Puigdemont’s right-hand man traveled to Moscow three times in 2019 and 2020 to meet with senior Kremlin officials to garner support for secession.
The Catalan independence movement not only asked the Kremlin for help before the secessionist attempt that led to the referendum on October 1, 2017. Far from throwing in the towel after the referendum, separatism increased its contacts with those closest to Vladimir Putin once it verified that the autumn 2017 order to break with Spain had failed.
Those attempts by the Government of Quim Torra and the closest circle of Carles Puigdemont to involve Russia in order to achieve independence were especially intense during 2019, when the independence movement once again looked to the Kremlin in the hope that the mobilizations in Catalonia during the trial of the ‘procés’, and especially the protests after the Supreme Court ruling in October of that year, could give a new push to independence. The trips and contacts of Torra and Puigdemont’s emissaries to Moscow continued until February 2020, when the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic made personal meetings impossible.
‘The New York Times’ had already revealed in its day that the Kremlin during the procés had not only dedicated itself to disinformation, sending spies to Catalonia or promising to send alleged mercenaries. The prestigious American newspaper revealed that after 1-O a key figure had emerged in the new offensive to gain Putin’s support. It was the historian Josep Lluís Alay Rodríguez, current head of the office that Puigdemont has as former president of the Generalitat and former coordinator of International Policies of the Presidency of the Government of Quim Torra. As published on Monday by ‘El Confidencial’ and ‘El Periódico’ and confirmed by various State security sources, Alay traveled three times between 2019 and 2020 to Moscow to meet with senior Kremlin officials and with the Russian espionage environment , using academic trips as a cover.
Alay, who was one of the three people who accompanied Puigdemont when he was arrested in Germany, was already arrested in 2020 in the framework of the Civil Guard’s Operation Voloh on the alleged diversion of public funds to pro-independence platforms, including some like Democratic Tsunami, which promoted the serious riots during the fall of 2019.
This trusted man of Puigdemont flew to Moscow in March 2019, a few days after the start of the procés trial in the Supreme Court, supposedly to participate in a cycle of conferences held at the Russian State Academic University of Humanities. However, on that first trip he managed to meet with one of the people closest to Putin, Sergei Sumin, a colonel in the Federal Protection Service (FSO) and a member of the Russian president’s security team. Alay made this first trip – service and intelligence sources confirmed – with the Russian businessman Alexander Dmitrenko, then the Russian head of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce and who was denied Spanish nationality in 2018 due to a CNI report that revealed his links to the Kremlin’s intelligence services.
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Four days after the end of the trial in the Supreme Court, on June 16, 2019, Alay and Dmitrenko returned to Moscow accompanied by Roc Fernández i Badiella, then responsible for Digital Content of the Generalitat. According to state security sources, Alay was seen on that occasion with the famous Russian ex-spy Andrei Bezrukov, a former SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) officer, a veteran undercover agent in the United States and whom many consider the current ‘entry contact’ to Russian espionage. On that same trip, Puigdemont’s man managed to reach former deputy Eugeni Primakov, very close to Putin, who a year later would appoint him director of the Federal Agency for Compatriots Abroad and International Humanitarian Cooperation. Primakov, as requested by Alay, opened the doors of the main media outlets controlled by the Kremlin to the escaped ex-president, in particular Russia 24, Russa Today and Sputnik, now banned in the EU.
In the midst of the protests after the sentence of the procés, in October 2019, Sumin and another person of absolute confidence of the Russian president, Artyom Lukoyanov, arrived in Barcelona. This character, according to ”The New York Times”, is the adoptive son of a senior adviser to Putin and has been “deeply involved” in “Russian efforts to support separatists in eastern Ukraine.”
Alay’s third trip to Moscow in February 2020, just days before the coronavirus pandemic led to international border closures. Puigdemont’s collaborator met Primakov again, at the same time that the Moscow-controlled media intensified their media campaign about the alleged repression of the independentistas.
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