian opposition figure Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a refugee in Lithuania. Against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, they all discussed the future of Russia and its relations with the West.

One of the organizers, Mindaugas Zickus, moved among the participants. "The security services are involved in the organization," he warned, "but in Lithuania, history and geographical proximity mean that we understand Russian methods from the inside, which is an advantage." Beside him, Khodorkovsky, who cast an amused glance at the buffet set up in an alleyway, admitted: "I'm always careful, even about what I eat or drink. I've learned to live with threats." According to him, Russian interference has declined – at least in its traditional form – thanks to sanctions and the expulsion of hundreds of agents in the West under diplomatic cover. In 2022 alone, Lithuania expelled five Russian diplomats, a considerable number for a country of 2.8 million residents. But this hasn't stopped the Kremlin's spies from continuing to crack down, notably by delegating certain operations to their allies in the Belarusian intelligence service, the KGB.

Since the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russia and Belarus have combined their efforts to track down opponents. Belarusian exiles are particularly targeted in Lithuania, where Russian speakers make up only 5% of the population. According to the Lithuanian intelligence service (VSD), interviewed by Le Monde, on October 17, 2020, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko himself ordered the KGB to "increase the efficiency of foreign intelligence," and find "other methods and forms of espionage."

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