Latvian authorities were able to track down a network of saboteurs recruited by the Russian special services. Relying on Latvian citizens, the network consists of operatives who have been dispatched to several countries on paid missions of subversion and provocation, all aimed at undermining Western support for Ukraine. Remarkably, this team was even assigned to burn down a military facility in Kyiv in January 2022, just a month before Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“The goal already then was to instill fear among Ukrainian residents,” Normunds Mežviets, head of the Laatvia’s State Security Service (VDD), says. “Just as Russia is now trying to do in Europe with acts of sabotage.”
Indeed, such acts have grown exponentially throughout NATO countries in the last two years, coinciding with Russia’s faltering campaign on the battlefield. The efforts are part of what Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas has dubbed the Kremlin’s “shadow war” against the West, whose resolve and determination in arming and supporting Kyiv has further contributed to Russian military setbacks.
The sabotage operations are so numerous and widespread that a new one is uncovered and reported on every week or two. Plots have included arson attacks on a large-scale shopping mall in Warsaw, an IKEA warehouse in Vilnius, a museum in Riga, a bus depot in Prague, an industrial estate in east London, and a metals factory in Berlin where air defense systems are manufactured. In the last two instances, the sites have been linked to military aid bound for Ukraine.
We recently had a deranged Belarusian throw a Molotov cocktail at the royal palace in Oslo. Not so sure it’s related at all, but funky timing.
