Truc Phuong
Former KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin, Russia’s current president, has never stopped his campaign to disrupt the West. On July 26, 2024, as the Paris Olympics were opening, anonymous attackers sabotaged the French national railway. So far, no organization has claimed responsibility for the attack. The French interior minister has hinted that “far-left” extremists may have been responsible. However, the world’s intelligence experts are looking in one direction: Moscow, as Javed Ali, a counterterrorism expert and former member of the US National Intelligence Council, recently told PBS NewsHour…
Although there is no clear evidence linking Russia, these suspicions are not without foundation. The French government has taken a firm stance in support of Ukraine; while Moscow has been upset by the International Olympic Committee’s ban on Russian athletes from Paris 2024. Since the beginning of 2024, European and US intelligence officials have detected a series of suspicious sabotage activities across Europe linked to Russia’s GRU intelligence agency, occurring in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Germany, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
In March 2024, a Ukrainian warehouse in Leyton, East London, was burned down. British police arrested four people, accusing them of planning sabotage and assisting Russian agents. The following month, a BAE (British aerospace, security and defence) facility in South Wales exploded and caught fire, a familiar pattern of sabotage. Also in April, German authorities arrested two men with dual German-Russian citizenship on suspicion of plotting to sabotage a military base in Bavaria. One of the suspects had been in contact with Russian agents. In May, Poland arrested three men, two Belarusians and one Polish, on charges of being linked to Russian intelligence and directly carrying out acts of arson and sabotage.
More shockingly, in mid-July, according to CNN, US and German intelligence coordinated to foil a plot by Russian agents to assassinate Armin Papperger, the chairman of Rheinmetall, a leading German arms manufacturer that supplies artillery shells to the Ukrainian army. This incident, (the plot) to assassinate a Western citizen on Western soil, marked a change in Russian intelligence operations, showing that Putin was increasingly reckless, opening a new chapter in Russia’s gray zone activities in the West. It should be emphasized that even during the Cold War, the Soviet Union was cautious about carrying out similar operations.
Over the past six months, Russia’s newly recruited spy network has been signaled that it needs to be ready to attack Western industrial and transportation infrastructure—and in some cases, Western citizens, Foreign Affairs reported on August 9, 2024. In deploying its sabotage tactics inside the West, the Kremlin appears to be seeking to escalate as much as possible while avoiding a military response. The Western community is largely unprepared for this new challenge. For now, the United States and its European allies are only dealing with individual attacks rather than responding with a broader counterattack. NATO countries have yet to develop a common approach to the threat. With the potential to cause widespread chaos, Russia’s terrorist model is becoming a destabilizing threat, especially at a time of political uncertainty in Europe and a tense presidential election in the United States.
In fact, even during the Cold War, Soviet intelligence agencies never used such actions to disrupt the West. When the Cold War began, the Soviet spy agencies—the KGB and the GRU—planned a series of sabotage attacks in Western Europe and the United States. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union began planting explosives throughout Western Europe, and even in the United States. However, they were not used and were reserved for what the Soviets called “special periods,” i.e., in the event of a full-scale war with the West.
When he came to power in the late 1990s, former KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin was clearly well aware of the destructive capabilities of Soviet spies, with much of the Soviet intelligence infrastructure remaining largely intact. In October 1999, just two months after Putin assumed the prime ministership and became the official successor to President Boris Yeltsin, the U.S. House Armed Services Committee held a hearing on “Russian threat perceptions and possible plans for sabotage activities against the United States.”
During the hearing, Curt Weldon, chairman of the Military Research and Development Subcommittee, emphasized that Russia never disclosed the existence of weapons and explosives that the Soviet Union hid in Western countries during the Cold War. These secret arsenals never disappeared. In the late 1990s, Soviet weapons and explosives were discovered in Switzerland and Belgium. That was also the period when the FBI began investigating whether there were KGB arsenals on U.S. soil. However, the investigation stalled as the United States dealt with the war on terror after the horrific events of 9/11.
Over the past two decades, as he has expanded his power, Putin has revived his sabotage tactics abroad. A series of brutal assassinations have been carried out by Russian agents around the world, from the Middle East to Europe. In 2004, Russian agents assassinated former Chechen Vice President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in Qatar. Since then, assassinations with the “signature” of the Russian state and the “fingerprint” of Vladimir Putin have never stopped. A series of Russian exiles and opposition figures have been mysteriously poisoned to death. At home, a series of Russian journalists have had their skulls blown off in broad daylight…
In 2014, when Russia invaded Eastern Ukraine, Putin intensified his campaign of sabotage and terrorism in many places. In October and December of the same year, a series of ammunition depots in the Czech Republic (a NATO member) were bombed and destroyed. In 2016, Russia even interfered in the US presidential election. With a plan to put Donald Trump in the White House at all costs, Russian spies launched a fake news campaign on an unprecedented scale in the history of world media, destroying the image of candidate Hillary Clinton…
Russia continues to disrupt the US presidential election this year. In late July 2024, US intelligence reported that Russia has been relentlessly spreading disinformation related to the US presidential campaign. Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned that the threat of foreign disinformation to the US this year is even more dangerous than the 2020 election, saying that the 2024 election is “in the crosshairs of malign actors around the world.”
According to Reuters, the Kremlin is quickly changing its script to sabotage the US election in the face of recent developments, especially the assassination of former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race to pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. Specifically, after Trump’s assassination, Russia’s fake news machine immediately amplified the arguments that the Democratic Party’s statements led to the assassination, that Biden or the Ukrainian government was behind the whole incident…