A familiar business: Russia’s trade missions are replacing GRU spies with the friends and relatives of influential officials — The Insider
In August 2025, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, acting on a request from the Ministry of Industry and Trade, dismissed Russia’s trade representative in Austria, 67-year-old Andrei Plotnikov — purportedly due to “the expiration of his fixed-term service contract.”
Ever since the Soviet trade mission in Austria opened in 1921, the post of trade representative has always been reserved for a military intelligence officer. Outside the period of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Austria during WWII, Moscow’s representative in Vienna has always been a professional spy.
Trade representative Plotnikov worked in Austria for four years and gave interviews fairly often about trade turnover between the two countries. However, these conversations were merely cover. Plotnikov in fact held the rank of colonel and doubled as the deputy GRU station chief in Vienna, where he demonstrated solid operational results. Plotnikov’s espionage interests included local politicians and journalists, along with the heads of major firms. He also oversaw the Russian-Austrian Business Council, which stopped operating after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
“Andrei Nikolaevich [Plotnikov] was fired right after his birthday, and it was an undeserved insult. He’s a very well-known person, and they could easily have signed him to another three-year contract. Look at Alexander Bogatyr, who was in Cuba for nine years, and that was fine,” a source at the Ministry of Industry and Trade complained to The Insider.
At the GRU, Plotnikov was called “our legend,” and his superiors held him up as an example to other staff. When Plotnikov was still a young military intelligence officer, he was sent to West Berlin to serve as the Soviet warden at Spandau Prison. At the time, former close Hitler associate Rudolf Hess was still serving out his life sentence there. In 1987, Hess killed himself, and a version of the story still circulates among neo-Nazi groups that claim he was killed by British intelligence services. Plotnikov wrote a book, The Mystery of Rudolf Hess’s Death: A Warden’s Diary, in which he too arrived at highly questionable conclusions.
After Germany, Plotnikov continued his GRU service and graduated from the Military Diplomatic Academy. He was then assigned to Rosvooruzheniye (now Rosoboronexport, the Russian state-owned defense export agency), where he headed the Southeast Asia desk. From 2003 to 2009, Plotnikov spied in China under cover as a Russian trade mission employee, and before being sent to Austria, he headed Rostec’s representative office in Germany.
Following a series of high-profile spy scandals resulting from reporting by The Insider, Austrian authorities have begun paying much closer attention to Russian diplomats and journalists. The Austrian Foreign Ministry rejected all trade representative candidates proposed by Moscow, forcing the mission to draw on personnel already present in Vienna.
The initial candidate for “chief trader” was Alexander Zherikhov, whose father, Alexander Zherikhov Sr., headed Russia’s customs service from 2004 to 2006 and now holds the post of advisor to the CEO of Gazprom Neft. However, Artem Klimentyev was put in charge of trade instead.
Klimentyev’s mother, Svetlana, is a well-known figure in financial circles, previously working at Mezhprombank and at the Moscow representative office of the now-defunct British company Fort Trading Corporation Limited. Svetlana currently works on the management side of the Moscow Venture Fund.
Klimentyev himself graduated from the Academy of Foreign Trade, and in 2018 his mother arranged for him to become a consultant in the Department of European and North American Countries and International Organizations at the Ministry of Economic Development. From there, he moved to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, where he headed a department until his departure for Austria.
Notably, the reshuffle in Vienna did not help improve trade turnover between the two countries, which in 2025 was down by 74% year-on-year, with a further decline expected for 2026.
The dismissal lists at the Ministry of Industry and Trade are drawn up by First Deputy Minister Kirill Lysogorsky, who directly oversees the trade missions. As it turns out, Lysogorsky is far from an outsider to the GRU — a graduate of the Russian Military Academy of the Strategic Missile Forces, he previously headed government departments connected with the defense industry and arms supplies.
“Lysogorsky may be an important figure now, but he used to be just an errand boy running after Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov — together they traveled to half the world,” a source at the ministry told The Insider.
In addition to Plotnikov, in September 2025 career GRU officer Ivan Nalich, Russia’s trade representative in Algeria, was put on Lysogorsky’s “chopping block.” Nalich had worked in North Africa for eight years and had built up an extensive network of contacts among military officers, officials, and public figures. “Algeria is the gateway to Africa,” Nalich said in one interview.
“Trade representative” Nalich also has a classic spy’s biography. In 2003, he graduated from the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University, where he appears to have caught the eye of GRU recruiters. After graduation, Nalich took a job at the RIA Novosti state news agency, covering Middle Eastern affairs. In 2005, he moved to Rosoboronexport. Then, from 2009 to 2011, he worked in various positions at Rostec before returning to Rosoboronexport. Nalich subsequently spent five years spying in Morocco before being sent to Algeria as trade representative in 2019.
Nalich seems to have inherited a knack for espionage from his KGB grandfather.
The GRU now has a standing joke that after being fired from the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Nalich will become a backup dancer for his cousin — the well-known performer Pyotr Nalich.
In place of Nalich, Prime Minister Mishustin appointed 56-year-old Alexei Shatilov as Russia’s new trade representative in Algeria. Shatilov had worked for the Presidential Executive Office since the late 1990s in several capacities, and his last post at the Presidential Executive Office was as advisor in the foreign economic activity department of the president’s expert directorate. He had previously worked as trade representative in Algeria and had also spent time in the UAE and Qatar. He is considered to be part of the inner circle of Igor Neverov, head of the president’s foreign policy directorate. Neverov is said to have lobbied for his protégé’s reappointment to Africa.
In a recent interview, Shatilov praised Algeria for its pro-Moscow orientation and encouraged Russian companies to enter the local market. The trade representative did not mention, however, that the country is considered one of the most corrupt in Africa. The initial budget for the highway connecting Algeria with Morocco and Tunisia was $6 billion, but corruption drove the final cost to $17 billion — including $5 billion in kickbacks for local officials.
In January 2023, Cuba welcomed a new Russian trade representative, Sergei Baldin. Before Havana, he had headed the trade and economic department at the Russian embassy in Portugal and the Russian trade mission in Brazil.
An analysis of Baldin’s activities shows that in Brazil he mainly represented Rosoboronexport’s interests. For example, the trade representative actively negotiated Russia’s entry into the Latin American arms market and took part in Latin America Aero & Defence military fairs in Rio de Janeiro.
Baldin is also credited with the successful negotiations to establish visa-free travel between Russia and Brazil, a development that clearly pleased the GRU and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). While in Cuba, Baldin spoke in interviews about the good prospects for trade between Moscow and Havana. However, in June 2026, he unexpectedly resigned before his contract had even ended.
As The Insider learned, Baldin had concealed from his superiors at the Ministry of Industry and Trade the fact that he was being prosecuted for smuggling. On May 2, 2021, he flew into Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport from Lisbon and headed for the exit through the green channel. When a customs officer asked whether he had any undeclared currency, Baldin said no. However, during an inspection, officers found nearly $52,000 on him.
To replace Baldin, Moscow appointed Vakhtang Mosashvili as its new trade representative. His father, Vyacheslav Mosashvili, is a close acquaintance and former Ministry of Transport colleague of Putin aide Igor Levitin.
The younger Mosashvili’s résumé, obtained by The Insider, matches all of the expectations for a member of a nomenklatura family: “Attended a school at the Russian embassy in Belgium, graduated from the law faculty of the Russian State University for the Humanities. Worked at Aeroflot and at trade missions in Hungary and Spain.”
In the Russian mission in Havana, Mosashvili is known as an irrepressible “jokester,” the life of the party at gatherings, and a fan of off-color jokes. The trade representative’s peculiar sense of humor is showcased in his now-deleted account on Odnoklassniki social network, where he wrote about himself: “Three years’ imprisonment under Article 162, Part 1 of the Russian Criminal Code, ‘Robbery,’ served at the PLS penal colony in Solikamsk. Broke, I don’t have a car, I curse, I’m schizophrenic, neurasthenic, asthmatic, I pick my nose, I have dandruff, worms, gonorrhea, I sniff glue, gasoline, and stain remover.”
A few more “trade representatives” from military intelligence also fell under Deputy Minister Lysogorsky’s cuts, but no replacements have yet been found for them. Vladislav Darvay left Moldova in September 2024, and The Insider later published wiretaps which showed that he had organized a visit to Russia by fraudster-oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc, who stands accused of involvement in running $20 billion in corrupt Russian money through the “Moldovan laundromat”. Plahotniuc met with Kremlin official Dmitry Kozak and discussed interference in Moldova’s elections. However, the plan fell through when Plahotniuc was arrested, Kozak was fired, the Kremlin’s preferred candidates lost the election, and Darvay was barred from entering the country.
In some countries, however, Russian spies have not been replaced by “well-connected” substitutes from the civilian sector. In Syria, for instance, the GRU again managed to appoint one of its own to the trade representative post — 55-year-old career intelligence officer Vladimir Noskov. He replaces GRU officer Georgy Asatryan, who was recalled to Moscow and put forward for an award for the successful evacuation of Russian military personnel and equipment from bases in Syria to Libya.
Colonel Noskov graduated from the Military Diplomatic Academy, was seconded to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and spied in Lebanon, Egypt, and Qatar (facts that did not prevent his son from getting a job at Bain & Company, a U.S. entity closely tied to Anatoly Chubais).
As for his appointment to Syria, it is likely that no one from the “well-connected” crowd, accustomed to a comfortable life, wanted an assignment to that troubled country.