How normal is it that the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Austria (1995-2000) and ex-Chancellor of this country (2000-2007) Wolfgang Schüssel suddenly becomes a member of the board of directors of the Russian telecommunications company MTS? And later – in 2019 – he becomes a member of the supervisory board of Lukoil, which is the second largest oil producer in Russia!
Of course, we can assume that the Russians invited V. Schüssel to join the boards of MTS and Lukoil, given his experience and competence. However, this is hard to believe, knowing, for example, the history with his German colleague – a great friend of Russia – Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Gerhard Schroeder, who was a member of the board of directors of the Gazprom concern, chairman of the board of directors of the Rosneft oil and gas company and chairman of the shareholders’ committee of the Nord Stream company. It is worth noting that V. Schüssel, who represented the Christian-democratic Austrian People’s Party, in 2000 formed his government together with the Austrian Freedom Party led by Jörg Haider, which is known for its right-wing radical, anti-Semitic and pro-Russian sentiments. In turn, in 2005, V. Schüssel formed a government with J. Haider’s next political formation – the right-wing populist, national-conservative Alliance for the Future of Austria. Given the fact that Russian special services have been cooperating very closely with all the far-right movements, parties and public organizations in Europe for 30 years in a row, it is reasonable to assume that the extremely close relations of Austrian Chancellor V. Schüssel with the Russians began back in 2000. It is difficult to imagine that the former Austrian Chancellor did not realize how much his positions in the top management of big Russian business discredited him. However, the salaries and bonuses he received obviously outweighed the fact that his work for big Russian business (which, as V. Putin’s rule became completely controlled by the Kremlin) cast a shadow on both himself and the entire Austrian political scene. V. Schüssel was forced (apparently with great regret for himself) to leave the boards of MTS and Lukoil only in connection with the invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine and the consolidated reaction to this sad event by the governments of EU member states. And even in these circumstances, V. Schüssel did not leave his top Russian positions on February 24, 2022. He waited until March 2022 when criticism of him from European anti-corruption activists significantly intensified.
In any case, V. Schüssel’s colleague at the Austrian Foreign Ministry, Karin Kneissl (head of the Foreign Ministry in 2017-2019 from the Freedom Party of Austria), held out as a member of the Rosneft supervisory board until May 2022. Moreover, K. Kneissl left her position at the Russian oil and gas company only after Rosneft fell under EU sanctions. On the other hand, such behavior was quite expected after, when she got married in 2018, she happily danced a waltz with V. Putin (whom she personally invited to her wedding) in front of the cameras of many European media. By that time, more than four years had passed since Russia occupied Crimea and launched a hybrid war against Ukraine in Donbas. Eventually, in 2023, K. Kneissl openly moved to live in Russia, headed the analytical center at St. Petersburg University, and began openly rebroadcasting all the main narratives of Russian propaganda.
At the moment, we can only guess what services Austrian politicians V. Schüssel and K. Kneissl provided to their friend Vladimir during the period when they held high state positions and had access to secret information.
Unfortunately, some Austrian civil servants prefer to continue to waltz with the Russians and share with them the most secret state secrets of Austria and the EU. Thus, on 08/29/2025, the Vienna prosecutor’s office announced that it had opened a criminal case against a former employee of the Austrian secret service, Egisto Ott, and an unnamed police officer, accusing them of corruption, abuse of office, violation of state secrets, and espionage in favor of Russia and to the detriment of Austria.
Egisto Ott previously worked for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Fight against Terrorism (BVT), which was once Austria’s main counterintelligence agency. According to the Vienna Public Prosecutor’s Office, E. Ott collected secret information and a large amount of personal data from internal (closed) databases of the Austrian police during 2017-2021. He passed this information on to Austrian citizen Jan Marsalek and representatives of Russian intelligence, receiving financial compensation for it. E. Ott is suspected of having handed over the mobile phones of three employees of the office of former Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka to a representative of the Russian secret service. In addition, on the orders of J. Marsalek, E. Ott provided an unknown person with a SINA-S laptop, which contained special equipment used by EU governments for secure communication. As the Vienna Public Prosecutor’s Office established, this laptop was then handed over to Russian intelligence. For this deal, E. Ott received €20,000.
As for J. Marsalek, he is the former COO of the German payment company Wirecard, which in 2020 suffered a financial collapse, owing creditors $4 billion. J. Marsalek fled on a private jet to Minsk (Belarus) just a few hours after he was fired from Wirecard. To date, a lot of data has already been accumulated in Austria indicating that he carried out espionage activities for the benefit of the Russian Federation. Moreover, in 2025, a London court established that J. Marsalek remotely controlled a network of six Bulgarian spies in the UK who worked for Russia. As British investigators suggest, J. Marsalek was recruited by Russian intelligence services while he was still working as a manager at the German company Wirecard.
At the request of Germany, Interpol in 2020 put J. Marsalek on the wanted list (this was a request to law enforcement agencies around the world to determine his location, arrest and extradition). According to various sources, since 2020 and to this day J. Marsalek has been living in a mansion near Moscow under the close supervision of one of the Russian special services. At the same time, it cannot currently be claimed that Austrian law enforcement agencies have exposed and neutralized all Russian spies in the country. For example, the Austrian police learned that Bulgarian citizen Tsvetanka Doncheva, who lives in Vienna, was assigned by J. Marsalek to monitor high-ranking officials and well-known journalists. Among those assigned to monitor Ts. Doncheva were Omar Hayavi-Pirkner, the head of Austria’s State Security and Intelligence Service (DSN), Anna Thalhammer, an Austrian journalist who wrote about Russian espionage and editor of the magazine Profil, and Hristo Grozev, a Bulgarian investigator for Bellingcat.
In 2024, police arrested Ts. Doncheva. Court documents indicated that she was seriously suspected of committing a crime in the form of secret intelligence activities detrimental to Austria. The documents also indicated that the intelligence cell to which Ts. Doncheva belonged was led by J. Marsalek, who did so from Moscow and on behalf of Russian intelligence. Despite this, the Austrian prosecutors’ request for Ts. Doncheva’s pre-trial detention was rejected and she was released. The Austrian court decided that the risk of her committing a crime again is not too high, taking into account the imprisonment of her accomplices in the UK.
The victim A. Thalhammer, commenting on this situation, advised Austrian law enforcement agencies not to believe everything that the spy tells them! According to A. Thalhammer, Austrian intelligence services suspect that there are other Russian spy cells in the country, whose active activities continue even now. However, unfortunately, so far they feel quite comfortable on the territory of Austria!