Russia has been accused of sending secret agents to defecate in the lavatories of Finnish MPs in a bizarre escalation of its hybrid warfare against the West.
Last week it emerged that some 20 Finnish MPs had reported mysterious break-ins at their homes, with one politician finding faeces left behind in his lavatory.
Ben Zyskowicz, a senior MP for the ruling centre-Right National Coalition Party, believes the behaviour is part of a Russian plot to intimidate Finnish legislators.
“It’s a way for the Russian intelligence service to show that people are being monitored, a way to create confusion or concerns,” Mr Zyskowicz said.
The Russian practice of breaking into the homes of MPs and diplomats has long been a tactic of its intelligence services.
In a method the US state department described as “home intrusions”, agents would move personal items, open windows and set alarms to demoralise and intimidate their targets.
Russian spies, and agents from other countries with feared intelligence services, have also been known to urinate in the toilets of diplomats and journalists to show they are capable of entering their homes.
In perhaps the most notorious example, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2023 that a Russian federal security service (FSB) agent defecated in the suitcase of a senior US official while he was visiting Russia.
Sarah Rainsford, the BBC’s former Russia correspondent, recalled in her memoir Goodbye to Russia that spies entered her flat and left “a large unflushed deposit in each toilet” as a calling card.
Luke Harding, a Guardian reporter, also claimed FSB officers would often break into his Moscow apartment, including once when agents left behind a sex manual, shortly before he was expelled from Russia in 2011.
US officials in 2014 reported that Soviet-era counterintelligence tactics were again being used against their diplomats, including tyre-slashing and multiple mysterious break-ins.
In some incidents, windows would be left open or personal belongings moved.
‘Operational psychology’
Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, complained at the time of being followed almost everywhere and having his inbox hacked and phones tapped.
The strategy dates back to the Cold War of the 1960s when the KGB developed “operational psychology”, Mr Harding reported in his book Mafia State.
The Soviets were inspired by German Stasi agents, who would target the homes of dissidents to try to make them think they were going mad.
Officers would remove pictures from walls or swap one type of tea for another, leaving their targets largely unaware that the Stasi was behind the disturbances. In one particularly alarming incident, a vibrator was sent to a target’s wife.
Some victims suffered breakdowns or ended up killing themselves as a result.
Jürgen Fuchs, a writer who was targeted by the Stasi, described the “Zersetzung” technique as “an assault on the human soul”.
He was convinced before his death in 1999 that he had been deliberately exposed to radiation by the secret police, causing his terminal cancer, after three dissidents died within a short period from similar rare forms of leukaemia.
