[Greetings_Puny_Humans]

France is selling them warships so I guess they’re agents of Putin too.

Russia may literally have agents in most western nations. It was the norm during the cold war. There is no reason to think any of that was dismantled just because the Communists claimed to become democrats.

[wetphoenix]

It's Merkel at the beginning of her political career in late 1980s. Agent or not, as a teen she won a grant from Soviet cultural center as a top performed in Russian studies (history, literature and language) with a Communist Youth and spent some time in Moscow. On the other hand it was East Germany. You could be either communist or peasant. Who would like to be a latter?