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It is by now common knowledge that Russian intelligence very nearly took over Deutsche Bank without anyone in the German government even knowing (or caring), and while pressuring the German financial regulator into pursuing a criminal investigation into the Financial Times' journalists trying to figure out why it didn't make sense.
What is less commonly understood (and in part only now being revealed) is what a combination of hilarious disaster and glorious victory the Russian intelligence operation in question was. Having stumbled onto Jan Marsalek, the co-founder of Wirecard (a longstanding fraudulent German fake payments startup), an autistic Austrian-Czech who was obsessed with secret agents and James Bond, while he was abortively attempting to extend his scam to Russia, Russian intelligence compromised him with the help of an ex-pornographic Russian actress and several "retired" FSB officials.
Over the years, Wirecard helped move (with Marsalek's full approval) the funds of sanctioned Chechens, questionable Libyans, and shady Russian-Israelis between East and West, with the help of ex-KGB fixer Stanislav Petlinsky and his Israeli financier son. They had under their control the darling of the entire German tech industry, a man praised by Merkel, and a company so overvalued it was genuinely attempting to buy Deutsche Bank. They had thoroughly taken control of Austria's intelligence apparatus, which meant they had unlimited access to classified intelligence from Western allies, the entire European border entry database and so on. And then it failed, because it could not locate 1.9bn Euros.
It turned out that a great deal of the FSB program, as it happened, had only tangentially to do with what one might consider the interests of 'Russia' the nation. Much of it - including large elements of the assassination program - had to do with the grift, the transferring of money, the profiting of various senior officials, and the fear that MI6 or the CIA would buy the information on who was making money in Russia (and how) from defectors like Skripal and Litvinenko. A competent FSB would have furnished Wirecard with the money needed for KPMG to sign off its audit (something well-paid accountants are always desperate to do) by showing proof of the 'missing' 1.9bn euros. But when it came to it, the FSB could not do this. The Russians, for all their immense capability and cunning, were so addicted to the grift that they were unable to salvage their own intelligence operation because they were too busy enriching themselves.
A tragic tale. Marsalek is now an Orthodox priest in hiding deep in Russia. Its inhabitants, that great people of so many contradictions, live to fight another day. I'm excited to see what they come up with next.
Tangentially, I've seen the story being rounded to "Marsalek is an Orthodox priest" as you do a lot, but when the story broke there was nothing indicating that he actually has taken on the role, but just that he assumed the identity of some Orthodox priest, who probably knew and may or may not have had a choice in the matter, for the purpose of crossing borders (with some interesting implication that there is a larger scheme of rural clergy donating their personae to Russian intelligence for such ends). Village priest is not a role that a random foreign business bro can just slip into, for reasons ranging from the linguistic to the Russian Orthodox church being socially quite tight-knit.
Sorry, I did actually mean that as a joke, and the part about him being wrenched out of that life to run spies in England, too.
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