Russia is concentrating its sabotage campaign in Europe on the rear of Ukraine's war effort, from drone factories to Starlink stations, BMI analyst Cassia Scott-Jones told a webinar on October 27.
"We've seen attacks on drone production facilities, Starlink infrastructure, and essentially Russia is increasingly targeting the European rear of the war in Ukraine: communications, defence production, logistics," said Scott-Jones, a senior analyst for Europe country risk who leads Russia and Ukraine analysis at BMI, the research arm of Fitch Solutions.
Scott-Jones described a shift from a wider, sometimes apparently random set of targets towards the communications, defence production and logistics supporting Ukraine. Each attack can disrupt suppliers, relay stations or cargo hubs and force European governments to spend more defending targets far from the front. "Before, there was a wider set of targets, which sometimes seemed random," she said.
The targets since the summer bear that out. Fire gutted the assembly section of WB Electronics' drone components plant in Skarzysko-Kamienna on August 31, and Estonia blamed Russian intelligence for an arson attack on Milrem Robotics, the Tallinn-based maker of unmanned ground vehicles for Ukraine. Slovak police said they had foiled a planned arson attack on the Slovak-Ukrainian drone maker Skyeton, and incendiary devices were thrown at a site outside Rohde & Schwarz's Munich headquarters in September.
Communications have been hit too. Polish officials called a September 23 fire at a Starlink ground station south of Warsaw, which supports internet links into Ukraine, sabotage; Russian intelligence may have hired a Turkish criminal gang known as the Daltons to start it, Der Spiegel reported. On October 28 Polish police detained a Ukrainian suspected of organising a Russian-directed arson attack beside the CARFIL arms factory in Brasov, Romania.
Harder to pin on Moscow
BMI's analysis of incidents shows a fairly continuous intensification from 2022 to 2024 and an apparent decline in 2025. Scott-Jones warned against reading that as a let-up, because the number of incidents in which Russia's role cannot be established has risen at the same time.
"I think Europe is moving into a more difficult phase where activity is widespread but attribution is becoming harder," she said.
How much of the campaign can be laid at Moscow's door is disputed. Published counts of Russian hybrid attacks in Europe since February 2022 range from 52 to 255 depending on the source, the writer Thomas Fazi argued in Responsible Statecraft, because there is no agreed definition of what counts. Germany's federal criminal police alone recorded 321 acts of sabotage against critical infrastructure in 2025.
The escalation in 2026, in both the number of incidents and the risks they carry, has been sharper. "The attempted attack in Leipzig was probably the most significant case," Scott-Jones said.
In early August an explosive-laden drone was found in the secure cargo area of Leipzig/Halle airport, next to a parked Ukrainian Antonov Airlines freighter. Investigators later traced a DNA link to the 2024 incendiary parcels sent through the DHL hub at the same airport. On September 1, Berlin formally blamed Russia and ordered Moscow's last career consulate in Germany, in Bonn, to close. Russia's SVR foreign intelligence service answered with a claim that Nato spies had linked Ukraine to the plot.
A Kremlin official then contacted a counterpart in the German government and warned that Leipzig would not be Moscow's last target, the Wall Street Journal reported in October, citing unnamed sources. The paper also reported that people familiar with US intelligence said Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally ordered the stepped-up sabotage campaign against Nato countries.
"If accurate, that tells us something really important about Russia's risk appetite," Scott-Jones said of the warning. "We would normally think about plausible deniability as one of the main advantages of sabotage activity, but here Russia wanted to warn Germany, to understand there could be further attacks."
She added: "One of the reasons is it's so cheap for Moscow to generate these threats and so expensive for Europe to comprehensively defend against them. And Russia wants Europe to know that."
Germany before the Baltics
The geography of the attacks does not follow the map of Europe's invasion fears. The Baltic states, most often discussed as the likeliest target of a Russian military attack, are not the most frequently hit. Germany was the most frequently affected country in the incident data, followed by Poland and France.
"I think that tells us vulnerability follows strategic value as well as geography," Scott-Jones said. "Poland is the principal logistical corridor into Ukraine, while Germany, France and the UK matter because they are the military-industrial complex of Europe, and politically."
Poland has had the most violent cases. In November 2025 an explosion damaged the Warsaw-Lublin rail line, a route for supplies to Ukraine, and Warsaw blamed two Ukrainians working for Russian intelligence and shut Russia's last consulate in the country. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in September that the latest incidents were "certainly not the last".
Raising the price of helping Ukraine
Scott-Jones separated the immediate goal of the operations, disrupting Ukraine's defence production and logistics, from their longer-term effect on European politics.
"Every incident imposes additional costs: governments have to protect more infrastructure, intelligence services have to investigate and companies have to spend more on security," she said. "Most importantly, European governments have to explain to voters why supporting Ukraine is producing security risks at home."
She cautioned against a narrow reading of what Moscow wants. "I wouldn't frame the Russian objective as simply trying to elect pro-Russian parties or parties that are more negative toward Ukraine," she said. The aim is rather to shape the political environment in which decisions about Ukraine are made, and to feed concern about escalation and security, "potentially to influence calculations of mainstream governments as well as parties on the political fringes."
That fits a debate already running in European capitals, where Europe has gone from paymaster to participant in Moscow's rhetoric as it builds weapons for Kyiv. Czech counterintelligence chief Michal Koudelka warned in October that Russia could move on to sabotage strikes against logistical hubs used to supply Ukraine.
Nothing Europe has done yet appears to have changed Moscow's calculation. "So far at least, Russia seems to judge that the European response has not imposed significant enough costs to make it change," Scott-Jones said.
BMI expects more of the same. "I would expect these operations to intensify further into 2027, and while it's unlikely to be a defining issue in Europe's elections, it will be interesting to see how parties respond to that pressure," she said.
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