Taken in isolation, they could just about be explained away as coincidences – freak accidents, one-off attacks, unfortunate infrastructure failures. The DHL cargo plane that crashed on Monday as it approached Vilnius airport. The recent bomb scares that have hobbled London, from Euston Square and Gatwick Airport to the US Embassy. The drones spotted circling near US Air Force bases in the UK. The explosion at a weapons manufacturing facility in Wales in April.
The telecommunications cables severed in the Baltic Sea earlier this month. The many arson attacks, including on a Ukrainian-owned business in Leyton, East London, in March. The successful attempts to interfere with Czech rail operators. The ransomware attack on an NHS provider in June. The television satellites disrupted and damaged, causing changes to programming across Europe. The defector gunned down in Spain in February. The assassination attempt on the chief executive of a German arms manufacturer.
Yet isolated is not what they were. Nor are the dozens of other worrying incidents that could be grouped with them. Taken together, the conclusion becomes unavoidable: that over the last 12 months, as the West has continued to support Ukraine’s war efforts, Russia has dramatically escalated its acts of sabotage across Europe and beyond, sowing a greater sense of instability on the continent than at any time since the Cold War.
Use the map below to explore the full list of recent acts of sabotage and violence across Europe.
The security services have sounded the alarm already. “We should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home,” MI5 director general Ken McCallum said in a speech last month. “The GRU [Russia’s military intelligence service] in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets: we’ve seen arson, sabotage and more. Dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness.”
It is, he said, a “concerted campaign” that requires a “strong and sustained response”. This week, Bruno Kahl, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, said Russian “hybrid measures” only increase “the risk that Nato will eventually consider invoking its mutual defence clause [Article 5]”. And in a joint speech with his French counterpart on Friday, Sir Richard Moore, the chief of MI6 – known as “C” – spoke of the “morally bankrupt axis of aggression” overseen by Vladimir Putin.
“Our security – British, French, European and transatlantic – will be jeopardised,” Sir Richard said of the prospect of Putin reducing Ukraine to a vassal state. “The cost of supporting Ukraine is well known, but the cost of not doing so would be infinitely higher.”
‘An escalation in terms of what they’re achieving’
Now, as 2024 draws to a close, barely a day passes without a new headline to add to the pile of potential Russian attacks or interference, causing experts all over the world to call for an even greater level of political and public attention to be paid to the threat – even if not every crime is proved. Russia may not be responsible for absolutely every aggressive move it is alleged to make on the global stage, but nor does it need to be.
“It feels like an escalation in terms of what they’re achieving, and it’s hard not to draw a line between that and the even greater level of aid we’re sending to Ukraine,” says Jonathan Hall KC, the UK Government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation. “In March this year, Putin started talking more about ‘the war’, not ‘special military operation’, and you can imagine that if he regards it as a war now, then when you have people helping Ukraine, there’s an even greater degree of hostility between them and us now, too.”
The fact people now half-jokingly say, “ah, it’s the Russians…” whenever a power-cut occurs in Western Europe is telling. “It’s tempting to say they win both ways, isn’t it? Because if it’s not them, they can project this image of being ultra-capable,” Hall adds.
Viljar Lubi, the Estonian Ambassador to the UK, has seen all this before. “There is an old saying in Russian politics, that they like to create ‘controlled chaos’,” he says. “But chaos cannot be controlled, they flatter themselves. This is a war of narratives, though, a war of values and beliefs, and this is something we need to talk about much more. Hybrid warfare is not always visible, but actually it is a major war already.”
While many acts have indeed been committed in the so-called “grey zone” of war – that unclear space that exists between direct conflict and peace in international relations – dozens of incidents are perfectly visible. Not least the many literal fires started across Europe this year, including in East London.
Last week, Jack Reeves, 23, a Croydon man who was involved in the arson attack on a Ukrainian-linked business in Leyton in March, pleaded guilty to an offence under the National Security Act of obtaining a material benefit from a foreign intelligence service. Prosecutors have linked the case to Russia. Reeves became one of the first to be arrested, charged and convicted using the powers brought in under the Act, which was introduced last year in response to the threat of hostile activity from states targeting the UK.
A month before, another man involved, Dylan Earl, 20, from Elmesthorpe in Leicestershire, admitted preparatory conduct and aggravated arson in relation to the fire. In previous court hearings, Earl was accused of carrying out the act on behalf of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, which operates under the direction of the Kremlin.
‘Russia is willing to consider causing mass-casualty events in Europe’
It is far from the only fire indirectly started by Russia on European soil this year. In July, Western security officials said Russia was responsible for sending two incendiary devices to DHL logistics hubs in Germany and the UK as part of a wider campaign to ignite blazes aboard aircraft. When a DHL plane crashed near Vilnius last week, then, people inevitably started to draw conclusions, even if the Lithuanian government has since said a technical issue was likely to blame.
“It’s impossible to tell how widespread this is, because we only see what comes to light – and some of what comes to light is by accident. Some countries are very keen to keep a lid on it,” says Keir Giles, senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, and the author of Who Will Defend Europe?. “We ought to be concerned that Russia is willing to consider causing mass-casualty events in Europe, as evidenced by the airliner plot. That was the one element missing in the campaigns of murder sabotage in previous decades. And that’s a worry.”
As is so often the case in modern geopolitics, pundits panic about what will happen next, while historians quietly gesture to the past. The academic and historian Calder Walton, the author of Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, points to “a long, long track record and playbook here that Putin, as a former KGB intelligence officer, knows full well. He will have been trained in the dark arts of sabotage in the KGB,” he says.
“In the Cold War, the KGB had an entire department focusing on sabotage operations that would take place when World War Three broke out between the Soviet Union and the West. This was all in the physical, real-world domain: blowing up railway tracks, deploying poison gas canisters in the London Underground… And this isn’t peculiar to Russia, by the way, sabotage is an inherent tactic in warfare, but Russia does have a particular, let’s say, fetish for it.”
The KGB was renowned for its active measures, which ranged from espionage and propaganda to sabotage and assassination, all of which has continued in various forms in the Putin era. Some plans have a particular echo. Operation Cedar, for example, was a Cold War KGB plot to seriously disrupt the US and Canada’s power supply by destroying hydroelectric dams, oil pipelines and bombing the Port of New York. It took more than 10 years of preparation but, for reasons unknown, was seemingly aborted.
Brazen assassination attempts in more recent years – not least those of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal, both in public on British soil – illustrate how Russia has continued to act with impunity overseas. But the nature of those operations has evolved since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in late February 2022, when Russian tanks rolled over the border.
“Whereas previously it was Russia’s own military officers that were roaming the continent in murder gangs, now two things have happened: one, all of those GRU goons are busy behind the lines, and two, they’ve been detected and evicted from their European countries,” Giles says.
“That means they’ve gone to this new strategy of recruiting locally. Proxies, organised crime groups, disaffected people in the target countries. On the one hand, that means it’s easier for the defensive services to detect them. On the other, the Russians only need a very low success rate to achieve their goals.”
The Leyton fire is potentially one such example. But, according to Giles, “that begs a lot of questions. We don’t know who recruited them, how, and what the motivation was, and that has been apparently very carefully kept under wraps by the British authorities for reasons that we can only guess at”.
A recent report by academics at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) identified the same shift: that in the “gig-economy era”, the Kremlin can outsource its aggression to anybody in want of a payday and willing to risk drawing the attention of the security services. The benefits of putting more and more layers between Russia and the eventual perpetrator are obvious when it comes to plausible deniability, as well as the sheer scale and speed of the work, but so are the basic economics of the deal.
As the Rusi report pointed out, arson and assassination “were paid at a rate of several hundred dollars, an extremely low figure given the nature of the work”, while other stunts, including painting 250 Star of David symbols on walls in Paris in 2023, were priced at as little as £53 per person. “It appears that just as in other areas of the gig economy, the benefits generally accrue to the employer. In the case of Russian intelligence services, the costs are so low that they are incomparable to either a full-time intelligence officer or running an agent,” the report said.
‘We’re at an acute stage in the crisis’
The extraordinary range of tactics allegedly used by Russia against the West – from cyber attacks to election interference, basic criminal damage to even paying right-wing influencers in the US to spread anti-Ukraine propaganda – is so vast that there is no obvious solution to it. A sensible way to start, though, is to listen to the East.
“Political leadership, to some extent, is in denial of this problem, so the first step is to recognise that Russia is in a secret war against the West, and that they have already got to the violent stage of that war,” says Oleksandr V Danylyuk, an associate fellow at Rusi and former Chief Advisor to the Minister of Defence and Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service in Ukraine.
“It’s super-important to create an international platform similar to the one established during the ‘War on Terror’, focused on Islamic terrorism in Europe. A central hub to counter Russian subversion against the EU and Nato countries should be established as soon as possible. Also, you can be more proactive in collecting evidence from within those radical groups and organised crime groups. We’re at an acute stage in the crisis already, so there needs to be extra measures.”
The error would be to fail to take measures fast enough, or at all, because we in the West are so stunned by the audacity of Russia. “It does feel as if states are more off the hook, in the sense that they are showing far less self-restraint,” says Jonathan Hall. “The two most egregious attacks on the UK – the Litvinenko and Salisbury attacks – were so unrestrained it’s almost unbelievable. I still find it staggering.”
He has identified a shift, however. “What you can certainly say is that intelligence agencies here [in Britain] are talking a lot about state threats in a way that they didn’t before, and they’re talking about pivoting resources away from terrorism.” Asked whether Russian sabotage is now a greater threat than Islamist terrorism, he errs.
“It’s a good question, but no, because I don’t feel as if the public perceives it as a bigger issue. That sounds slightly circular, but the point of terrorism is to make people frightened, and people are still frightened about Islamist terrorism, and they’re not so frightened of the state threat. Though that, I suspect, is to some extent because of ignorance.”
Of course, the direction of the West’s response is largely led by the whims of the incoming US president. On Thursday, Donald Trump announced Keith Kellogg, an 80-year-old retired US army lieutenant general, as his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, as he embarks on making good a promise to end the war.
“Together, we will secure PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH, and Make America, and the World, SAFE AGAIN!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Bringing peace to the region was a key campaign pledge, though quite how he plans to achieve that, besides “through strength”, remains a closely guarded secret.
‘We shouldn’t shy away from using force if necessary’
“Maybe that’s exactly the thing,” says Lubi. “We all want peace, but we shouldn’t shy away from using force if necessary. I don’t have a good answer to what that looks like, but we have our legal mechanisms as well, we have our sanctions, and we have to be visible: if Russian warships are there, ours are there as well. It has to be balanced, but we cannot let our adversary gain the crown while we take too long to react.”
Lubi is another who stresses the importance of international alliance. “We need to take things seriously, and with unity – how we can jointly do it, between the UK and EU and Nato. We are all in this, jointly, because this isn’t against an individual country, it’s [against] all of us – the West.”
The alternative to peace, and the consequences of not responding quickly enough to Russia’s aggression, may yet be unchecked escalation to the point of a full attack. Walton is cautious to second guess Putin, as “we don’t know, and maybe Putin doesn’t know, what his overall strategy is.” Still, he can identify “chilling echoes of 1914, [that] we’re kind of sleep-walking into a global conflict here. Preparing for ‘the big one’ is a classic time when sabotage would be used.”
Giles is in less doubt. “If you disregard some of the more random ones, then the core of this, the reconnaissance and the preparations for attacks on logistics and communications across Europe, and on emergency preparedness… if there’s a theme that brings this together it’s one we identified as far back as 2019: Russia looking at ways it can prepare for an overt assault on Europe and preventing its disaster response,” he says. “We’ve been ticking off the list ever since.”
Little by little, day by day, Russia is testing the West’s patience. The question now is whether we’re going to do anything about it.
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