By ANDREW ROTH
OCT. 31, 2014
MOSCOW — The casual reader of The New York Times may be forgiven for thinking he or she had dozed off and awakened in a John le Carré novel. How else to explain the sudden increase of bombers in the skies over Europe, kidnapped spies, troop buildups in Eastern Europe and roaming submarines in the Baltic Sea?
Much of what we see today, we hope, is bluster, as when a popular Russian television host reminded his prime-time audience that Russia could reduce the United States to “radioactive dust” (to help explain why President Obama’s hair was graying).
But something has indeed been afoot since Vladimir V. Putin resumed the presidency of Russia in 2012 and sought to push back against the West, which he has accused of meddling in Russia’s backyard.
Here are recent examples of Russia’s new assertiveness. Of course, none of this has been confirmed by Moscow.
Air
In response to an “unusual level of air activity over European airspace,” NATO scrambled fighter jets to intercept 26 Russian aircraft in just two days this week, including 19 Russian fighters, bombers and refueling aircraft on Wednesday.
The Russian planes, which were intercepted in international airspace over the Black Sea, Baltic Sea and North Sea, included Tu-95 Bear H bombers, Su-27 fighter jets, and Il-78 tanker aircraft. According to NATO, they did not file flight plans or maintain contact with civilian air traffic control.
Mr. Putin has dispatched bombers as a show of force before: During a period of heightened tensions in 2007, he resumed the Soviet-era practice of long-range patrols far beyond Russia’s borders.
Land
An Estonian intelligence officer ended up in Russian custody in Moscow in September. How that happened remains in dispute.
Estonian officials said that Russians armed with stun grenades and radio-jamming equipment crossed the border and subdued Eston Kohver, the intelligence officer, while he was on duty. The possible incursion of Russian security forces in Estonia came as violence was still surging in eastern Ukraine, and other countries on Russia’s borders had voiced concerns about security.
The F.S.B., Russia’s security service, said in a statement that Mr. Kohver had been “detained on Russian territory,” and that he had been found to be carrying a pistol and ammunition cartridges, 5,000 euros (about $6,500), surveillance equipment and “intelligence-gathering instructions.”
This was not the first recent claim of an extrajudicial kidnapping by Russian forces or their proxies. A Ukrainian pilot who disappeared during fighting in eastern Ukraine suddenly reappeared in a prison in the southern Russian city of Voronezh. She claimed she had been kidnapped by Ukrainian separatists. But Moscow said she had sneaked across the border on a mission. She was charged with war crimes for her part in the Ukrainian conflict and remains in custody.
Sea
In what came to be playfully called “The Hunt for Reds in October,” the Swedish Navy launched the country’s largest mobilization since the Cold War to find a mysterious submarine first detected near Stockholm on Oct. 17.
Suspicion quickly fell on Russia because of heightened tensions over Ukraine, media reports that the vessel was communicating with Kaliningrad, where Russia’s Baltic fleet is, and the fact that it was reminiscent of the “Whiskey on the Rocks” incident, when a Soviet submarine carrying nuclear weapons ran aground near the south coast of Sweden in 1981, prompting an international standoff until it was returned to the Soviet fleet.
Russian officials denied the recent vessel was theirs, suggesting it might be a Royal Netherlands Navy submarine, which the Dutch denied. Despite a weeklong search by minesweepers, helicopters and ships last month, no submarine was found.
Cyberspace
American intelligence officials quickly focused attention on Russia when the White House’s unclassified computer systems were discovered to have been infiltrated by sophisticated spying software; after all, the rising brinkmanship went virtual when George W. Bush was still president.
On Tuesday, the Silicon Valley investigator FireEye released a report detailing Russian cyberattacks against NATO, an American defense contractor, the government of Georgia and other Eastern European governments and militaries over the last seven years.
The report did not cite specific evidence of Russian government involvement, but alleged that Russia stood behind the attacks because the software was programmed on Russian-language machines during working hours in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and because the targets were closely aligned with Russian intelligence interests.
In July, three security firms tied a string of coordinated attacks on Western oil and gas companies to Moscow, though the motive behind the attacks then appeared to be industrial espionage.
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