«The fire that broke out in the Diehl Metall factory in the Lichterfelde suburb of Berlin on May 3rd was not in itself suspicious. The facility, a metals plant, stored sulphuric acid and copper cyanide, two chemicals that can combine dangerously when ignited. Accidents happen. What raised eyebrows was the fact that Diehl’s parent company makes the iris-t air-defence system which Ukraine is using to parry Russian missiles. There is no evidence that this fire was an act of sabotage. If the idea is plausible it is because there is ample evidence that Russia’s covert war in Europe is intensifying.
In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent. Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted. The men are accused of aiding the Wagner Group, a mercenary group that has been active in Ukraine and is now under the GRU’s control. On May 8th Britain announced that in response to “malign activity” it was, among other steps, expelling Russia’s defence attaché, an “undeclared” ´GRU officer.
A number of Baltic states have also accused Russian intelligence services of recruiting middlemen to attack property and deface monuments. In February Estonia said it had arrested ten people and broken up a plot to attack the cars of the country’s interior minister and the editor of a news website. Latvia’s security service said it had detained an Estonian-Russian citizen who had poured paint on a memorial to Latvian soldiers who fought the Red Army in the second world war. In March an ally of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in Russian custody in February, was attacked with a hammer in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius.
None of this is new. In 2011 the GRUblew up an ammunition depot in Lovnidol in Bulgaria. It followed that up with two explosions at the Vrbetice arms depot in the Czech Republic in October and December 2014, where ammunition bound for Ukraine was being held. All these incidents were tied to members of Unit 29155, the GRU’s sabotage-and-assassination squad. Other unexplained explosions occurred at Bulgarian arms factories in 2015, 2020 and 2022. But European officials believe that the GRU has been given a fresh mandate and funding for what Russia calls “active measures”. On May 2nd nato published a statement describing these incidents as “part of an intensifying campaign of activities” including “sabotage, acts of violence, cyber and electronic interference, disinformation campaigns, and other hybrid operations.”
Russian cyber operations have also grown bolder. A report published by Google’s Mandiant cybersecurity division in April noted that “hacktivist” groups with loose ties to the GRU had made credible boasts of manipulating the control systems for water utilities in America and Poland, and what the hackers thought was a hydroelectric facility in France. The GRU had previously conducted sophisticated cyber-attacks on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure both before and after the full-scale invasion of 2022. That it was willing to threaten—if not yet disrupt—the same infrastructure in Europe suggests a new level of recklessness.
In some ways that is curious. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, re-crowned on May 7th after a sham election, believes time is on his side. His country’s armed forces have the initiative on the battlefield. They are making slow but steady progress in eastern Ukraine, capturing around 20 square kilometres each week. On May 10th Russia appeared to launch a new ground offensive in the Kharkiv region. Mr Putin can look forward to an American presidential election in November which might return Donald Trump, a sceptic about aid to Ukraine, to the White House.»
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