Mariusz Kamiński also said that anyone doing business with Russia was, in fact, doing business with its security apparatus.
He was speaking during a conference on Tuesday at the Wilson Center think tank marking the 30th anniversary of the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe.
Kamiński said that from time to time Russian agents “show the world their real face".
He mentioned the murder of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko with the rare radioactive isotope polonium in London in 2006, and an attempt last year to kill Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence agent convicted of spying for Britain.
'Continuation of criminal Soviet KGB'
"Putin’s FSB [Federal Security Service] is simply a continuation of the criminal Soviet KGB. The same operating methods, the same mentality," Kamiński said.
The goal of the Russian security services, he added, was the reconstruction of the Soviet Union "as a global empire" and their activities were visible in Syria and Venezuela, North Africa, the Caucasus and the Balkans.
Kamiński told the conference in Washington that Russia was a state which "of its own will and as a result of its aggressive policies has fenced itself off from the West."
'Unscrupulous corruption'
He added that in today's Russia, the secret services are "the backbone and the linking factor, they decide who belongs to the political and economic elite and who will drop out of it."
The Russian authorities are "unscrupulously" corrupting Western business elites, "using one of their few assets - access to natural resources, primarily energy," added Kamiński.
(pk)
Source: PAP/niezalezna.pl