When in 2017 – a few months before the illegal Catalan self-determination referendum – Russian state media began to echo the independence movement and publish such distorted information as “the ethnic cleansing of the Spanish state in Catalonia” or the alleged “NATO bombings in Spain”, the journalist and ABC correspondent David Alandete began to pull a thread that culminated in the publication of his latest book, “The Russian Plot”. A research project developed over seven years and which begins with this sentence: “At five o’clock, Putin’s emissary arrives”.
A plot that has transcended the anecdotal and has already been tried in court and promoted by the journalist and author of this book, David Alandete. This Tuesday, on Jorge Juan Street, in Madrid, the former director of the newspaper El País, Antonio Caño, and the author met to discuss and present this research work, now a 336-page copy edited and published by the publishing house La Esfera de los Libros.
Alandete recounts with absolute clarity those months of 2017 in which he remembers the first warning signs that led him to believe that the Kremlin was interested in the independence movement flourishing in Catalonia. It was a tweet, he says, from a well-known analyst that caught his attention, which said: “Beware, Spain, a bear is prowling your forests.” A source in the United States confirmed that before October 1, a distorted narrative about what was happening in Catalonia was being created on social media and in pro-Russian media.
In this conversation between two former colleagues of the editorial staff, Alandete and Caño reflected on the difficulties of giving the “green light” to a subject that seemed so difficult to believe. Caño explained this because of that “Spanish complex” that makes people think that Spain “has no role in Europe”. But the 336 pages resulting from Alandete’s investigation put it in black and white and “there is not a single statement without foundation”, says Caño.
“There is not a single statement in the book that is without foundation.”
The Russian plot of the “process” is the clearest example of the destabilizing intention of Russia, “a state with its own mafia” – as Alandete indicates – on Western democracies. Throughout this investigation, the journalist reveals the string of promises, sometimes laughable, that Vladimir Putin’s regime has made Catalan secessionism.
Following his investigation, Alandete recounts Russian interference in the “process”, as one of the many meetings that took place between pro-independence leaders and members of the Russian mafia. Like Nikolai Sadovnikov who, in the official residence of the President of the Generalitat, offered 10,000 soldiers to Carles Puigdemont to carry out his coup d’état.
“ABC bet on and supported my investigations into ‘The Russian Plot'”
By 2017, Putin’s interest in destabilizing Spain and the EU was such that Barcelona had become a nest of Russian spies and oligarchs who came to promise Puigdemont the completion of the work on the Sagrada Familia, an economic injection of 500 million euros, an army and a republic with its own currency, cryptocurrencies. Alandete also recounts the numerous visits to Moscow of one of Puigdemont’s most loyal men, the the neoconvergent Victor Terradellas, who served as a sort of foreign minister of the non-existent Catalan republic.
Objective: Dismember Europe
The Kremlin was so determined to support Catalan secessionism that it even called a “summit” for the independence of different territories, which would be attended by representatives of the Catalan independence movement, in Russia, a country where independence is punishable by law, as Alandete recounts in his book. “Russia made a calculation,” Alandete says, “if Spain fell, then Scotland would disappear, then Italy…” The goal, “the collapse of the democratic system”, to dismember Europe.
There have been so many contacts and cases where the independence movement has considered embracing Putin for this purpose, that the latest thing that has emerged about the “Russian plot” is that the judge in charge of the investigation “has cost a lot personally,” says Alandete, Judge Joaquín Aguirre has asked the Supreme Court to open an investigation into Puigdemont and his main collaborators – his chief of staff, Josep Alay, or his lawyer, Gonzalo Boye – for high treason.
This book appears at a key moment and arrives in bookstores as a preview of a summer full of current Catalan politics. Finally, Alandete highlights his gratitude to ABC for allowing him to continue an investigation that was denied in other media and was not continued. “ABC supported and supported my investigations into ‘The Russian Plot'”, says the journalist, who expressed his gratitude to the newspaper for allowing him to continue investigating Russian interference in the 2017 secessionist process.
