A joint operation between several central European countries has identified an alleged Belarusian spy ring that reportedly included a former deputy head of Moldovan intelligence.
A statement from Eurojust, the European Union’s criminal justice coordination body, said it had worked with Romanian, Czech and Hungarian authorities to “capture an individual investigated for the crime of treason by way of transmitting state secrets”. The Czech Republic expelled a Belarusian diplomat over the affair, as did Moldova.
Eurojust did not identify the main suspect but the Hungarian news outlet Telex named him as Alexandru Balan, a former deputy head of the Moldovan intelligence service and for a time its liaison in Kyiv. A Moldovan official confirmed that Balan was the arrested man.
Eurojust alleged the suspect had two meetings in Budapest in 2024 and 2025 with officers from the KGB, the Belarusian intelligence service, where he received money and instructions. “The meetings endangered Romania’s national security,” said the body.
Moldova, which is led by a pro-EU president, Maia Sandu, has been at the centre of a battle between Russia and the west for influence. In a referendum last year, the country voted by a narrow margin in favour of future EU membership, and western intelligence agencies say the country remains a top priority for Moscow. Parliamentary elections are due there later this month.
It was not immediately clear what kind of information Balan could have provided to the Belarusians. Since leaving Moldova’s SIS service, he has been an active participant on the circuit of security conferences in various European countries.
A European intelligence source said the Belarusian KGB was “mainly focused on the Belarusian diaspora in Europe”, where many opposition political forces are based, but added that it worked increasingly closely with Russian intelligence, and could have been helping the Russians carry out operations in Europe.
In most other post-Soviet countries, including Russia, foreign intelligence has been split off into separate agencies. However, the Belarusian KGB still functions both as a domestic tool of repression and a foreign intelligence agency, just like its Soviet predecessor.
A former senior intelligence official from an EU country said that before 2020, the KGB had engaged in friendly outreach to European services, as Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president, looked for a balancing act against Russian domination in Belarus.
However, after Lukashenko crushed a broad protest movement in summer 2020, Moscow asserted its influence in Belarus more aggressively. Lukashenko removed the overall head of the KGB and the director of its foreign intelligence arm, replacing them with figures more amenable to Moscow.
Since then, Belarus has moved closer to becoming a Russian vassal, with Lukashenko forced to accept Russian troops using the country as a launchpad for the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. A major joint military exercise with Russia is due to start in Belarus on Friday. At the same time, however, Minsk has also attempted a new diplomatic outreach to the US, and Lukashenko has touted himself as a possible intermediary between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Michal Koudelka, the head of the BIS security service in Prague, said the open borders inside Europe’s Schengen zone made it harder for counterintelligence agencies to stop the intelligence work of Russian and Belarusian spies. “To successfully counter these hostile activities in Europe, we need to restrict the movement of accredited diplomats from Russia and Belarus within the Schengen area,” he said in a statement.
iSANS, a Warsaw-based thinktank, named the diplomat expelled from the Czech Republic as Mikalai Dukshta, and said he was a staff employee of the KGB, working under the cover identity as a counsellor for administrative affairs at the Belarusian embassy in Prague. A source in the Czech security establishment confirmed that Dukshta was the expelled diplomat.
