Report from Warsaw: Russian Plots on Poland Intensifying

Kremlin escalating brazen spy and sabotage war on key Ukraine ally, but no Havana Syndrome incidents discovered, official tells our correspondent.

WARSAW—In the ongoing and intensifying spy wars between Moscow and the west, the arrest last January of a Russian operative plotting to blow up a paint factory in the Polish city of Wroclaw didn't get much attention. But it should have, a senior U.S. official tells me. The paint factory wasn’t some random target. It was right next to a fuel depot.  The Russian plan was straightforward sabotage—to ignite a giant conflagration that would cause the fuel depot to explode, resulting in a “terroristic type of event” that could disrupt the flow of weapons to Ukraine through Poland, said the official.  “And that's scary.”

Vladimir Putin (RFE/RL photo)

The Polish paint factory plot was only one example of a marked uptick in Russian covert operations—including “active measures,” to use the old Cold War term—that is getting ever more attention from U.S. national security and intelligence officials. As a strategic supplement to its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow’s security agencies have stepped up their game of late, deploying bribes, bots and a proliferation of phony news  sites pumping out disinformation about the war—not to mention brazen assassinations and sabotage operations such as the paint factory attack (which was aborted and busted by the ABW, Poland’s internal security agency). 

The purpose of virtually all of these actions appear to revolve around buttressing Moscow’s goal of crushing Ukrainian resistance—either by undermining political support for Kyiv in the west, disrupting the flow of arms to the embattled nation  or, in the case of the recent murder in Spain of a Russian helicopter pilot who defected, punishing any sign of internal dissent to its war goals.