A Latvian member of the European Parliament helped arrange travel visas for Russian spies to visit Europe in her role as a double-agent for Moscow, according to a report.
Freshly-leaked emails appear to reveal correspondence between Tatjana Zdanoka, 73, a member of the former Soviet Communist Party for two decades, and two veteran handlers from Russia’s FSB security service which date back to 2005.
She discussed funding from Russian sources to carry out her political duties in Brussels, and offered detailed explanations of her work as an MEP, in the messages published by the Insider, a Russian independent news outlet.
The report comes amid escalating fears the Kremlin is mounting a disinformation campaign aimed at causing unrest amongst ethnic Russian populations in the Baltic states.
Ms Zdanoka, who represents Latvia’s Russian Union party, has long-standing links with the Kremlin, first as a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between 1971 and 1991.
The 74-year-old was condemned by Latvia’s foreign ministry in 2014 after travelling to Crimea as an independent observer in the referendum used by Vladimir Putin to illegally annex the peninsula from Ukraine.
She later travelled as part of a delegation of MEPs to Damascus, Syria to meet dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose regime was being militarily propped up by Russia at the time, a trip derided as “unacceptable” by the EU Parliament.
Zdanoka in direct contact with FSB
More recently, she voted against a European Parliamentary resolution demonstrating support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia, claiming the statement was: “An escalation of the military confrontation.”
And in a statement to the parliamentary chamber in Strasbourg, less than a week before the invasion, Ms Zdanoka said: “Russia’s military threat against Ukraine. It is not proved.”
The leaked messages appeared to show that Ms Zdanoka was in direct contact with Dimitry Gladey, 74, an employee of the FSB’s office in St Petersburg, Russia.
In the first exchange, the Latvian MEP forwarded an unpublished agenda for a conference event in Estonia to discuss “the experience of Russian politicians’ participation in municipal governments”.
She also sent apologies to the FSB handler for not sending “the promised information” from Strasbourg, the home of the EU Parliament’s second seat, while listing her recently completed tasks.
They also teamed up over a plan to promote Russia’s patriotic Victory Day in her native Latvia.
She had requested $6,000 in funding, in addition to money she had secured from the EU, to organise the event in her capacity as an MEP.
The cash would have been used to buy St George ribbons to commemorate Soviet soldiers who died on the Eastern front during the Second World War.
Zdanoka denies being spy
While Ms Zdanoka has denied being a Russian double agent, she did confirm knowing Gladey for decades, saying they met “in the early 1970s at a tourist base in the North Caucasus, where they were learning to ski”.
It is claimed she was later assigned over to a new handler in 2013 named as Sergey Krasin, by the Insider.
She allegedly worked alongside a third FSB agent called Artem Kurseeve, for whom she used her powers as an MEP to obtain a visa to visit the European Parliament two weeks after Russia invaded Crimea.
Ms Zdanoka did not respond to a request for comment from The Telegraph.
A European Parliament spokesman said an internal investigation had been launched into the Latvian MEP.
On top of her parliamentary duties, Ms Zdanoka is the president of the EU Russian Speakers’ Alliance, an NGO that doesn’t feature on the bloc’s lobbyist transparency list.