[exelius]

I don’t know it’s so much Russia’s MO as the result of a decentralized Russian intelligence community that overlaps heavily with criminal elements. So some Russian mafia cell may be spying on Americans hoping Putin throws some legitimate business their way if they prove their worth by murdering a defector with some poison they “found”.

The downside to this structure is that you have rogue agents you can’t control. The upside is that clandestine operations are very difficult to uncover if nobody in Russia knows about it.