Putin’s New Agents of Chaos

On July 26, on the day of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris, unknown attackers pulled off a coordinated sabotage operation on France’s national railway, leaving millions of passengers stranded. No one initially claimed responsibility for the attack, which is still being investigated; France’s interior minister has suggested that “ultra-left” extremists may have been responsible. Yet intelligence experts have also asked whether Russia might have been involved. “The Russian angle is certainly a strong one,” Javed Ali, a counterterrorism expert and former member of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, told PBS NewsHour after the attack.

Although there has been no clear evidence implicating Russia, there are strong grounds for these suspicions. Over the past few months, the French government has taken a more aggressive stance in its support for Ukraine, and the Russian government holds particular grievances against the International Olympic Committee, which banned Russian athletes from competing in the games this year. What is more, since the early months of this year, European and U.S. intelligence officials have connected a spate of sabotage operations across Europe to Russia’s GRU intelligence service. These attacks have involved arson and other tactics. They have sometimes targeted transport networks. And they have occurred in more than half a dozen European countries, including the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

In March 2024, a Ukraine-linked warehouse in Leyton, East London, was set on fire. The British police arrested four people on charges that included planning an arson attack and assisting Russian intelligence. The following month, a facility in South Wales belonging to the British defense, security, and aerospace company BAE was hit by an explosion and caught fire—an attack that has not yet been attributed but which follows the pattern of others. Also in April, German authorities arrested two men with dual German and Russian citizenship on suspicion of plotting sabotage attacks on a military base in Bavaria, accusing one of the suspects of being in contact with Russian intelligence. And in May, Poland detained three men—two of them Belarusian and one a Polish citizen—for carrying out acts of arson and sabotage on behalf of Russia.

Even more startling, in mid-July, CNN reported that U.S. and German intelligence had disrupted a plot by Russian agents to assassinate Armin Papperger, the head of the leading German arms maker Rheinmetall, which has been a major supplier of artillery shells to Ukraine. The assassination of a Western national, on Western soil, would mark a dramatic departure from previous Russian tactics abroad—and even those of the Soviet Union.

Drawing on a resurgent Russian spy force and a new army of local recruits in target countries, Russian President Vladimir Putin has opened a new chapter in Russian gray zone operations in the West. Over the past six months, Russian-backed forces have signaled that they are prepared to attack Western industrial and transport infrastructure—and also, in some cases, Western citizens. Moreover, in deploying such tactics, the Kremlin appears to be seeking to escalate as much as it can without triggering a military response.

The West has found itself completely unprepared for this new challenge. For now, the United States and its European allies have dealt with each attack separately rather than as part of a broader campaign. And although some operations have been disrupted, NATO countries have thus far failed to develop a collective approach to the threat. With the potential for causing large-scale chaos, or worse, these attacks could become a destabilizing threat at a time of political uncertainty in Europe and a closely fought presidential election in the United States.

THE BOLSHEVIK UNDERGROUND

Although Russia’s sabotage campaign has caught the West by surprise, it is not entirely new. In June, Philip H. J. Davies, a leading British intelligence scholar, wrote that “the West has had three decades to collectively, institutionally forget about the threat from nation-state sabotage.” In fact, even during the Cold War, although they planned for such actions, Soviet intelligence agencies never used them against the West. It was even earlier, before World War II, that the Soviets perfected this strategy.

After the Russian Revolution, in 1917, the Bolsheviks viewed sabotage operations as an effective way to target the West. At its founding, the Communist International (Comintern)—the worldwide organization of communist parties—ordered its member parties to infiltrate weapons and ammunition facilities in their home countries, and Lenin forced them to also support covert militant cells. These underground cells soon posed such a big problem that the British government conditioned formal recognition of the Soviet Union on the condition that the Soviets put an end to communist activities in the British military and in munitions factories. But during World War II, Stalin disbanded the Comintern in a desperate bid to please the Americans, and the sabotage operations abruptly ended.

With the onset of the Cold War, the two Soviet spy agencies—the KGB and the military intelligence unit the GRU—devised new plans for sabotage operations in Western Europe and the United States. In the 1950s, the Soviets began planting caches of high explosives and arms across Western Europe, and reportedly in the United States, for this purpose. But they were to be used only in the event of what the Soviets called a “special period”—a euphemism for all-out war with the West.

Since these plans were never activated, Western spy agencies concluded that stepped up deterrence strategies had forced the KGB and the GRU to set aside offensive subversion operations in the West. But the tactics were never fully discarded, as Putin’s intelligence forces have now made clear.

THE DICTATOR’S DYNAMITE

To understand the motivations for Russia’s return to sabotage, it is important to recognize that the Soviets’ reasons for not using it had nothing to do with Western deterrence efforts. At the beginning of the Cold War, the Soviet intelligence agencies had plenty of resources available for precisely this approach. After World War II, Soviet military intelligence recruited many agents with long experience in sabotage.

Take Ivan Shchelokov, a young but battle-hardened fighter pilot with an impressive record of blowing up bridges in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Shchelokov and his wife, Nadia, were deployed to Western Europe by the GRU as assassins, their main task “eliminating traitors,” including prisoners of war who had fought for the Germans. A veteran of the Soviets’ brutal war with the Nazis, Shchelokov was aware of the risks. “After a year, out of the five couples carrying out these missions, only Nadia and I were still alive,” he later wrote. Still, he would not have hesitated to blow up ammunition factories or military facilities—or kill the directors of those factories—if ordered to do so.

In Moscow, there were also experienced operators ready to run agents like Shchelokov. In the early 1950s, Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenty Beria assigned Nahum Eitingon, the chief architect of the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky, in Mexico, to form a special operations brigade to lay plans for blowing up U.S. military bases in Europe. But the order to activate those plans never came. The Soviet Union’s internal politics was the chief reason. 

In the 1950s, the Soviets began planting high explosives and arms across Western Europe.

In the thaw that followed Stalin’s death and the purging of Beria, there was a backlash against the all-powerful security and intelligence services among the Soviet elite, many of whom had barely survived Stalin’s purges, and under Stalin’s successor Nikita Khruschev, the Soviet leadership sought to bring the security services under Communist Party control. As a result, the intelligence agencies got rid of their most adventurous forces, including Eitingon, who was sent to the gulag for 11 years; Shchelokov was brought home and assigned to a special forces unit in the Leningrad military district. In the years to come, the Soviet military intelligence and the KGB adopted a more cautious approach.

Nonetheless, Soviet intelligence carefully watched the effect of sabotage operations by other groups in Western Europe during the Cold War. In the 1950s, for example, West Germany struggled to find a response to a series of attacks and assassinations targeting German arms traders who supplied weapons to Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN). These attacks were attributed to the Red Hand, a supposed extremist group of French settlers in North Africa, but in reality they were orchestrated by French intelligence, the SDECE. West Germany seemed unable to stop these actions, which put pressure on the German authorities to tighten the rules for the arms trade—exactly what the French wanted.

In the later decades of the Cold War, although the Soviets avoided using sabotage, they understood how effective the attacks were, and kept the option in reserve. This expertise would prove crucial to Putin when he began his broader war against the West in 2014, and especially after Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

PUTIN’S PYROMANIACS

When Putin came to power at the end of the 1990s, he inherited the Soviets’ sabotage capabilities, along with much of the Soviet intelligence infrastructure mostly intact, with the SVR absorbing the foreign intelligence branch of the KGB. In October 1999, just two months after Putin became prime minister and was named an official successor to President Boris Yeltsin, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Armed Services Committee held a hearing on Russian threat perception and possible plans for sabotage against the United States.

During the hearing, Curt Weldon, chair of the Military Research and Development Subcommittee, noted that Russia had never disclosed the existence of arms and explosives that the Soviets had stashed in Western countries during the Cold War. Yet these hidden stockpiles were still there: in the late 1990s, Soviet arms and explosives were discovered in Switzerland and Belgium, and the FBI was investigating whether there were similar KGB arms caches in the United States. But the investigation was soon overshadowed by the 9/11 attacks, from which point Russia began to be considered an ally in the global war on terror.

Over the past two decades, as he has extended his power, Putin has gradually revived the more ambitious overseas tactics used by Stalin until World War II. In 2004, Russian intelligence agents assassinated former Chechen Vice President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in Qatar. Ever since, Russian state-sponsored assassinations have never really stopped, and soon came to include a series of poisonings of Russian exiles and opposition figures who had gone to the West.

Then, in 2014, when Russia invaded eastern Ukraine, Putin added sabotage back into the mix, as well. In October and December of that year, a series of ammunition depots in the Czech Republic, a NATO country, were bombed and ultimately destroyed; the Czechs had been supplying weapons to Ukraine. The Czech government didn’t seem to know how to respond; only in 2021, seven years later, would it finally point the finger at Russia.

Following Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the West began to adopt a naming and shaming approach, calling out Russian covert operations in an effort to get Moscow to back down. But Russia’s military intelligence showed no signs of slowing down, and by the late 2010s, Putin’s spy agencies were recruiting a new generation of operatives who combined toughness, no-questions-asked loyalty, and adventurism from Spetsnaz, Russian special forces, some of which were recruited from among veterans of the wars in Syria and eastern Ukraine.

In 2022, Moscow’s badly botched invasion of Ukraine, and the failure of Russian intelligence to anticipate the Ukrainian and Western response, temporarily put these hybrid intelligence activities into disarray. For a while, Russia’s military intelligence struggled to regain its footing. But as we wrote in Foreign Affairs last winter, as the war in Ukraine quickly evolved into a broader spy war against the West, Russia’s intelligence and security services rapidly regrouped and found a new sense of purpose.

Thanks to the fighting in Ukraine, there was a new wave of war-hardened veterans ready to do whatever it took to disrupt Western aid to Ukraine. It was only a matter of time before the Russian agencies turned to sabotage. They also began recruiting local affiliates in European countries, mostly through criminal networks and sometimes including citizens of Belarus and Ukraine. By the beginning of 2024, Russia was ready to roll out the attacks that have been unfolding across Europe this spring and summer.

Among the boldest of these plans was the effort to assassinate Papperger, the German arms executive. This attack could be a test: Moscow may have been trying to assess the German reaction and the potential of such an operation for changing German public opinion about Germany’s support for Ukraine. In April, Papperger’s summer house in Lower Saxony was set on fire. Even as leftist activists claimed responsibility, Russian agents were following Papperger around planning his assassination.

EUROPE’S SCORCHING EARTH

By now, Western spy agencies can no longer claim ignorance of the Russian arson and sabotage campaign, and U.S. and NATO officials have begun raising the alarm. The Kremlin appears to be seeking to have Europeans experience more directly the costs of the war in hopes of eroding public support for the Ukrainian war effort. Moreover, a larger attack on Western infrastructure could have far-reaching, destabilizing effects.

Still, Putin’s sabotage strategy has put the West in a difficult situation. Given Western efforts to avoid direct conflict with Russia, Western leaders are reluctant to call for a larger military response to these attacks, which could trigger uncontained escalation. Even now, after months of such operations, Western leaders seem prepared to look the other way when they deem it necessary. 

In early August, in the landmark prisoners-for-hostages deal with Russia, the United States, Germany, and other Western countries agreed to return several high value Russian intelligence operatives in exchange for the release of Russian opposition leaders, journalists, and human rights activists, including The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who had been held in Russian prisons. Among those handed over by the West was the convicted assassin Vadim Krasikov, a close confidant of Putin who has been directly implicated in operations in the West. That Putin went to the airport to greet the assassins and spies in person will inevitably boost the morale and aggressiveness of the intelligence agencies.

Political expediency aside, the West may be limited in the kinds of counteroperations it can launch in the face of continued acts of Russian sabotage. For one thing, the United States and its allies cannot easily respond in kind, because they are not officially at war with Russia. But there is another problem, as well: U.S. and European counterintelligence agencies lack the ability to implement full-scale measures to stop Russian sabotage operations, because to be truly effective, these must include drastic steps that are in practice only feasible under totalitarian regimes.

After all, the Soviets attempted to control and surveil all foreigners’ movements within the Soviet Union, but such an approach would be anathema in any Western democracy. What the West needs is a collective intelligence strategy, and it needs to start now—before a large-scale attack makes calibrated responses far more difficult.