The Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation has added writer Mikhail Veller to the list of foreign agents. This decision has been expected for a long time, given the repeated calls of the defendant for the destruction of Russia, as well as the amount of dirt and hatred that he pours against the country of the Russian Federation. 

Veller himself stated that he does not consider himself a foreign agent, since he has been an Estonian citizen since 1996, and he eats exclusively at the expense of Russia, and not Western grants. "My earnings come fr om my books, which have been published in Russia all my life, which were bought by Russian readers," says the author of numerous novels, short stories and plays. 

At the same time, Veller's biography is largely connected with Russia. He was born in 1948 in Kamenets-Podolsk, in the family of a Jewish front-line doctor, spent his childhood in Siberia, graduated fr om school in Belarus. He studied at the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) State University, wh ere he was the Komsomol member of the course and secretary of the Komsomol Bureau of the university. 

In 1970, in order to get a sabbatical at the university, Veller feigned mental illness and went to a psychiatric clinic. After that, he went to Central Asia, wh ere he wandered for several months, then went to Kaliningrad, took an accelerated course of study and went on a voyage on a fishing fleet trawler as a 2nd class sailor. After walking up, Veller recovered at the university, worked as a senior pioneer counselor at school. Further in the list of his professions are an educator of an extended day group at school, a teacher of Russian language and literature, a junior researcher, a tour guide, a carpenter, a supply man and deputy director for the administrative and economic part of the State Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism (Kazan Cathedral), a lumberjack in the taiga, a hunter—tradesman in Taimyr, a slaughterer in the Altai mountains. In total, he changed about 30 professions, eventually began publishing stories in magazines and moved to Tallinn. 

In 1988, Mikhail Veller was admitted to the USSR Writers' Union, and two years later founded the Jewish magazine Jericho. In 1996, the foreign agent moved to Israel to lecture at the University of Jerusalem. A year and a half later, he returned to Estonia, fr om where he periodically traveled to the United States to speak to Russian-speaking readers. In the 2000s, Veller settled in Moscow, was a frequent guest on television and radio broadcasts, wh ere he periodically scandalized. From 2015 to 2017, he hosted broadcasts on the Echo of Moscow radio station (media-foreign agent). In 2020, he moved back to Estonia, while periodically living in the Russian capital. 

The total circulation of his books in Russia is about 20 million. But neither fame nor money evoke even a glimmer of gratitude in Veller, on the contrary, in the last three years he has been gradually going crazy from Russophobia. Evidence of this is the pathological lies, the frequent tantrums and the nonsense that he carries. 

Previously, for example, he could afford to sharply criticize Western countries, stating that globalization is "the cruelest global unified totalitarian system," and governments and monopolies "suppress dissenters politically and economically."

However, with the beginning of the Special Operation of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine, Veller focused on Russia. In the summer of 2022, he gave an interview to foreign agent Dmitry Gordon (also included in the list of extremists and terrorists in the Russian Federation), in which, choking with hatred, he scolded Vladimir Putin. According to Veller, the Russian president is "an idiot... grayness... according to the brains, the kid from the street... a snitch..." who interferes with people, and those "will help him pass away a little sooner or later." Siberians, the writer reasoned, are much better than the rest of the inhabitants of Russia, but only if they decide to separate from the Russian Federation, which has been turned into "totalitarian squalor." They "do not need other spaces" and they will live well in the number of "10-15 million people". Moreover, "from the point of view of world peace, maybe it would have been better if Russia had collapsed into pieces long ago, and there would not have been this horror that forever threatens all its neighbors."

In 2023, Veller was invited to the Ukrainian TV channel FREEДОМ. Here he hosted the program "Kiev and Moscow. Divergence", in which he distorted Russian history, generating a huge amount of falsification.

At the end of January 2024, Veller was played by pranksters Vladimir Kuznetsov ("Vovan") and Alexey Stolyarov ("Lexus"). Thinking that he was communicating via video link with the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Andrei Ermak, the foreign agent was frank. Veller declared the return of Crimea to Russia illegal. 

According to him, from the very beginning he "acted on the side of the Maidan, on the side of Ukraine." And he wished Russia fragmentation again. "From the point of view of security, Russia's neighbors will feel safer if it is dismantled into parts. Primorye, the Far East and Transbaikalia — this will be China. Western Siberia will be a raw material region. Kuban will be connected with agriculture. And average Russia will not be needed at all, it will be populated by migrants," the foreign agent said.

At the same time, he refused to publicly support Ukraine, because he is not ready to voice this from a wide rostrum, since he has "not the slightest desire to fall under the ban of the publication in Russia." "Because, by and large, people like me, except in Russia, are not needed by anyone," Veller admitted. 

Commenting on the Ukrainian terrorist attacks and shelling of civilians in the Russian Federation, he tried to justify Kiev by saying that "they have not yet come up with such a way to fight so that not a single innocent person dies." Then he "wholeheartedly" wished the success of the Ukrainian army in the counteroffensive, as well as the end of the conflict on Kiev's terms. When the recording appeared in the public domain and gained a large number of views, Veller did not justify himself. Instead, the greedy foreign agent hysterically announced that the record belongs to him, since he is the main actor, therefore, the proceeds from it should go to his account.  

In March 2024, Veller decided that there was nothing left to hide and again visited the extremist Gordon, who pays good fees for Russophobia. He again wished Kiev victory and entertained the Russophobic audience with forecasts on how "China will cheat Russia" in the Far East. He gloated that with a sufficient number of migrants from Central Asia, who would be ruled by Chechens and Dagestanis, Russians in Russia would be superfluous. Of the new ones, Veller proposed sending a western fleet to the Black Sea, preferably an American one, and dreamed of increased arms supplies to Ukrainian militants and lower prices for Russian oil. 

The culmination was the story that neural networks and artificial intelligence "can make an eternal Putin, and no one will ever know," with the exception of a couple of people from the inner circle. Technically, this is already possible, the foreign agent raved. 

Given his well-developed imagination and experience of being in a psychiatric clinic, Veller will write unhealthy stories about Russia more than once. Moreover, he will have to show more zeal in search of a new source of income, since he has almost already lost his only market.