The reaction of the Kremlin after the revelations that Russian spies were behind the “Havana syndrome”

The Kremlin denied on Monday that the Russian secret services had any role in the so-called “Havana syndrome”, a series of bizarre ailments suffered by American diplomats and spies around the world and that even the United States has not been able to elucidate. Russia’s reaction comes after a team of investigative journalists revealed that a sabotage unit within Moscow’s military intelligence service, the GRU, was behind the affair.

“This is by no means a new theme; for many years, the theme of the so-called “Havana Syndrome” has been exaggerated in the press, and from the very beginning it was accompanied by accusations against the Russian side,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday, according to Reuters, taken by Agerpres.

“But no one has ever published or stated any convincing evidence of these baseless accusations. Therefore, all these are nothing more than baseless accusations by the media”, added the spokesman of Vladimir Putin.

Moscow’s reaction comes after an anti-Kremlin Russian website based in Latvia, The Insider, cited by Reuters, claimed that it had carried out an investigation with other media outlets that members of a unit of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service had been in areas where those symptoms occurred among American diplomats and spies, and high-ranking members of that unit received medals and promotions for their work in developing “non-lethal acoustic weapons.”

Among the symptoms of the so-called “Havana syndrome”, migraines, nausea, memory loss, dizziness or auditory hallucinations have been observed since 2016. First, members of the staff of the US embassy in Cuba and their families were affected, and later the phenomenon was also observed at other American diplomatic missions.

The United States has not been able to elucidate their cause, but the US secret services concluded last year that it is “highly unlikely” that any external adversary caused them, estimating some pre-existing conditions or environmental factors as the more likely cause of the said symptoms.

Publisher: BP

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