Russia’s ‘hybrid’ plan against Berlin

Russian President Vladimir Putin is reported to have personally ordered an escalation of the hybrid war against NATO countries. The 4 August attack, in which a drone laden with explosives struck a Ukrainian Antonov An-124 at Leipzig-Halle Airport, is said to have been one of the first strikes in this new escalation. This is reported by the WSJ, citing European officials briefed by US intelligence. Following the failed attack, a Kremlin official acting as a confidential channel with the German government is said to have even warned Berlin that Leipzig would not be the last attack. Advisers to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the newspaper that, had there been many casualties in Leipzig, they would have considered invoking Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.

From the very first days following the foiled attack at the German airport, it was clear that we were facing something more serious than before. On 1 September, Berlin – usually very cautious about officially pointing the finger at Moscow – accused Russia of being behind the operation. In October, the head of foreign intelligence, Martin Jäger, said that Russia was waging “a shadow war against us” and, referring to Leipzig, spoke of a “new, dangerous dimension”, whilst the president of the domestic intelligence service (BfV), Sinan Selen, stated that “Russia is already factoring in potential civilian casualties”.

The MAD, Germany’s military counter-intelligence service, is also on high alert. This Wednesday, WDR and SZ reported exclusively that the Bundeswehr, in an internal document, had for the first time raised the threat level of Russian sabotage against its own forces to ‘erheblich’ (considerable) – the second-highest level, starting from the most serious – anticipating ‘actions in the near future’. It is precisely with the shift from spy drone overflights to the use of drones laden with explosives that Moscow is said to have crossed what the German armed forces regard as the true red line. This is not only due to the incident in Leipzig, but also to the discovery, in mid-September, of a similar explosive-laden drone near the Wunstorf air base in Lower Saxony, where the Luftwaffe’s A400Ms are stationed.

Leipzig’s leap in quality is also evident from investigations by The Telegraph, Die Welt and The Insider into who the suspects behind the operation might be. The chain of command is said to start with GRU Colonel Denis Smolyaninov, who has been sanctioned by the European Union and was previously identified as one of the commanders behind the 2024 DHL parcel bomb plot. Then there is the organisation led by Oleg Levushkin, a Russian and Latvian citizen who, according to the WSJ, is a former officer recruited by the GRU following a criminal conviction. Furthermore, the DNA of at least one Belarusian operative, Andrei Karshakov, is said to have been found on the remains of a glove on an antenna structure likely used to guide the drone in Leipzig. The Belarusian operative is said to have already been involved in an act of sabotage in Łódź in 2024, and has therefore been in operation for at least two years.

Even before 2022, the Russian security services were already accustomed to carrying out highly brazen operations in Germany, such as the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former Chechen-Georgian commander of an anti-Russian militia in Chechnya, who was killed in 2019 in Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten park by FSB hitman Vadim Krasikov. Then, following the invasion of Ukraine – and the expulsion from Germany alone of around 80 diplomats, most of whom were believed to be Russian intelligence operatives – Russia decided for a time to rely primarily on low-level agents who could be ‘burned’ much more easily. The chain of command in Leipzig now appears shorter and more traceable, with Moscow perhaps once again prepared to forgo a significant degree of plausible deniability. In recent months and weeks, there have been suspected acts of sabotage in Estonia, Poland, Lithuania and Bulgaria. But it is Germany that remains the key target of an irregular war which, according to analytical and intelligence assessments, is set to intensify.