“Like A Russian Among Russians” - The Story of Yoann Barbereau

By François Christophe, December 2017

        “I was treated like a Russian among Russians.” In 2012, 34-year old Frenchman Yoann Barbereau moved to Irkutsk, Siberia to help foster friendly Franco-Russian ties as the new head of the local “Alliance française” (French Alliance), the organization promoting French language and culture around the world on behalf of France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After a few years, he was arrested on fabricated charges of pedophilia, beaten, detained, forced into a psychiatric hospital and eventually sentenced to 15 years in a Siberian labor camp. His story ought to serve as a cautionary tale for Western expatriates living in Russia. As the Kremlin-backed media fuel animosity toward the West, even diplomats are no longer safe from the authorities’ dirty tricks and Russia’s parody of a justice system.

At around 9 a.m. on February 11, 2015, about a dozen police officers, several of whom were masked, forcibly entered the Irkutsk home of Yoann Barbereau. They took him to a local detention center where he was beaten and ordered to admit guilt in an unspecified crime. Barbereau soon learned that he was accused of sharing online child pornography and abusing his own five-year old daughter. He was jailed for 71 days, spent two weeks in a psychiatric facility, where he had to pay a $20,000 bribe to avoid being officially labeled as a “pedophile” and forced to be medicated with questionable substances.^[1] On April 22, he was placed under house arrest while awaiting trial, during which time he was strictly prohibited from communicating with the outside world.

From the beginning, the case against Barbereau has made little sense. He is accused of willingly uploading several batches of compromising pictures and videos on an online forum for Russian parents, which would be akin to committing social suicide. The images themselves are a disparate set put together to paint Barbereau as a sexual deviant: intimate pictures taken with his wife were juxtaposed with random online child pornography, and a photo of an old friend kissing Barbereau on the cheek was even added to allude to Barbereau’s alleged homosexuality (homophobia is rife in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where homosexuality is often conflated with pedophilia). As for the child molestation charge, the “evidence” comes down to a non-sexual picture of father and daughter undressed after a shower with clear physical distance between them.^[2] All pictures and videos were uploaded from Barbereau’s home IP address, which was broken into just weeks before his arrest.^[3] Barbereau smartphone geolocation record shows that he was not home on the day of the upload,^[4] and his hard drive was tampered with after the police seized it (and supposedly placed it under lock and key).^[5] 

Barbereau’s accusers put a huge amount of pressure on his family to build their case. His Russian wife, Daria, and their five-year old daughter, Héloïse, had little choice but to accuse him. Aware of difficulties in the marriage, the local police and Federal Security Service (FSB) had hoped that Daria would agree to testify against her husband. On several occasions before the arrest, a police officer had asked her for dirt on her husband, a clear warning sign of a plot in the making.^[6] During a seven-hour long questioning, interrogators called her “a whore” and blamed her for “betraying her country” by marrying a foreigner. They threatened to send her to jail and Héloïse to a local orphanage if she did not sign a pre-written statement calling Barbereau “dangerous”.^[7] When Daria accused interrogators of fabricating the case entirely, one of her questioners offered a kafkaesque response: “Yes, but I know he’s guilty. That’s why I am making up a case.”^[8] In the end, Daria signed the document. She then addressed a letter to the Russian government explaining that she had only signed the document under duress. Daria has since consistently defended her husband against the charges. Five-year old Héloïse was also interrogated for hours on end, and deceptively told that her dad would be freed only if she accused him. She testified of her dad’s innocence in several recordings, which judges refused to admit as evidence.

The case against Barbereau is a perfect example of “kompromat”, the old-time Soviet practice of collecting or fabricating “evidence”, typically sexual in nature, to blackmail or discredit a person. Putin himself was named Prime Minister as a reward for organizing a successful kompromat plot against Russia’s Prosecutor General, Yuri Skuratov, at a time when Skuratov was investigating corruption allegations against then-President Boris Yeltsin. In recent years, several Russian figures have been hit by a particularly pernicious form of kompromat involving child pornography.^[9] Such accusations have proven their effectiveness at destroying a person’s reputation, as few are usually willing to defend the target against such ignominy, and the suspicion tend to stick. Dissidents in and outside of Russia have been particular targets. In June 2015, police officers visited the home of Konstantin Rubakhin, an environmental activist living in Lithuania, apparently acting on a tip that he possessed child pornography. They subsequently dropped the case. In Russia, historian Yuri Alekseievich Dmitriev, whose work focuses on identifying the victims of Stalin’s Great Terror in his home region of Karelia, was arrested and charged with child pornography in December 2016. However, why were such methods used against a foreign official like Barbereau?

While there may not be a single reason for Barbereau’s arrest in February 2015, several elements likely contributed to it. Barbereau himself is still unsure why he was arrested, but thinks the initial decision to concoct a case against him was local. As a regular organizer of local cultural events, he had grown close to the then-mayor of Irkutsk, Viktor Kondrashov, a rare opposition figure in a country where most cities of Irkutsk’s size are led by Putin’s party, United Russia. Barely a month after Barbereau’s arrest, Kondrashov’s election was annulled and a new mayor from United Russia was appointed. The Frenchman’s proximity to a soon-to-be-disgraced opposition leader likely worked against him. Ironically, several months into the trial, the local FSB attempted to pin the plot against Barbereau on Kondrashov, floating rumors of an affair between the Frenchman and the mayor’s wife, as well as rumors of another affair between Barbereau and the wife of the local prosecutor, also an opposition figure.^[10] An amused Barbereau later said that had the rumors been true, he would have gladly confirmed them to clear his name of degrading charges of pedophilia.

Following Barbereau’s detention and trial, scathing attacks against him flourished in local newspapers, suggesting another rationale for his arrest. By all accounts, Barbereau had been doing his job well and had become increasingly well-known in Irkutsk through outreach events and local TV interviews. His friendly, ever-smiling figure was apparently oblivious to the backdrop of intense anti-Western rhetoric. This made him a threat in the eyes of those who routinely spread anti-Western sentiment in the local media. Newspaper articles depicted the Alliance française, a central pillar of France’s cultural diplomacy worldwide, as a nest of spies and a hidden intelligence outpost. In a particularly strident piece dated Sept. 2, 2016, Barbereau himself is presented as a foreign agent on a mission to corrupt Russia’s youth and destabilize the country, no less, as well as a spokesman for “immoral and perverse European ideas”.^[11] The charge of corrupting Russia’s youth echoes an incident preceding Barbereau’s arrest, during which an FSB agent had asked him if the Alliance française “influenced Russian youth”.^[12] 

Lastly, in the months preceding Barbereau’s arrest, the Russian media frequently targeted France for its reluctance to proceed with the sale of its Mistral warships to Russia in the wake of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. Although the French government only decided against the sale in August 2015, months after his arrest, Barbereau says that the topic frequently came up in his conversations with local residents. Ongoing diplomatic tensions surrounding the warships’ sale may have played a role in the targeting of a second-rank French diplomat (as director of the Alliance française, Barbereau was directly employed by France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs) by local authorities. Such tensions could also have contributed to the Kremlin’s subsequent decision to use Barbereau’s case as a kind of currency in its dealings with the French government. Barbereau’s situation was directly discussed between Putin and former French President François Hollande, as well as at the initial meeting between Putin and Emmanuel Macron in Versailles in May 2017.^[13]

On September 11, 2016, 19 months after the police first knocked on his door, Barbereau escaped house arrest, covering the electronic tagging device on his ankle with aluminum foil. He sent the police on a false lead by abandoning his charged phone on a bus bound for Ulan-Bator, Mongolia, while using a popular car-sharing application to reach Moscow, some 3,200 miles west, under a false identity.^[14] He left behind a defiant letter:^[15]

“I am escaping the violence of your pathetic little mafia-like police.

I am escaping a parody of justice.

Let the puppet show go on without me.

I will no longer be a part of it.”

In December 2016, the Irkutsk court sentenced him in absentia to 15 years of prison camp, a foregone conclusion on which judges, who sometimes fell asleep during the trial, had little bearing. By that time, he had managed to reach the French embassy in Moscow, where he remained stuck for over a year after the Russians authorities learned of his presence there.

Uncertainty remains as to how Barbereau managed to flee while the embassy was under the constant surveillance of Russian security services. At a November 10, 2017 press conference following his return to France, he gave a movie-like account of his escape, which has not been independently verified. After it became apparent that the French authorities were unwilling to risk exfiltrating him, Barbereau claims to have seized upon a security breach to leave the embassy building under a disguise, and drive to the border of a EU state, presumably Latvia, with the assistance of a Moscovite friend. Months spent studying satellite maps allegedly enabled him to find his way through a forested area across the Russian border into EU territory, a 10-hour hike. Once on EU soil, he was promptly arrested and interrogated by the local authorities, which did not extradite him back to Russia despite an existing international arrest warrant, perhaps because they did not find the case against him particularly credible. Within hours, Barbereau was on a flight back to Paris, and reunited with his family. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reacted to the news by announcing new criminal proceedings against Barbereau for violating Russia’s borders, to which his French lawyer responded by exclaiming: "Here is finally a charge that makes sense!".^[16] 

Barbereau’s successful escape from Russia has fueled suspicions that he was, in fact, an agent of France’s Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE). His case brought back memories of Clotilde Reiss, a 24-year-old student arrested in Iran in 2009 on charges of espionage. Following her eventual release, a former DGSE agent declared that she had indeed passed on information to the agency while in Iran, a claim vehemently denied by the French government. Yet had Barbereau been a spy, France would likely have seized on one of several opportunities to exfiltrate him, as it normally does for DGSE agents. Since his return home, Barbereau has openly and repeatedly castigated the French authorities for their alleged failure to assist him.

However, could Barbereau’s final escape have been the result of secret negotiations between Paris and Moscow, of which he may not be aware? Such a deal would explain why the Frenchman succeeded in leaving the embassy and crossing the border without being apprehended.^[17] It would also allow Moscow to maintain an uncompromising official stance, not admitting that the charges against Barbereau had been fabricated (rather unsubtly) by Irkutsk’s local FSB and police. The French government, for its part, might have agreed to take the blame for allegedly “doing nothing”, and let Barbereau think that he owed his escape to his sheer bravery. However, it seems hard to believe that Russian authorities would consent to any scheme exposing the vulnerability of the country’s borders, which are guarded by the FSB. Why would Russia agree to have its fearsome surveillance agency ridiculed twice over? Besides, the coverage of Barbereau’s escape in Russia’s state-controlled media goes against the idea of a secret agreement, with furious newspaper articles denouncing “the pedophile Yoann Barbereau”.

        Whatever the true circumstances of Barbereau’s escape from Russia, his diplomatic status did not protect him from becoming a kompromat target in the first place. At a minimum, this should lead Western countries to re-evaluate the safety of their diplomats and expatriates living in the country. When recounting his story, Barbereau is careful not to present it as a case of France vs Russia, insisting that there were ordinary Russians who helped him throughout his trouble - even the wardens charged with enforcing his house arrest had sympathized with his plight. At Irkutsk’s psychiatric hospital, Barbereau encountered several individuals who did not suffer from any mental illness, but had ended up there after running into trouble with local authorities, and were unable to bribe their way out. They too had been caught in the clutches of the police, FSB and corrupt judges, but, unlike him, stood no chance of making it out.