It’s a sabotage

At the end of January, Norway’s coast guard and police surrounded a cargo vessel in the Baltic Sea, taking it and its Russian crew into custody, towing it into a Norwegian port. Why? The ship had been sailing between two Russian ports, Murmansk and St. Petersburg, but en route, it apparently severed an undersea cable between Latvia and Sweden—and all signs point to sabotage by Moscow.

Earlier the same week, Swedish authorities seized another vessel suspected of severing another undersea cable. Weeks earlier, on Christmas Day, undersea power and data cables between Finland and Estonia were cut by a ship in Russia’s shadow fleet—Moscow’s flotilla of unregistered vessels used to evade Western sanctions.

These incidents appear to belong to a growing pattern of sabotage, assassination, and terror operations Moscow is conducting across Europe. In mid-January, Poland’s prime minister accused Russia of plotting to blow up European cargo planes: Last summer, parcels with explosive devices caught fire in an airport warehouse in the U.K., as well as on a tarmac in Germany, and authorities found two other incendiary devices in parcels in Poland. They all involved a magnesium-based accelerant that Western sources attributed to Russia’s GRU military intelligence directorate. Western intelligence officials say these operations were trial runs for large-scale attacks on airliners bound for the United States.

In 2024, Kremlin agents also killed a Russian pilot who had defected to Spain. In Germany, police foiled a plot to kill the CEO of the country’s biggest arms manufacturer, Rheinmetall. German prosecutors also arrested two men suspected of planning strikes on industrial and military sites. In Finland, Russian operatives staged a series of sabotage break-ins at water-treatment plants; in Sweden, officials encouraged citizens to boil their water before using it. In Bulgaria, Russian saboteurs attacked a munitions factory.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin has been expanding its meddling in elections across Europe—through social-media campaigns, illegal payments to parties and candidates, or outright vote-buying. What’s Moscow up to?

Darrell Driver is a professor at the U.S. Army War College and the co-director of its Advanced Strategic Arts Program, the former deputy director of strategy in the U.S. military’s European Command, and a retired colonel in the U.S. Army. Driver says the goal is clear: Moscow wants European countries to stop supporting Ukraine in the war. And the methods are recognizable: The sabotage campaign follows longstanding Russian psychological tactics. Ultimately, the Kremlin wants to shift perceptions of risk in Europe, so European leaders—and voters—come to believe that backing Kyiv just isn’t worth the potential costs of bigger attacks.

But the campaign isn’t just about the war, soon to be in its fourth year. It’s also vital to Moscow that Kyiv doesn’t move closer to the West by joining the European Union or NATO. At some point, Russia and Ukraine will stop fighting on the battlefield—but if the West decides to try to bring Ukraine into its institutions, the Kremlin could well decide that it needs to keep fighting in the shadows …

Michael Bluhm: What patterns do you see in the targets of these operations?