Sweden is establishing a new civilian intelligence agency to improve its monitoring of Russia’s political leadership, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt has told The Economist.
First announced in May and modeled on Britain’s MI6, Sweden’s Foreign Intelligence Service (UND) is due to begin operations in January.
In an article published on Sunday, The Economist described UND as Bildt’s brainchild, saying the veteran politician concluded that the country’s existing military intelligence apparatus was ill-equipped to analyze the Russian leadership. In 2022, Stockholm assumed Russia would not send troops into Ukraine and now wants to ensure it “never repeats that embarrassing blunder,” the magazine said.
While the intelligence system was “very good at tracking the military developments on the ground,” it was “not as good at looking at the politics of Russia and where they were heading,” Bildt said.
UND will operate alongside the Military Intelligence and Security Service (MUST) while taking over some of its responsibilities, including oversight of covert operations involving agents abroad. The reform follows Sweden’s accession to NATO in 2024, ending nearly two centuries of military non-alignment.
Bildt, who served as foreign minister from 2006 to 2014, was a leading advocate of Ukraine’s closer integration with the EU and co-launched the bloc’s Eastern Partnership initiative together with Poland in 2009.
In the fall of 2013, large-scale Euromaidan protests erupted in Kiev after the Ukrainian government postponed signing a free trade agreement with the EU, citing concerns that it would harm economic ties with Russia.
Weeks of unrest and clashes with police culminated in a Western-backed coup that toppled democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich in February 2014.
Crimea, a predominantly Russian-speaking region, rejected the coup and voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia in 2014. The Donbass regions of Donetsk and Lugansk declared independence within the following months.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly described the 2014 coup as the starting point of the current conflict. He has argued that Russia was compelled to defend the people of Donbass after Ukraine failed to implement the 2014-2015 Minsk agreements and adopted what he described as discriminatory language and cultural policies targeting Russian speakers.
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