The Six Objectives of Russia and Active Actors
The internal documents of "The Company" are unusually explicit about their goals for Argentina: first, discredit Milei's pro-Ukrainian policy and reorient Argentina's position regarding the war; second, foster divisions within the ruling party and with its regional allies; third, support opposition candidates in the 2025 legislative elections through indirect financing of narratives; fourth, promote legislation that prevents Argentina from joining the Contact Group of Friends of Ukraine; fifth, generate conflicts with neighboring countries —operation "Argentinian tourists"; and sixth, gather strategic intelligence on the Argentine military-industrial complex and oil resources in Antarctica. This last objective reveals that Argentina is, for Moscow, a permanent target, regardless of the government in power.
On December 28, 2024, three Russian citizens —Pavel Bandurin, Igor Lomakin, and Vitaly Kharlabo— appeared before Congress with a baby carriage, claiming to have lost a drone capable of recording audio and images, which was later found on a terrace of the Legislative Palace. The case was archived without charges (Perfil, Dec. 30, 2024). Andriashvili and Yakovenko, arrested in June 2025 and publicly presented by spokesperson Manuel Adorni as responsible for the disinformation network, remain in Buenos Aires without formal charges at the time of this edition's closure.
The Local Accomplices: Corruption and Ideology Serving the Enemy
No foreign intelligence operation works without a local support network. The effectiveness of Russian and Cuban operations in Argentina is not only explained by the capacity of their services: it is also explained by the existence of Argentine citizens who, due to corruption, ideological conviction, or both, actively facilitated their work. Judicial files identify three categories of collaborators: those who falsified State documents, those who channeled money and narratives without questioning their origin, and those who put their political access at the service of foreign powers.
In the first group, the most documented case is that of Fabián Horacio Gutiérrez, an employee of the Civil Registry in Viedma, charged in the case led by Judge Sebastián Ramos for his alleged role in the logistics network that supported the Dultsev for a decade. An Argentine public official who, according to the investigation, would have helped manage the documentary infrastructure of two spies from the SVR operating on national soil. He was not an ideologue. He was a cog in the State that someone bought. Olga Alexandrivska and Ali Kherchi are also included in the case, identified as part of the framework that allowed Russian agents to operate undetected (Alconada Mon, La Nación, Jul. 13, 2025).
The second group is larger and harder to prove judicially. The documents from The Company state that their articles reached Argentine media through local intermediaries who presented themselves as consulting firms, press agencies, or press operators. None of those contacted by the journalistic consortium acknowledged a connection with Russian sources; they all shifted responsibility to the next link in the chain. The question that the investigation has yet to answer is how many acted out of genuine ignorance —accepting free content in a precarious media ecosystem— and how many knew exactly what they were distributing and in exchange for what (Alconada Mon, La Nación, Apr. 3, 2026).
The third group is the most serious in institutional terms. The internal documents of The Company describe political analysis sessions that included interviews with Peronist politicians, opposition political scientists, and economists, aiming to identify fissures in Milei's government and indirectly finance narratives that exploited them. These are not citizens expressing public opinion: they are actors with access to the political system who, knowingly or not, fed a foreign intelligence network with strategic information (Torres Cabreros, El País, Apr. 3, 2026).
The ideological dimension of this collaboration has deeper roots. The Cuban G2 built, over decades, through the ICAP —Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples— an infrastructure of cultural associations, solidarity networks, and academic spaces aligned with the regime that operate in Argentina as a social base for its operations. They are not agents in the technical sense of the term. They are sympathizers who open doors, spread messages, and organize presence at protests without needing an explicit order. According to defector G2 official Enrique García Díaz, the model relies on integrated citizens whom the apparatus can activate when it needs their access, and who rarely know they are being used (El Español, Nov. 2025).
"The media nearly universally responded that they did not know their authors and that they had been offered for free by a third party, whom they described as a consultant, agency, press operator, or intermediary." — O'Donnell Consortium / openDemocracy / Filtraleaks, April 2026
What the collective of these cases reveals is an architecture of complicity that ranges from low-level bureaucratic corruption —a Civil Registry employee who alters documents— to influence over State decisions: a diplomat who, for forty years, oriented the foreign policy of the most important power in the hemisphere to benefit Cuba. Between both extremes are journalists who published without questioning, intermediaries who took payments without investigating, and politicians who spoke with those they should not have. None appear in headlines as spies. All, to varying degrees, were part of the system that makes foreign espionage possible in Argentina.
Argentine Counterintelligence: Between Reform and Paralysis
While Russia and Cuba operated methodically, with budget and strategic patience, Argentine counterintelligence was undergoing two years of intense institutional reorganization —and, according to its own critics, politically ambiguous. The question running through the opened files is not only who the spies are: it is why the State took so long to see them, and what real capacity it has today to dismantle them.
The official diagnosis is striking. When Milei's government came to power in December 2023, the Argentine intelligence system had accumulated overlapping functions, oversized structures, an inability to integrate information scattered across different agencies, and zones of normative uncertainty dating back decades. The response was a two-phase reform: Decree 614/2024, which reorganized the basic structure, and Decree 941/2025, signed on December 31 of that year, which radically redefined the architecture of the system (Infobae, Jan. 2, 2026).
The most relevant change for the case documented in this article was the transformation of the National Security Agency into the National Counterintelligence Agency (ANC), with the exclusive mandate to identify and analyze threats to national strategic security: espionage, sabotage, interference, and influence by external actors, state or non-state. For the first time in its democratic history, Argentina has an agency formally dedicated to counterintelligence. Decree 864/2025, approved in December, also established the first formal National Intelligence Policy in over twenty years, which explicitly classifies Vaca Muerta, lithium, the maritime platform, and Antarctica as resources that the intelligence system must protect from actors seeking to access them through unconventional means (DEF Online, Dec. 12, 2025).
The concrete results of this new architecture are, so far, partial. The SIDE detected the Andriashvili and Yakovenko network in October 2025 and publicly presented them in June of that year. They identified them. They named them. They did not prosecute them. In the Dultsev case, the judicial investigation has been active since 2022 with three defendants in the local logistics network and six suspects linked to the GRU —none of whom has been formally charged in Argentina by the time of this edition's closure. The drone over Congress was found, the three involved Russian citizens were identified, and the case was archived weeks later without consequences. The SIDE reported The Company's operation to the Public Ministry in October 2025; the judicial complaint arrived in April 2026 (Infobae, June 18, 2025).
"In two years, there was not a single real coordination. The Secretariat should produce strategic intelligence for decision-making, not manage the entire flow of information from the State." — Source with extensive experience in intelligence, cited by elDiarioAR, March 2026
The gap between detection and judicial action has a structural explanation that is not new. Historically, the Argentine intelligence system has lacked adequate technical training, has been used for domestic espionage and political operations, and has never developed a culture of strategic intelligence focused on external threats. The current reform aims to correct this, but analysts warn that changing norms is faster than changing capabilities. "The system is being used to maintain governability in defense of the administration itself, without a strategic perspective on protecting citizens from external risks," noted Natalia Litvachky, researcher at CELS, to Deutsche Welle (Deutsche Welle, Aug. 14, 2025).
To this criticism is added a deeper tension that the National Intelligence Plan itself exposed. The secret document —170 pages long, leaked to La Nación in May 2025— defines as areas of interest for the SIDE actors who "erode trust in officials," "manipulate public opinion," or spread "disinformation," without specifying whether these categories refer to foreign agents or local journalists and analysts who disagree with the government. The ambiguity is not accidental: in practice, the same tool that should pursue the networks of The Company could be used to surveil those who denounce them (Alconada Mon, La Nación, May 2025).
The Government also created the Federal Investigations Department (DFI) in June 2025, modeled after the FBI, with 25,000 applicants for its first call for professional investigators. Its mandate includes dismantling networks linked to terrorism and transnational organized crime. It is, in theory, exactly the tool needed for cases like those documented in this article. In theory. At the time of this edition's closure, no publicly identified Russian or Cuban operator has been prosecuted for their activities in Argentina. Argentine counterintelligence detects, names, and archives. Dismantling is still a pending promise.
About the Author
William L. Acosta graduated from PWU and Alliance University. He is a retired police officer from the New York Police Department, a former U.S. Army veteran, as well as founder and CEO of Equalizer Private Investigations & Security Services Inc., a licensed agency in New York and Florida, with international projection. Since 1999, he has led investigations in cases of narcotics, homicides, and missing persons, in addition to participating in criminal defense at both the state and federal levels. A specialist in international and multi-jurisdictional cases, he has coordinated operations in North America, Europe, and Latin America.
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