Estonian security expert Erkki Koort said that authorities should have been completely sure before arresting Oleg Bessedin, who was detained for spreading Kremlin propaganda, writes ERR News.
Bessedin was detained on the 4th of November, however, it is known that his activities related to Russia began as early as 2002, and he has long been in the spotlight of security services – as early as 2011, the Estonian Internal Security Service (KAPO) mentioned the man’s activities in its annual report.
In an interview with the program Terevisioon, Koort said that it is very difficult for security services to arrest a person if the amount of evidence is small. The expert pointed out that if Bessedin were arrested without serious evidence, the damage could be much greater, and the KAPO and the prosecutor’s office acted correctly. Koort noted that the authorities knew about Bessedin’s views, and the activities for which he is now arrested have been accumulating since 2002. There are two important points. First, publicly available information does not allow to judge when exactly Bessedin began cooperating with Russian intelligence services, because supporting Moscow’s point of view does not always mean that a person is cooperating with the services of a hostile state. Second, documentation is challenging and takes a lot of time.
Koort said that, given his own experience working at KAPO, he knows that it is possible to spend three years working on a case, only to conclude in the third year whether it is admissible or leads to a dead end. “A lot of this type of seemingly pointless, from a Ministry of Finance perspective, work, is done because at the start of a process where you don’t actually know
whether you’ll be able to prove if the person has started cooperating, or just holds certain views,”
the expert said.
In the Bessedin case, the KAPO and the prosecutor’s office have indicated that by the time the man was detained, it was clear that he was cooperating with Russia, which means that he was also receiving instructions on what to do or not to do. In Bessedin’s case, it was assuming the role of a journalist. Koort added that Bessedin is a person who used journalism as a cover, and he would not even say that the man was really a journalist. The Russian Foreign Ministry has already accused Estonia of suppressing independent journalism, but in reality Moscow is simply skillfully using journalists or volunteer lawyers, or other individuals, to achieve its goals.
The KAPO detained Bessedin on suspicion of violating European Union sanctions and activities that are considered a crime against the state. Currently, the Harju Regional Court has decided that Bessedin will be in custody for the next two months.
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