Vladimir Putin’s spies are plotting global chaos

“We’ve seen arson, sabotage and more: dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness,” says Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security and counter-intelligence agency, in a rare update on the threat posed by Russia and the GRU, its military-intelligence agency.

“The GRU, in particular, is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets,” he said on October 8.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is “trying to hit us all over the place”.Credit: AP

Russia’s war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a crescendo of aggression, subversion and meddling elsewhere. In particular, Russian sabotage in Europe has grown dramatically.

“The risk level has changed,” Vice-Admiral Nils Andreas Stensones, the head of the Norwegian Intelligence Service, said in September. “We see acts of sabotage happening in Europe now.”

Sir Richard Moore, the head of MI6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence agency, put it more bluntly: “Russian intelligence services have gone a bit feral, frankly.”

The Kremlin’s mercenaries have squeezed Western rivals out of several African states. Poland’s security services say Russian hackers have tried to paralyse the country in the political, military, and economic spheres. Its propagandists have pumped disinformation around the world. Its armed forces want to put a nuclear weapon in orbit. Russian foreign policy has long dabbled in chaos. Now it seems to aim at little else.

Start with the summer of sabotage.

In April, Germany arrested two German-Russian nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU. The same month, Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass to the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, a hub for arms to Ukraine; and Britain charged several men over an arson attack on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London. The men were accused of aiding the Wagner Group, a mercenary outfit now under the GRU’s control.

In June, France arrested a Russian-Ukrainian national who was wounded after attempting to make a bomb in his hotel room in Paris.

In July, it emerged that Russia had plotted to kill Armin Papperger, the head of Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest arms firm.

Ken McCallum, director general of MI5.Credit: AP

On September 9, air traffic at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport was shut down for more than two hours after drones were spotted over runways.

“We suspect it was a deliberate act,” a police spokesperson said.

American officials warn that Russian vessels are reconnoitring underwater cables.

Even where Russia has not resorted to violence, it has sought to stir the pot in other ways. The Baltic states have arrested a number of people for what they say are Russian-sponsored provocations. French intelligence officials say that Russia was responsible for the appearance of coffins draped with the French flag and bearing the message “French soldiers of Ukraine” left at the Eiffel Tower in Paris in June. Many of these actions are aimed at fanning opposition to aid for Ukraine. But others are intended simply to widen splits in society of all kinds, even if these have little or no link to the war.

France says that Russia was also behind the graffiti of 250 Stars of David on walls in Paris in November, an effort to fuel antisemitism, which has surged since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Much of Russia’s activity has been virtual. In April, hackers with ties to the GRU seem to have manipulated control systems for water plants in America and Poland. In September, the United States, Britain, Ukraine and several other countries published details of cyberattacks by the GRU’s Unit 29155, a group that was previously known for assassinations in Europe, including a botched effort to poison Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer.

The GRU’s cyber efforts, which had been ongoing since at least 2020, were not just aimed at espionage, but also “reputational harm” by stealing and leaking information and “systematic sabotage” by destroying data, according to the US and its allies.

Beyond Europe, GRU officers have been in Yemen alongside the Houthis, a rebel group that has attacked ships in the Red Sea, ostensibly in solidarity with Palestinians. Russia, angered by America’s provision of long-range missiles to Ukraine, came close to providing weapons to the group in July, according to US officials who spoke to CNN, but reversed course at the last moment after strong opposition from Saudi Arabia. The fact that Putin was willing to alienate Muhammad bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler whom he had courted for years, is an indication of how Russia’s war has cannibalised its wider foreign policy.

Servicemen of the Wagner Group in Russia last year. Credit: AP

“What Putin is trying to do is hit us all over the place,” argues Fiona Hill, who previously served on the US national security council. She compares the strategy to the Oscar-winning film, Everything Everywhere All at Once. In Africa, for instance, Russia has used mercenaries to supplant French and American influence in the aftermath of coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. About 100 advisers from the Africa Corps, a successor to the Wagner Group, arrived in Niger in April. The US has been forced to close its last prized base in the country.

‘The risk level has changed ... We see acts of sabotage happening in Europe now.’

Vice-Admiral Nils Andreas Stensones, head of the Norwegian Intelligence Service

Russia’s meddling in the US takes a very different form. In May, Avril Haines, America’s Director of National Intelligence, called Russia “the most active foreign threat to our elections” above China or Iran. This was not merely about trying to shape US policy on Ukraine.

“Moscow most likely views such operations as a means to tear down the United States as its perceived primary adversary,” she said, “enabling Russia to promote itself as a great power.”

In July, American intelligence agencies said that they were “beginning to see Russia target specific voter demographics, promote divisive narratives, and denigrate specific politicians”.

These efforts are generally crude and ineffectual. But they are prolific, intense and sometimes innovative. In September, the US Justice Department accused two employees of RT, a Kremlin-controlled media outlet that regularly spews out Russian talking points and lurid conspiracy theories, of paying $US10 million ($15 million) to an unnamed media company in Tennessee. The company, thought to be Tenet Media, posted nearly 2000 videos on TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube. Commentators paid by the company denied wrongdoing, saying they were “victims of this scheme”. The department also seized 32 Kremlin-controlled internet domains designed to mimic legitimate news sites.

Russian propagandists are also experimenting with technology. CopyCop, a network of websites, took legitimate news articles and used ChatGPT, an AI model, to rewrite them. More than 90 French articles were modified with the prompt: “Please rewrite this article taking a conservative stance against the liberal policies of the Macron administration in favour of working-class French citizens.” Another rewritten piece included evidence of its instructions, saying: “This article … highlights the cynical tone towards the US government, NATO, and US politicians.”

Russian disinformation campaigns are hardly new, acknowledges Sergey Radchenko, a historian of Russian foreign policy, pointing to episodes such as the Tanaka memorandum, an alleged Soviet forgery that was used to discredit Japan in 1927. Nor are proxy wars or assassinations a novelty. Soviet troops were already fighting in Yemen, disguised as Egyptians, in the early 1960s, he notes. The KGB’s predecessors and successors have killed many people abroad, from Leon Trotsky to ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko.

Alexander Litvinenko in a London hospital, dying of radiation poisoning, in November 2006.Credit: AP

The genuinely new part, says Radchenko, “is that whereas previously special operations supported foreign policy, today special operations are foreign policy”. Ten years ago, the Kremlin worked with America and Europe to counter Iran and North Korea’s nuclear program. Such co-operation is now fanciful.

“It is as if the Russians no longer feel they have a stake in preserving anything of the post-war international order,” says Radchenko. This period reminds him more of Mao’s nihilistic foreign policy during China’s Cultural Revolution than the Soviet Union’s Cold War thinking, which included periods of pragmatism and caution. Hill puts it another way: “It’s Trotsky over Lenin.”

Putin embraces these ideas. “We are in for probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time most important decade since the end of World War II,” he said in late 2022. “To cite a classic,” he added, invoking an article by Lenin in 1913, “this is a revolutionary situation.”

That belief – that the post-war order is rotten and needs rewriting, by force if necessary – also gives Russia common cause with China. “Right now there are changes the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years,” Chinese President Xi Jinping told Putin last year in Moscow, “and we are the ones driving these changes together.”

Russia’s foreign policy strategy, published in 2023, offers the bland reassurance that it “does not consider itself an enemy of the West … and has no ill intentions”. A classified addendum acquired by The Washington Post from a European intelligence service suggests otherwise. It proposes a comprehensive containment strategy against a “coalition of unfriendly countries” led by the US. That includes an “offensive information campaign” among other actions in the “military-political, trade-economic and informational-psychological …spheres”. The ultimate aim, it notes, is “to weaken Russia’s opponents”.

This does not mean Russia is an unstoppable. It is increasingly a junior partner to China. Its influence has slipped in some countries, such as Syria. It does not always back up its own proxies – dozens of Wagner fighters were killed in an ambush by Malian rebels, aided by Ukraine, in July. And Russian subversion can be disrupted, says Moore, by “good old-fashioned security and intelligence work” to identify the intelligence officers and criminal proxies behind it. The fact that Russia is increasingly reliant on criminals to carry out these acts, in part because Russian spies have been expelled en masse from Europe, is a sign of desperation.

“Russia’s use of proxies further reduces the professionalism of their operations, and – absent diplomatic immunity – increases our disruptive options,” McCallum says.

Russian meddling is intended to put pressure on NATO without provoking a war. “We also have red lines,” says Hill, “and Putin is trying to feel those out.” But if he is truly driven by a revolutionary spirit, convinced that the West is a rotten edifice, that suggests more lines will be crossed in the months and years ahead.

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