According to the Italian newspaper, Russian diplomatic personnel withdrew nearly €4 million ($4.35 million) in cash from two accounts belonging to the Russian embassy in Rome. Russian embassy staffers reportedly withdrew the €4 million on 21  separate instances, sometimes in portions amounting to €100,000 at a time. The withdrawals drew the attention of the UIF, which is now reportedly investigating the withdrawals.

La Repubblica said that UIF investigators are anchoring their probe on several hypotheses. These include the possibility that the cash withdrawals were meant to bypass the progressively stricter financial sanctions that the European Union has been imposing on Moscow. The bulk of these sanctions began shortly February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Notably, Russian embassy staffers started to withdraw the funds almost immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.

The correlation between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the cash withdrawals has led Italian authorities to entertain another hypothesis, namely that Rome embassy staffers have been using the cash to pay Russian intelligence personnel working without a diplomatic cover in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. A third hypothesis is that Russian intelligence personnel have been using the cash to support information operations that target European audiences. According to La Repubblica, the cash could have been used for “paying influencers to espouse the Kremlin’s cause in Italy, thus influencing public opinion”.