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12 August 2024

Putin’s New Agents of Chaos

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan

On July 26, on the day of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris, unknown attackers pulled off a coordinated sabotage operation on France’s national railway, leaving millions of passengers stranded. No one initially claimed responsibility for the attack, which is still being investigated; France’s interior minister has suggested that “ultra-left” extremists may have been responsible. Yet intelligence experts have also asked whether Russia might have been involved. “The Russian angle is certainly a strong one,” Javed Ali, a counterterrorism expert and former member of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, told PBS NewsHour after the attack.

Although there has been no clear evidence implicating Russia, there are strong grounds for these suspicions. Over the past few months, the French government has taken a more aggressive stance in its support for Ukraine, and the Russian government holds particular grievances against the International Olympic Committee, which banned Russian athletes from competing in the games this year. What is more, since the early months of this year, European and U.S. intelligence officials have connected a spate of sabotage operations across Europe to Russia’s GRU intelligence service. These attacks have involved arson and other tactics. They have sometimes targeted transport networks. And they have occurred in more than half a dozen European countries, including the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

In March 2024, a Ukraine-linked warehouse in Leyton, East London, was set on fire. The British police arrested four people on charges that included planning an arson attack and assisting Russian intelligence. The following month, a facility in South Wales belonging to the British defense, security, and aerospace company BAE was hit by an explosion and caught fire—an attack that has not yet been attributed but which follows the pattern of others. Also in April, German authorities arrested two men with dual German and Russian citizenship on suspicion of plotting sabotage attacks on a military base in Bavaria, accusing one of the suspects of being in contact with Russian intelligence. And in May, Poland detained three men—two of them Belarusian and one a Polish citizen—for carrying out acts of arson and sabotage on behalf of Russia.

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