Russian political parties using organized crime groups to carry out their work were responsible for selling arms to outlawed Kurdish groups so as to destabilize Turkey, according to information in recently leaked U.S. cables.
The claim comes from Spanish prosecutor Jose Gonzalez, who told U.S. officials that "he considers ... Russia to be a virtual 'mafia state'" where "one cannot differentiate between the activities of the government and organized crime groups," according to a diplomatic cable made public by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks and published by the Guardian newspaper Thursday.
Gonzalez, who has been investigating Russian organized crime in Spain for a decade, also agreed with poisoned dissident Alexander Litvinenko's thesis that Russian intelligence and security services "owned organized crime."
The memo, sent in February of this year from the U.S. embassy in Madrid, cited the senior prosecutor as claiming that "certain political parties in Russia operate 'hand in hand' with organized crime."
"He argued that the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, was created by the KGB and its successor, the SVR, and is home to many serious criminals," the memo said.
The allegations in the cables were not supported by evidence.
The leaked cable suggested that Russian authorities used the mafia to carry out operations it could not "acceptably do as a government," such as the Kurdish arms sales.
The document added the authorities took "the relationship with crime leaders even further by granting them the privileges of politics, in order to grant them immunity from racketeering charges."
Any crime lords who defied the country's Federal Security Service, or FSB, could be "eliminated" either by killing them or "putting them behind bars to eliminate them as a competitor for influence," Gonzalez said in the cables.
Far from being a localized problem, Gonzalez said he also thought the mafia virtually ran Belarus and Chechnya and exerted "tremendous control" over vital components of the global economy, including aluminum.
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that it was unclear whether the cables were genuine, but that if they were he would be surprised that U.S. diplomats could write such "rubbish."
He said that the purported cables repeated silly rumors and lacked supporting facts to back up their claims. He said he did not feel the documents would complicate Russia's relations with the United States.
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