In June 2024, Austria withdrew the accreditation of two TASS (the Russian state news agency) correspondents — Ivan Popov and Arina Davidian — suspecting them of being spies for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Agency, the SVR, The Insider, a Russian publication specializing in investigative journalism and exposing fake news. said it had learned that the suspicion was not unfounded.
Austrian authorities said they were willing to grant journalistic credentials to other TASS employees, but only after due diligence.
For more than a year, TASS’s press office in Vienna remained empty. At the end of August, the new correspondents, Olga Kukla and Maksim Cerevik, arrived to take up their posts, according to an investigation by The Insider, a Russian investigative outlet.
However, before being sent to Austria, the ‘Tass reporters’ ordered food from an apartment in a building owned by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service in Yasenevo (Eds: south Moscow were the SVR has its headquarters). Records of phone bills show that they were in direct contact with a teacher from the SVR Academy, whose job is to advise undercover agents for espionage missions in German-speaking countries.
Dubious apartment
At first glance, neither Olga Kukla nor Maksim Cerevik would arouse suspicion — in their resumes there is nothing that indicates a connection with the security services. However, even a cursory check would raise some questions: for example, why did Olga Kukla, who had never had any connection with journalism, suddenly decide to become a TASS correspondent in Vienna. She was born in Tyumen, central Russia, graduated from MGIMO specializing in energy economics, as a student she did internships at the gas companies “Novatek”, OOO “Gazprom geologorazvedka” and at the Research Institute “Transneft”, continued her master’s studies at the University of Leipzig, after which she got a job at “Novatek”. There is no trace of any journalistic activity by Kukla, neither at TASS nor elsewhere.
At the same time, Maksim Cerevik also arrived in Vienna, and made an unusual career switch, from the oil industry to journalism. Born in Novosibirsk, his father was a nuclear engineer, and mother, Elena, a businesswoman. In school, Maksim was a top student, participated in artistic activities and did karate. After graduation, he entered MGIMO, at the Department of International Economic Relations, where he studied German and art. After graduating, he did an internship at “Rosneft” (public oil and gas company), and then, unexpectedly, he became a TASS correspondent in Beijing. He sent only four news stories from China before being recalled to Moscow, but managed to stand out in an interview in which he stated: “Some of the media is constantly fabricating information about so-called human rights issues in China, but during my visit I became convinced that this is not true.
Both correspondents declined to respond to The Insider’s request to comment on allegations.
In 2024, before the World Youth Festival in Moscow, Cerevik and the head of the TASS press office in the Balkans, Stanislav Varivoda, coordinated a propaganda project called “New Superheroes”, in which guests from Africa, Europe, the USA and Vladimir Taranenko, Putin’s representative in the elections in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, described how they see the future. In addition, Cerevik composed music, and one of his pieces, entitled “Persona non grata”, risks becoming prophetic in the very near future.
Like other alleged spies, Kukla and Cerevik revealed their true identities because of their passion for pizza. According to the food order database, Olga Kukla and Maksim Cerevik ordered pizza and drinks nine times from an apartment in a block of flats on Tarusskaya Street. The building (unit 28178), built in 2012, houses the SVR headquarters, and it’s where 220 families of foreign intelligence officers live. Among them are soldiers from the secretive special-purpose unit within the Russian external security, “Zaslon”, formally “affiliated” to the Russian Foreign Ministry as well as “undercover journalists” working for state media. Unit 28178 participates in billion-dollar purchases for the needs of the foreign intelligence service and is the founder of the SVR sanatorium “Porecie” near Mojaisk. The apartment on the 14th floor, where the orders were delivered, is a safe house (in the jargon of the services — an “owl”). “It is a four-room apartment, transformed into a small classroom. It is under the operative administration of the SVR. There are computers, textbooks, a kitchen and a rest room with a sofa. In the ‘owl’ there is training for adaptation and training in foreign languages of agents or officers who later work undercover in embassies and so on,” a source in the special services told The Insider.
In addition to the pizza orders delivered on Tarusskaya Street, orders were also placed from Cerevik’s phone number on Yasnogorskaya Street. However, the one who called the Delivery Club and IKEA called himself Nikolai. In this apartment building, SVR has allocated service apartments. In 2011, the residents of the Iasenevo neighborhood protested against the construction of this building, organized pickets, sent petitions to the SVR and the city hall, and even set fire to a drilling machine, but without success.
According to the course of the telephone conversations, before the trip to Austria, the composer was in direct contact with Svetlana Strelkovskaya. She previously worked as a spy under the “cover” of Aeroflot in Germany, then moved on to a teaching career in the SVR Academy (military unit 27147). In the academy she is considered a legend for teaching several generations of illegal agents. “No one knows Germany, Austria and Switzerland better than Svetlana Petrovna, with their customs, folklore and culture,” said the same secret service source. The transcript of Strelkovskaya’s phone calls, consulted by the editorial office, also confirmed that she frequently communicated with officers from the SVR’s illegal espionage directorate (military unit 33949), whose traces were then quickly lost.
According to the frequency of publications, Cerevik should publish news from Austria every 8–12 days. On September 3, he sent TASS his first dispatch about the visit of the employees of the Russian House in Vienna to the cemetery in Aspern, where 130 Soviet citizens are buried. On September 15, under his signature, TASS published a news report about the meeting in Vienna between IAEA chief Rafael Grossi and the director of “Rosatom” Alexei Lihacev, and on September 27, he reported on a lecture given at the Russian House by the graduate of the Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics Alexei Konopatchenko, deputy chairman of the International Committee of Prisoners of the “Mauthausen” concentration camp.
TASS, as a subsidiary of the KGB-SVR
Austria has been one of the key operational directions of the KGB PGU since Soviet times, as it is home to dozens of headquarters of the largest international organizations, such as the IAEA, OPEC, OSCE, among others. The “undercover” TASS reporters not only carried out espionage activities, but also participated in active special operations of the KGB, feeding the European media with disinformation. For example, the KGB residence in Vienna was long run by General Vyacheslav Kevorkov, who was spying under the “cover” of a special TASS correspondent. At the same time, he supervised the “Komsomolskaya Pravda” office, opened in 1976 at Lubjanka’s request. The general was the prototype of KGB resident Vitalii Slavin in the series “TASS is authorized to declare”. After the collapse of the USSR, Kevorkov was not recalled to Moscow, but continued to spy in the Alpine republic, and later moved to Germany, where he lived until his death in 2017.
Currently, almost nothing has changed. TASS not only deals with espionage, but is also one of the Kremlin’s main propaganda mouthpieces. The agency frequently distributes disinformation created by the head of the SVR’s press office, Sergei Guskov, who began his career in the KGB’s political espionage department.
For example, in July this year, TASS published, citing SVR, the news that representatives of the US and Great Britain had held a secret meeting in an Alpine resort, discussing the replacement of Ukraine’s President Zelensky. In August, citing SVR, TASS published a “news item” according to which German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was obsessed with the idea of revenge for the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Soviet Union: “His thirst for revenge has grown since childhood.”
“TASS employs employees who were employed there during the time of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Leonid Brezhnev. Then they praised the ‘wise’ policies of Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev, and in Yeltsin’s time they even painted themselves as democrats. President Putin almost every year decorates TASS employees with orders and medals. Last year, 34 people were honored. It was curious to observe how some of the decorated journalists were tensing up militarily,” said somebody who attended the ceremony.
The person in charge of Ivanov and Davidian, the TASS journalists expelled last year, was reportedly the first secretary of the Russian embassy in Austria, Andrei Prosvyrnikov, who has been spying in Vienna since 2016. Previously, he served in military unit 54939, disbanded in 2015. This unit was in charge of distributing disinformation and monitoring social media and its office was in Moscow, in the so-called “SVR Residents’ House” on Gonciarnaia Street, which The Insider has already reported. After the expulsion of the journalists, Prosvyrnikov’s name disappeared from the list of diplomats at the Russian embassy.
On August 18, Putin recalled the Russian ambassador to Vienna, Dmitry Liubinsky, to Moscow, and he was appointed deputy foreign minister. Two weeks ago, another resounding espionage scandal broke out in Austria: local counterintelligence detained a high-ranking employee of OMV, energy company, whose identity has not been revealed. The secret services had been monitoring him for several months and noticed that he frequently met with a diplomat from the Russian embassy. Numerous confidential documents from OMV were found during searches at his home. Austrian authorities are asking Russia to lift the diplomat’s immunity — according to the Vienna Convention, he will automatically be declared persona non grata, shorthand for spying.
The safe house did not remain empty
The safe house Tarusskaya Street, from where Kukla and Cerevik were placing their pizza orders, did not remain vacant after their departure. Now a certain Alexei Iașin lives there, who previously indicated as his address the residential complex “White Nights” (located near the SVR headquarters). From the age of 17 he participated in the annual ski marathon in Kirjaci, dedicated to the memory of the deceased employees of the CSN FSB; In the army he was an eminent student in combat training and commanded a unit.
Currently, Iașin serves in the special detachment “Zaslon” of the SVR, which, during visits to high risk countries, provides protection to high-ranking officials, generals, top managers of large state-owned companies, etc. For example, in September 2020, he accompanied a large group of employees of “Gazpromneft” and “Novatek” to Baghdad, and in August 2022 he protected a secret cargo in Damascus. On board the “Syrian Airlines” were five more members of the “Zaslon” and a senior officer from the illegal espionage directorate of the SVR.
The Insider was founded in 2013 and its editorial office is based in Latvia. In 2022, the Russian government declared it an “undesirable” organization in Russia, leading to its website being blocked in the country.
Among its most notable successes, The Insider identified the FSB officers responsible for poisoning the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza, writer Dmitry Bykov, and Nikita Isaev, a politician, and others.
Romania, it seems, has gained the courage to confront Russian disinformation
