Commentary: Russia's shadow war against the West is more dangerous than you think

In June, an arson attack on a Prague bus was foiled, and a man in a hotel near Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport accidentally blew himself up with a homemade bomb. Antisemitic graffiti was spread across walls in Paris this summer, and at least two plots to disrupt the Olympic Games were foiled.

In May, a large shopping center in Warsaw, Poland, and an Ikea in Vilnius, Lithuania, both caught fire, and a metal factory owned by a defense manufacturer went up in flames outside Berlin. A package on a plane in Germany burst into flames before the flight took off, narrowly averting a plane crash. U.S. and German authorities foiled a plot to assassinate the CEO of a large German arms manufacturer, one of a series of assassination plans against European leaders of the industry.

In April, German authorities arrested two German-Russian nationals suspected of plotting attacks on U.S. military facilities. Men were charged in the United Kingdom for an arson attack on a Ukrainian-owned business in London. A man was arrested in Poland for spying on an airport on behalf of Russian intelligence. Last year, the Czech Republic’s railway system was hacked and disrupted. Anti-war graffiti was spray-painted around Poland, and surveillance cameras were placed along railway tracks transporting humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine.

European governments believe all of these were acts of sabotage orchestrated by Russia, and this list is far from exhaustive.

At the same time, Russia is engaged in an extensive disinformation campaign across Europe and America, manipulating social media and using fake articles and cloned websites to flood the Western media landscape with deceitful pro-Russian and anti-Western narratives to influence elections and otherwise wreak havoc. It has used other creative means to destabilize its neighbors, such as last year when it sent a surge of migrants from Syria and elsewhere to flood the Finnish border.

Russia is fighting a shadow war on many fronts with the West, which has reached unprecedented levels. These attacks have two aims: Target anyone or any entity assisting in Ukraine’s war effort and sow chaos, animosity and distrust across communities of the West.

While the West has supported Ukraine in its defense against Russian aggression, the United States and our European allies have taken care so far to avoid direct confrontation with Russia. Russia has not been so cautious.

A few weeks ago, the U.S. Helsinki Commission, an independent government agency led by members of Congress, held a hearing on Russia’s shadow war on NATO that cataloged many of these incidents. The threat is known, yet many U.S. political actors and the public at large seem unconcerned or unaware yet of its size and scale. Political leaders in Europe are also split on how to counter it, with some leaders pushing for a more aggressive response, while others urge caution.

The pace has ramped up, but Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been engaged in this type of warfare against the West for two decades.

In 2007, after Estonia removed a Soviet war monument from downtown Tallinn, Russia conducted a massive cyberattack, paralyzing the country’s internet infrastructure for three weeks. In 2011, Russian intelligence reportedly blew up an ammunition storage facility in Bulgaria, causing the evacuation of an entire town. The Czech Republic has accused Russia of several cyberattacks and the 2014 explosion of two munitions depots in Vrbetice, which killed two and caused $42.5 million in damage. In 2015, Russian agents tried to kill the owner of a Bulgarian arms factory with poison, a tactic Putin has also used to target many Russian dissidents at home and abroad.

One reason Russia has been so successful is the variety of tactics and targets across a range of countries and time. This has made it harder for the West to get a collective sense of the magnitude.

That is changing. Heavy sanctions and closer scrutiny of Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have hampered Russia’s traditional approach of relying mostly on its own spies secretly living in foreign countries. It has become much harder for Russian agents to move undetected across the continent. This, however, has only led Russia to take more creative approaches, and the internet has offered an open door.

Today, Russia’s preferred course of action is to act through sympathetic citizens of NATO countries, recruiting them online through Telegram or other social media networks, often paying them very small sums in cryptocurrency to conduct sabotage or surveillance on Russia’s behalf.

The growing threat has expanded awareness in law enforcement and intelligence agencies across the West. Dozens of low-level actors have been arrested, but the cost of contracting out its meddling is so low that Russia just keeps finding recruits.

Europe and America have not yet found an effective way to deter or respond to these acts. Until that changes, Putin will undoubtedly keep them coming.

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Elizabeth Shackelford is senior policy director at Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center for International Understanding and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is the author of“The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”

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