Seth G. Jones
Introduction
Russia is engaged in an aggressive campaign of subversion and sabotage against European and U.S. targets, which complement Russia’s brutal conventional war in Ukraine. The number of Russian attacks in Europe nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, after quadrupling between 2022 and 2023. Russia’s military intelligence service, the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (or GRU), was likely responsible for many of these attacks, either directly by their own officers or indirectly through recruited agents. The GRU and other Russian intelligence agencies frequently recruited local assets to plan and execute sabotage and subversion missions. Other operations relied on Russia’s “shadow fleet,” commercial ships used to circumvent Western sanctions, for undersea attacks.
The data indicate that Russia poses a serious threat to the United States and Europe and that the Russian government, including President Vladimir Putin, cannot be trusted. Roughly 27 percent of the attacks were against transportation targets (such as trains, vehicles, and airplanes), another 27 percent were against government targets (such as military bases and officials), 21 percent were against critical infrastructure targets (such as pipelines, undersea fiber-optic cables, and the electricity grid), and 21 percent were against industry (such as defense companies). Many of these targets had links to Western aid to Ukraine, such as companies producing or shipping weapons and other matériel to Ukraine. Russia also used a variety of weapons and tactics. The most common (35 percent) involved explosives and incendiaries. Other weapons and tactics included blunt or edged instruments (27 percent), such as anchors used to cut undersea fiber-optic cables; electronic attack (15 percent); and the weaponization of illegal immigrants (8 percent).
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