It's hard not to spot the flashy white house clinging to the hillside in Nacka, a residential suburb of Stockholm. On the first floor, several windows have been covered with plastic, the scars of an event from which the local inhabitants are still struggling to recover. At dawn on November 22, 2022, against a backdrop of snow, two helicopters and police units burst in, smashing doors and windows. Lars, a 48-year-old neighbor, remembered seeing the inscription "FBI" on the backs of some of the agents present alongside the Swedish police.

That morning, Sergei Skvortsov and Elena Koulkova, aged 59 and 58, and their son, were still asleep. Since then, the couple have been accused of "illegal acquisition of technologies for the benefit of the Russian military industry." Skvortsov was in contact with "the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU," said the prosecutor in charge of national security cases, Henrik Olin.

Six months had passed by the time Le Monde arrived on May 23, the snow had disappeared. Ringing the bell twice was all it took for Koulkova to come and open the door. Unlike her husband, she had been released, but was still being prosecuted for complicity. She was clearly not quite the personality she used to be, always ready to flaunt her comfortable life on social media. Pale, dressed in jeans and a white blouse, she wore a wool cardigan on a hot day. Her round glasses dressed a thin, worried but combative face.

As in 'The Americans'

Defensive, her voice betrayed no weakness. Her tone was dry, her words clear. "I have my passport, I can travel. It's a good thing I'm not who you think I am." The exchange was brief but polite. She eventually entered this middle-class home spread over two floors that they had built, in 2015, for 11 million Swedish krona (nearly €1 million).

At the end of 2022, Sweden was stunned to discover its first "Illegals." These are Russian agents who infiltrate foreign countries on a long-term basis, under a false identity or false status, as in the hit TV series The Americans. Now dual nationals – in 2010 for Koulkova, in 2012 for Skvortsov – they both hail from the Perm region in the Urals. They studied engineering in Moscow, and moved to Sweden in the late 1990s. The courts suspect that their companies, which import and export electronic components and advanced technologies, are Swedish links in an industrial espionage network run by the GRU.

"The February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine has not reduced Russian interference in our country," Daniel Stenling, head of Swedish counter-espionage (Säpo) told Le Monde, "because our high-performance, cutting-edge industries are of interest to the Kremlin. The sanctions regime is hurting them, they've lost a lot of equipment in the field and need to replenish their stock of military equipment." In Sweden, unlike Estonia or Latvia on the other side of the Baltic Sea, there is no Russian-speaking community on which Moscow could rely for its interference operations. Here, espionage is practiced the old-fashioned way.

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