Russia has significantly strengthened its sabotage campaign over the past two years as Europe and the US tried to pressure it to curb support for Ukraine, according to a new study released Tuesday.
The report, by the Strategic and International Research Centre, is one of the first reports attempting to quantify the scale of Moscow's secret campaign targeting subsea cables, warehouses and railways. It turns out that Russia's attacks in Europe quadrupled between 2022 and 2023 and tripled again between 2023 and 2024.
“This is an important tool that Russians use in collaboration with traditional wars in Ukraine,” said Seth G. Jones, the author of the study and former advisor to the US military. “It makes little sense for Russia to push its troops across the border into the Baltic or Finland right now. But their retrieval for these countries offering weapons is to chase after their businesses, assassination plans for staff, and threaten critical infrastructure.”
According to Western officials, Russia has led Washington to halt the war in Ukraine. However, experts believe that if the government develops new plans to support Ukraine with arms and peacekeeping forces, it will continue its campaign against European goals.
Anger over Russian sabotage could affect Europe's response to a US-led push to end the war in Ukraine. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tass said in a social media post on Monday that Lithuanian officials confirmed the assessment that Russia is responsible for a series of fires in Lithuanian capitals, Warsaw and Vilnius shopping centres. “It's good to know before negotiating,” Tass wrote. “This is the nature of this state.”
The message to the countries that support Ukraine is that Russia can impose costs and increase them. There is little evidence that the Russian campaign was in effect last year. But as the US is clearly retreating from the support of its Ukraine and European allies, the question is whether the secret Russian campaign can be more successful by pushing the country to rethink their support.
A report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that around 28% of Russian attacks were opposed to transport targets, 20% were on industrial targets, and 20% were on subsea cables, pipelines and other infrastructure. Overall, this study tracked 50 separate sabotages from 2022 to the present.
Russia tried to manage the campaign and tried not to escalate too much. Jones said they tried to curb the level of violence to avoid inadvertently driving support in Ukraine.
“We don't see many people dead right now,” he said. “If the train gets off track by carrying weapons, that's one thing. If it's full of people, it's going to be completely different.”
Those killed as part of a secret campaign, such as the former Russian helicopter pilot in Spain, were primarily exiles. Russia tried to avoid killing foreigners, but a Western intelligence reporter said last year they tried to kill the chief executive of a prominent German weapons manufacturer.
American and European officials are concerned about the miscalculations caused by Russia and the inability to accurately control some of its own operatives.
After the Russian Intelligence Agency plotted the placement of fired Cen devices on DHL cargo planes last year, the Biden administration warned President Vladimir V. Putin that the sabotage of defeating the aircraft would elicit a serious response. European leaders and NATO repeatedly called for attacks, issued warnings and expelled Russian diplomats and spies. However, the report found that these efforts “failed to force Russia” would halt the campaign.
This effort is part of the Russian tradition of secret sabotage known as an aggressive measure that the KGB honed during the Cold War. Russian military intelligence, known as the GRU, is leading the current campaign, The New York Times reported in May.
The operation intensified when the Kremlin approved a push after Britain and Germany announced new aid for Ukraine, according to the Western intelligence agency. The German publication Wirtschaftswoche has reported its decision to expand its disruption campaign, including the use of other Russian intelligence agencies.
The new study found no recorded attacks in Russia-friendly European countries, such as Serbia and Hungary. Meanwhile, Poland, a hub of Western aid flowing into Ukraine, has been repeatedly targeted.
“They are clearly making concrete decisions on who they are chasing and who they are not chasing,” Jones said of Russia.
While it has attracted a lot of attention in recent months that Russian shadow vessels are trying to avoid sanctions, Jones said the majority of the attacks are explosive or burnt-out devices that cause fires in factories, warehouses and other facilities.
He added that there have been no instances of sabotage around US bases in recent weeks. Last year, as the sabotage campaign was strengthened, military authorities ordered our bases in Europe to raise vigilance levels.
“We have never seen any US targets in recent weeks,” Jones said.
