Slovak police foiled an arson attack on a Ukrainian-owned drone factory near Presov this week, the first documented attempt of its kind in the country.
Officers from the anti-crime unit UBOK arrested three foreign nationals - two in Slovakia and one in Germany under a European arrest warrant - over a plot against a plant belonging to Skyeton, which builds the Raybird surveillance drone, Dennik N reported on August 25. They seized petrol thickened with polystyrene, tools, phones, an action camera and a hand-drawn map of the site. About 70 people were working in the building at the time.
"The recent attempted attack on our facility in Slovakia is further proof that Ukrainian defence manufacturers have become a real thorn in their side, and that we are on the right path," a Skyeton representative, whose identity was withheld for security reasons, told the Kyiv Independent. "The Russians regularly attempt to attack both our production facilities in Ukraine and our reputation."
Slovakia was the last of the Visegrad and Baltic states to be hit. It is not the last that will be, because what has changed is not Russian intent but the location of the target.
Four countries in six months
Russian-back partisans have been operating in Europe since hostilities broke out as far back as 2014, but now they appear to be scaling up as an asymmetric response to the mushrooming number of EU-Ukraine joint defence production projects as a result of Ukraine’s insatiable appetite for modern weapons.
In March, arsonists set fire to a plant in the Czech city of Pardubice belonging to Archer-LPP, a Ukrainian maker of thermal imaging equipment. This month three people were detained in Latvia over an arson attack on a building owned by Milrem Robotics, the Estonian firm that supplies unmanned ground vehicles to Ukraine. German investigators traced explosive drones found at an airport to the network behind the Lithuanian parcel bombs of 2025, and police a hidden weapons cache near Berlin to Russian intelligence on August 21.
Two more incidents this month were at munitions plants and neither has been attributed to anyone. An explosion at the EMCO plant at Belitsa, near Tryavna in Bulgaria, forced the evacuation of about 300 people on August 10; Bulgarian investigators assessed the cause as most likely internal, a truck fire that reached the warehouses. Three days later a fire and a large explosion hit the gunpowder unit at KNDS Ammo Italy's plant at Colleferro, near Rome, which makes 155mm shells for Ukraine. That cause is still under investigation.
The Bulgarian case is of note, as EMCO belongs to Emilian Gebrev, who was poisoned in 2015 in a case Bulgarian prosecutors linked to Russian military intelligence, and because Bulgaria has been here before: a series of arms depot explosions between 2011 and 2020 led Sofia to issue warrants for six Russian nationals.
Why here, and why now
The targets are consistently Ukrainian or Ukraine-supplying manufacturers operating inside Nato and EU countries, which is a cheaper way of degrading Kyiv's supply chain than trying to reach it inside Ukraine and a less politically charged way of striking the factories with Russian ICBMs.
It is also, increasingly, where the industry is. Ukrainian producers went looking for capacity and customers abroad as production scaled past 4mn drones a year; Skyeton announced its Slovak site at Haniska in spring 2024, put $3.5mn into it and expected up to 200 staff by the end of 2025. Last year it turned over €33mn, against just over €2mn in 2024, and made a net profit of €730,000 with about 100 employees.
European primes have moved the same way. Rheinmetall alone is building a €535mn ammunition powder factory in Romania, two plants in Bulgaria and more than €1.5bn of munitions capacity across the Balkans, plus a €400mn propellant powders joint venture in Romania. Central and Southeastern Europe has gone in three years from a place that bought weapons to a place that makes them, and the risk register has not caught up.
The method is disposable
Russian spies have a long history of operating on European soil from the Sergei Skripal poisoning case in the UK to the assassination of a Chechen rebel by Vadim Krasikov, a FSB hit man, in a Berlin park.
The action camera the Slovak police seized is the most informative item on the list. Arsonists working for themselves do not usually film the work. Filming it is how a recruited operative proves delivery to whoever is paying, and it is a recurring feature of the campaign that has run across the EU since 2022, in which Russian services have hired both foreign nationals and their own citizens through messaging apps and paid them in cryptocurrency to hit industrial and logistics sites.
And using freelancers is a cost effective and deniable way of sabotaging European defence establishments. A recruit costs a few thousand euros, has no prior intelligence connection, is often unaware who is paying, and is expendable if caught. The Slovak arrests followed a joint operation involving military intelligence; the German arrest came on a European warrant, which is the part of the system that works. What does not work is prevention: three people were stopped at Presov, and the state has no way of knowing how many others are being recruited this week.
The Skyeton plot also had a public-facing accompaniment. The destruction of the company was promoted on Facebook by the pro-Russian commentator Andrej Palko, though Dennik N noted there is no evidence linking his posts to the thwarted attack.
What it costs, and what it is meant to cost
Slovak police put the property at the Presov site in the tens of millions of euros. Set against the €1.5bn Rheinmetall is putting into the Balkans alone, one burned building is not a material blow to European production.
But the target was not the building per se. It is the insurance premium, the security cost, the board conversation about whether to put the next plant in Slovakia or Portugal, and the willingness of a Ukrainian company to keep manufacturing in a country where a jury may be asked to decide whether burning its factory down was sabotage or arson. Those costs land on every producer in the region, including the ones that have not been attacked.
In the meantime, Russia has been putting the conventional means to destroy European factories in place alongside the covert ones. The Kremlin suggested that a Wiltshire-based factory producing British-made Nyan drones that Ukraine has been using against Russian oil refiners is now a legitimate military target. Speculation has been swirling in the last weeks that Moscow is preparing to test Nato’s Article-5 resolve with attacks that is believed to have prompted an eight-hour visit to Moscow by CIA boss John Radcliffe this week to warn the Kremlin off.
Ten newly constructed drone bases on Russia’s boarder now put six Nato states within range, and US intelligence assessments reported this week hold that Moscow may try to test the alliance's collective defence commitment within the next few years - through sabotage, cyberattacks, unattributed armed groups or a limited local incursion. The first item on that list is the one already happening.
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