I spent a year in Gothenburg after many years in Stockholm. The neighborhood I lived in for most of that time was a very quiet residential area with a small square. In the square was a Thai lunch place. As with many lunch offers in Sweden, the place offered free coffee with lunch. You’d come up to a self-serve coffee counter and pour yourself a cup.

The first time I went there in October 2022, their collection of cups caught my interest. It was a mish-mash of designs and cup types, but they had quite a few cups with a logo that piqued my curiosity:

Of course, I grabbed one of these cups to drink my coffee from. The logo reminded me of ¹Conway’s Game of Life. I have had an amateur interest in life simulation for years, having worked on a snail simulation, attended ECAL 2017, IJCAI 2018, ALIFE 2020, played around with a self-modifying simulation project, and gone to London to listen in on an OpenWorm mini-conference about worm locomotion.

Aside from the coolness factor, I was curious: How did this random Thai place end up with all these simulation cups? And who made these? Was it a project? A game? A studio?

I tweeted about it. The tweets have at this point been deleted, but coupled with my own curious Googling while eating my lunch as well as follower input, here’s what I learned.

Complex Simulation AB

Complex Simulation AB is an inactive (liquidated?) limited company based in Gothenburg. Its current address is listed as a law firm.

It was originally run by a man named Kristian Dimitrievski, born in 1974.

Dimitrievski’s thesis at the Göteborg University Department of Physics was titled Monte Carlo Simulations of Supported Biomembranes and Protein Folding. According to a forum online this was from 2006, but I have not confirmed.

Dimitrievski was previously a project lead at Chalmers University of Technology. He then went on to work as a consultant for Volvo and Scania, both of which have huge presences in Gothenburg. None of this is uncommon. Gothenburg in general is very much a “car city” - I dare you to find a meetup where no attendant has some connection to Volvo or car manufacturing in general.

Eventually, he was listed as the Market Area Manager at a limited company called Complex Simulation AB. I seem to remember finding some old archive that also claimed him as the owner of the company back in 2022, but could not find that resource this time around.

In February 2019, Kristian Dimitrievski was arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia since 2017. Below is an auto-translated screenshot of the archived press release from the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO):

Prosecutors claimed that Dimitrievski worked with Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service through a Russian diplomat named Yevgeny Umerenko. Umerenko left Sweden and went back to Russia a few weeks after the agent was arrested.

His trial had started in September 2021. This was apparently the first time in 18 years that someone was put on trial for espionage in Sweden.

In December 2021, Kristian Dimitrievski was convicted of espionage and sentenced to three years in prison.

In 2023, SVT published a new article suggesting that it may have been code for self-driving cars that was handed over to Russia via various storage devices. SÄPO has said that the information can be used for military purposes.

My spy cup

So… In my hand was more than just a cup with a quirky logo that resonated with me, but the cup of a Russian spy and allegedly the first spy put on trial in Sweden in 18 years.

How did this random Thai place get all these cups? They must’ve had about ten of them.

There was a bit of a language barrier when I tried to ask so I’m not sure if this is totally accurate, but from what I understood they got these cups in some kind of clearance sale or market. Which tracks if the company was liquidated and assets sold off. Did they realize this cup represented the remnants of a “spy company”? I didn’t ask. But I did ask if I could buy one. They sold it to me for 10 SEK.

The next time I went there for lunch, I asked if I could buy another… You know, to have a backup in case mine broke. But at that point they seemed to have caught on that there may be a little more to these cups and declined to sell me a second. Or maybe they just didn’t want to have to buy new cups after selling theirs to some neighborhood weirdo.

Well, I thought it was an interesting little piece of Swedish spy history to have come across while eating lunch and quite a rabbit hole to have gone down on a random lunch break in Gothenburg.