Poland’s prime minister appeared on Wednesday to confirm the conclusions of western intelligence officials who had warned of a Russian plot to blow up cargo aircraft over western countries.
“I can only confirm that Russia planned acts of air terror, not just against Poland but against airlines across the globe,” the prime minister, Donald Tusk, said during a meeting with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Mr. Tusk did not elaborate, and it was unclear whether officials believed that Moscow was continuing to actively plan such an action.
Officials first became aware of the plot over the summer, when incendiary devices placed at shipping hubs in Britain and Germany ignited fires that caused minimal damage. In November, four Western officials briefed on intelligence about the operation said the fires had been part of a test of security measures carried out by Russia’s military intelligence service, known as the GRU.
The ultimate goal of the plot was not known, but intelligence agencies started an investigation into whether the intent was to destroy planes on American or European runways, or even blow up an aircraft midair.
By the fall, the White House became so concerned that President Biden ordered his national security adviser and the C.I.A. director to warn top aides of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, that such plotting could provoke a severe reaction from the United States. Any acts of sabotage that caused mass casualties would represent a serious escalation of conflict between Moscow and Washington, and the United States would hold Russia responsible for “enabling terrorism,” a senior official told The New York Times.
While the Kremlin has denied that its agents engage in sabotage, western officials say Moscow has ordered its intelligence services to find ways to bring the war in Ukraine, soon to enter its fourth year, to Europe and the United States.
Many of the sabotage plots attributed to Russia appear amateurish, perhaps intended more to annoy than to terrorize. In December, Estonian authorities released details about a gang of GRU agents paid to break the windows of the interior minister’s car and deface World War II monuments, and in France Russian agents have been linked to antisemitic graffiti spray painted on walls.
But other episodes have been more sinister. Fires have broken out at arms factories supplying weapons to Ukraine as well as aboard buses and at shopping malls. And critical telecommunications cables crossing the Baltic Sea have been cut, though attributing these definitively to one country has been difficult. Last year, two assassins who were believed to have ties to Russia killed a Russian defector in southern Spain.
The sabotage campaign, officials said, is being waged almost exclusively by the GRU, an agency that has carried out sabotage and assassination operations in Europe since before Mr. Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Most notably, it was operatives from the GRU who used a highly potent nerve agent in the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, a GRU turncoat who was living in Britain.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the GRU’s activities in Europe abated somewhat as European countries expelled operatives and limited travel for Russians. But in the past year, the agency has figured out ways to restore its operations. Officials say that many acts of sabotage are carried out by hired proxies, sometimes recruited over the internet. That is one reason the operations have so far achieved limited results. But officials worry that recruiting people over the internet to commit such operations also increases the risk of dangerous and potentially deadly mistakes.
“The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets,” Ken McCallum, the director general of Britain’s Mi5, the country’s domestic intelligence service, warned in rare public remarks last fall. “We’ve seen arson, sabotage and more. Dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness.”
