Russian active measures in Eastern Finnmark, Norway

Last year, the City Council of Vardø cancelled a friendship agreement with Archangels and now Mayor Tor-Erik Labahå wants to take down three local war monuments. Two of these are initiated, paid, and designed by FSB veteran organization Shield headed by former KGB leader in Murmansk Gennadiy Gurylev. Together with Sergey Goncharov, who has been identified as an FSB agent, Gurylev has organized bus trips from Murmansk to Vardø in May and October every year since 2011 – so-called patriotic memory tours, proclaiming to commemorate Norwegian partisans and Soviet soldiers who lost their lives on the northernmost part of the Karelian Front during WWII. In reality, the trips have served as cover to build networks and propagate Russian foreign policy narratives in the Norwegian borderland, with Vardø as a main target.