sabotage, manipulation and organized crime – L’Express

It was almost midnight on March 20 when a car stopped in front of the warehouse belonging to the transport company Meest, in north London. Under the eye of a video surveillance camera, two men come out to douse the roller shutters with gasoline, before setting them on fire and running away. It was only after four hours of intervention that around sixty firefighters managed to bring the fire under control.

A simple criminal act? No, Scotland Yard quickly identified and imprisoned five alleged participants, including a twenty-year-old Englishman, suspected of having been paid by Moscow. Meest specializes in delivering packages to and from the Ukrainian city of Lviv, where it has already sent around fifty humanitarian aid trucks since 2022. For parquet, there is no doubt : this fire “was intended to send the message that if you help Ukraine, there will be punishment.” Another disturbing fact: ten days after the fire, Meest suffered another, in its premises in the suburbs of Madrid…

It is not just England and Spain that are affected by such destabilizing operations. Determined to make Europe pay for its support of Ukraine, Russia has intensified its malicious actions on the continent in recent months. “These are acts of sabotage, acts of violence” and other “hybrid activities” which “constitute a security threat,” NATO member countries denounced at the beginning of May, adding that this “does not would not dissuade us from continuing to support Ukraine.

“A psychological bath of fear and threats”

These sabotages serve as much to disrupt the supply chain of aid to Ukraine as to shake opinions. “They aim to immerse us in a psychological bath of fear and permanent threats, to make Westerners less capable of making the right decisions when necessary,” said Mathieu Boulègue, associate researcher at the Chatham House think tank. . And what do the consequences matter: “The Russians don’t care, they have nothing to lose by committing this type of action,” continues the Russia specialist. “It’s not just a conventional war, we have gone beyond this course, but a form of open, permanent, low-intensity conflict.”

Particularly targeted, Poland announced the arrest of nine people, of Ukrainian, Belarusian and Polish nationality, “directly involved on behalf of Russian services in acts of sabotage”, according to Prime Minister Donald Tusk – who announced an additional budget of 23.5 million euros to strengthen its counter-espionage. Some of the suspects were planning a fire on a paint factory, others an attack against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. A last one would be the sponsor of the hammer attack, in Lithuania, of Leonid Volkov, a close friend of the late Russian opponent, Alexeï Navalny.

Favored targets, the Baltic States are also increasing arrests – around fifteen in Estonia alone since the start of the year – and are on maximum alert in the face of this threat. “The Russian intelligence and security services have become significantly more aggressive,” notes the Estonian domestic intelligence service, Kapo, in its latest report. “While they use cruder methods, they also act more often undercover.”

The authorities of Finland and Estonia believe that Russia is behind the sabotage of Balticonnector, the gas pipeline connecting the two countries, in October. The drop in pressure in the pipeline corresponds to the passage of a ship registered in China, the Newnew Polar Bear, whose crew was Russian. Investigators believe that the boat’s anchor may have caused damage. The episode is reminiscent of another, when fiber optic cables were damaged near the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, in January 2022, at the same time as a Russian fishing vessel was sailing in the area. A Norwegian authorities drone revealed intensive bottom trawling around the cables.

“Russia uses indirect means to strike, without this triggering a radical counter-offensive, notes the former colonel of the DGSE, Olivier Mas. Its services have the skills, the ‘niaque’ and the spirit for this kind of crap.” The German authorities have discovered this since the invasion of Ukraine. For them, it is Moscow which would be behind the cutting of cables which interrupted rail traffic in the north of the country, in October 2022. The European rail network is a privileged target: sabotage attempts in the Czech Republic, via attacks cyber on the signaling system, have been postponed. Air traffic, another: jammers near the Estonian border and in Kaliningrad regularly disrupt the guidance systems of civil aircraft over the Baltic Sea.

Subcontracting to organized crime

“The risk of acts of sabotage sponsored by the Russian state has increased considerably,” admitted Thomas Haldenwang, the head of German domestic intelligence (BfV), specifying that Moscow was ready to carry out operations with “high potential damage”. Recently, two German citizens, holders of Russian nationality, were arrested in Bavaria. In contact with a “person linked to the Russian secret services”, according to the German prosecutor’s office, one of them had agreed to commit sabotage “on industrial and military sites”. Their locations also included the American base at Grafenwoehr, where Ukrainian soldiers are being trained in the use of American Abrams tanks.

Other losses could be attributed to Russia. An investigation must determine the exact origin of the fire which ravaged part of a factory in the western suburbs of Berlin belonging to the Diehl group, the manufacturer of an anti-missile system popular with the Ukrainians in the face of Russian air threats, the IRIS- T. Another is underway concerning an explosion at the BAE Systèmes munitions production site in Wales.

This would not be the first time that Russia has attacked the defense infrastructure of NATO member countries. In 2014, officers from its military intelligence service, the GRU, blew up a Soviet ammunition depot in the Czech Republic, from which the Ukrainians could subsequently have drawn. The same GRU was accused of blowing up several similar warehouses in Bulgaria, before and after the invasion of Ukraine. Operations all the more damaging as this country is one of the last European manufacturers of shells and cartridges adapted to the Soviet guns of the Ukrainian forces.

The hand of the GRU would also be behind the fire at the Meest warehouse in London, but through intermediaries of whom the authorities assume, four of them, were unaware of acting for Russia. “Using organized crime is an effective way to recruit […] without the participants needing to know that they are working under Russian control, explains a report from the British think tank RUSI. This allows for denial.”

Russian services forced to reinvent themselves

The time no longer seems to be for operations carried out by agents sent on site, as during the assassination attempt, in the English city of Salisbury, of defector Sergei Skripal. Western services are more vigilant than ever. And the expulsion of hundreds of false diplomats – but real spies – throughout Europe, following the February 2022 invasion, has led Russian services to favor a form of paid subcontracting.

Two public opinion manipulation operations aimed at discrediting France and attributed to Russia illustrate this trend. Last October, after the October 7 massacre and the start of the war in Gaza, blue Stars of David were stenciled on Parisian buildings and relayed on social networks as an expression of anti-Semitic hatred. The authors, a couple from Moldova, had been paid for a pro-Russian Moldovan businessman. In mid-May, red hands were painted in front of the Holocaust memorial, this time by Bulgarian nationals.

In both cases, Moscow’s spies had only to learn from the methods of their elders. Swastikas were painted on the Cologne synagogue in 1959, before others appeared, along with anti-Semitic slogans, elsewhere in West Germany, but also in France and other European countries. This vandalism sparked strong public reactions and led to a demonstration of 40,000 people in West Berlin to denounce the return of Nazi anti-Semitism. These were in reality “active measures”, piloted from the USSR to discredit the FRG and sow discord with its allies, as KGB defectors subsequently revealed.

Other episodes of the Cold War are enough to put Western authorities on alert. “Planning sabotage operations is something quite old for the Russians, who began to set up dedicated networks in the 1920s,” explains Cyril Gelibter, doctoral student in the history of diplomacy and specialist in Russian services. has always had officers stationed in capitals to study the infrastructures, particularly oil, to be sabotaged.”

The defection in 1971 of Oleg Lyaline, a KGB agent based in London, revealed the extent of the preparations for destabilizing actions planned in the United Kingdom. And this in times of peace, but also in the event of war, with the aim of terrorizing the population. Among the operations listed was the flooding of the London Underground, the elimination of anti-Soviet figures and the destruction of radar capable of giving warning in the event of a ballistic missile attack – potentially nuclear – on a base in Yorkshire by a group of saboteurs landed clandestinely on the coast.

If tensions were to increase further with the West, Russia is already planning its next sabotage. In October, she performed a strange ballet of comings and goings to a brand new spy ship, the Evgeny Gorigledzhan, in the Fehmarn Belt Strait, where four rail and road tunnels are being dug between Denmark and Germany. Another vessel, Admiral Vladimirsky, also officially dedicated to oceanographic research, visited the different wind farms of the Baltic and the North Sea. Enough to identify their weak points, test the vigilance of Westerners and strike on D-Day.