RUSSIA’S CAMPAIGN of sabotage against Europe has escalated so drastically in recent months that on September 18th Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, summoned French party leaders and presidential candidates to the Elysée Palace to brief them on the threat of civilian casualties.
“No one is safe,” Mr Macron told them, according to Le Monde, a daily. The Russians , he said, aim “to intimidate us and break our support for the Ukrainians”.
Because russia has been linked to other grey-zone incidents, it benefits from the fear and doubt even without being definitely blamed, yet. A tepid response by allies would cast doubt on that commitment. The havoc on the Dutch railways was a good illustration.
A day earlier Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, had said he had intelligence that Russia intended to hit European countries supporting Ukraine with drones or missiles, then claim the strikes were accidental. Russia wanted to “paralyse” NATO, he said, by testing Article 5 of their treaty, which pledges that an attack on one will be treated as an attack on all. Dutch authorities have not said whether the sabotage was linked to Russia or was conducted by angry farmers, who had blocked roads during protests on the same day.
Russia has been staging covert operations and deniable provocations against European countries for many years. These have included incursions by reconnaissance drones, hacking, arson, parcel bombs targeting cargo flights and plots to kill executives of leading European arms firms. In recent months the pace of such shadowy attacks appears to have risen again. In just the week before Mr Tusk and Mr Macron spoke out, Italian jets on a NATO mission shot down an explosives-laden drone that had flown into Lithuania from Belarus, and others scrambled to intercept two Russian fighter jets that violated NATO airspace. In the same week, Russian drones struck a train in Ukraine within 2km of a Polish border crossing, soon after Boris Johnson, a former British prime minister, and several European security officials had travelled through. In the Netherlands the railway network was recently disrupted by the co-ordinated placement of pipes and cables on tracks around the country.
Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022 they have increased.
The Russian operations have three main goals, according to analysts and security officials: trying to coerce European countries into halting their support for Ukraine; raising the costs of providing that support; and attempting to make NATO look powerless. “It feels like we are moving from a series of grey-zone incidents into a continuous campaign,” says Andrew Thomson, a British former diplomat who is now at Monarch, a German security provider.
