Finger Pointed at Russians in Alleged Coup Plot in Montenegro

PODGORICA, Montenegro — After multiple but unproven accusations that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is working hard to destabilize America’s friends in Europe, a pro-Russian mercenary detained in Montenegro is slowly spilling his guts — and providing the first insider’s account of what the authorities in this tiny Balkan nation say were Russian efforts to sow mayhem.

The man, Aleksandar Sindjelic, a veteran anti-Western activist from neighboring Serbia, has become a key informant — and a suspect — in a sprawling investigation into an alleged plot orchestrated by two Russians to seize Montenegro’s Parliament building last month, kill the prime minister and install a new government hostile to NATO.

Mr. Sindjelic’s account of the events includes a visit to Moscow in September to plan the operation and details of the encrypted phones he was asked to use to avoid eavesdropping. He has not directly implicated any Russian officials but has raised questions about the links between state agencies and a murky network of Russian nationalists active in the Balkans and in eastern Ukraine.

The Montenegrin authorities say two Russians carrying passports in the names of Eduard V. Shirikov and Vladimir N. Popov commanded the botched plot. But both men, who oversaw preparations for the operation from Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, are back in Moscow, and it is unclear whether they were traveling under real or fake identities and for whom exactly they were working.


The Montenegrin news media has reported that they are agents of Russia’s military intelligence service, known as the G.R.U. People close to the investigation said that they were Russian intelligence officers but that their precise affiliation was unclear.

The prosecutor’s office, in a statement this month, said the Russian pair had orchestrated plans in Montenegro, Serbia and Russia to carry out an “undetermined number of criminal acts of terrorism and the murder of highest-ranking representatives of Montenegro.”

In public, Montenegrin officials have avoided accusing the Russian state directly of directing the actions of Mr. Popov and Mr. Shirikov.

“Obviously, there are people with more power who are behind them,” Montenegro’s minister of justice, Zoran Pazin, said this month in an interview in Podgorica, the capital. “Is it the Russian state or Russian nationalist groups? We don’t know yet.”

After the early-1990s breakup of Yugoslavia, of which Serbia and Montenegro were parts, the Balkan region has been a zone of dark and often lethal intrigue.

To Moscow’s dismay, Serbia and Montenegro, both traditionally close to Russia, have increasingly tilted toward the West, applying to join the European Union and, in Montenegro’s case, even NATO.

With a few thousand soldiers, a handful of tanks and only 600,000 residents, Montenegro — whose application to join NATO was accepted in May and now awaits ratification — is hardly a military powerhouse. But it controls the only stretch of coastline where warships can dock between Gibraltar and eastern Turkey not already in the hands of the alliance.

“There is a big struggle going on,” said Ranko Krivokapic, an opposition leader who has lobbied for years for Montenegro to join NATO. “We are the last piece of the Mediterranean that is not already in NATO, the last piece in a big puzzle.”

Russia has campaigned furiously to keep Montenegro out of the alliance, supporting pro-Moscow political groups in the country and Orthodox priests who view NATO as a threat to Slavic fraternity and faith.

“NATO is an occupying force, and I am absolutely against it,” said Momcilo Krivokapic, an Orthodox priest and an estranged relative of the pro-NATO politician. His church in Kotor, an ancient fortress town, is just a few yards from Kotor Bay, a deepwater haven long coveted by both Russia and the West for its strategic location.

In early October, Father Krivokapic presided over a ceremony in Kotor for the foundation of the Balkan Cossack Army, a Russian-led grouping of Pan-Slavic nationalists bitterly hostile to NATO. The priest described the gathering as “just folklore,” featuring men in fur hats and imperial-era costumes.

Yet it was also attended by members of the Night Wolves, a Russian motorcycle gang whose leader is a friend of Mr. Putin’s, and mercenaries who have fought in eastern Ukraine on the side of Russian-backed separatists.

The anti-NATO clamor has succeeded in weakening already lukewarm public support for the alliance, which even some pro-Western voices view as a needless provocation of Russia and a ploy by Milo Djukanovic, Montenegro’s longtime and notoriously devious leader, to cement his power with help from the United States.

So when Mr. Djukanovic announced that his government was the target of a Russian-backed plot in October, opposition politicians — both pro- and anti-NATO — as well as much of the news media and many independent observers dismissed the claim as a fairy tale.

Mr. Djukanovic and his officials initially provided no evidence to support their allegation of a foiled coup attempt on Oct. 16, the day of national elections. They said only that 20 Serbs — some of whom turned out to be elderly and in ill health — had been detained just hours before they were to launch the alleged putsch. Nonetheless, Mr. Djukanovic insisted it “is more than obvious” that unnamed “Russian structures” were working with pro-Moscow politicians to derail the country’s efforts to join NATO.

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