- Fires at DHL warehouses this year may have been part of Russian sabotage operations, officials said.
- The Kremlin has allegedly stepped up hybrid attacks in Europe in recent months.
- The airline industry is braced for further action.
Suspected Russian sabotage activities targeting the airline industry have been on the rise this year, and the industry is preparing for further action.
Brandon Fried, the executive director of the Airport Operators Association, which represents US air cargo companies, told Business Insider that the industry had been on high alert since 9/11.
“So regardless of who’s doing this, whether it’s another country or whether it’s a terrorist organization, our industry has been vigilant for quite some time,” he said, referring to two fires at DHL warehouses earlier this year. that have been linked to Russia.
“They want to cause fear and panic, but we, as a community, will not allow them. One of our main messages is that we are vigilant,” Fried said.
Western officials have said the fires, which broke out at two DHL hubs in the UK and Germany in July, may have been part of Russian sabotage operations aimed eventually at North America, the Wall Street Journal first reported of this week.
A package caught fire before being loaded onto a plane at a DHL freight center in Leipzig, eastern Germany, while a similar incident occurred at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham in the UK.
Thomas Haldenwang, the president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said in October that it was a “lucky coincidence” that the package in Leipzig caught fire on the ground and not in flight.
Haldenwang did not explicitly blame Moscow, but German news agency DPA reported that security services were working on the assumption that the attack was linked to Russia. Financial Times.
A police spokesman told BI that counter-terrorism officers were leading an investigation into the Birmingham incident and were working to identify any links to similar incidents across the continent.
The Wall Street Journal report said the fires were caused by electric massagers implanted with a magnesium-based flammable substance.
The devices that were set off in the United Kingdom were traced to Lithuania, where officials say they appear to have been part of a broader Russian plot to get such devices onto planes in North America, the Journal reported.
Frank Umbach, a research director at the European Cluster on Climate, Energy and Resource Security at the University of Bonn, said Russian hybrid warfare had escalated from spying on critical infrastructure to active sabotage across Europe.
“Hybrid warfare has intensified here in Europe, especially against Germany,” Umbach said, adding that there were concerns that German intelligence services had been “heavily penetrated” by Russian agents.
Moscow has already been linked to a number of sabotage incidents in Europe this year, including attempted arson and a reported plot to kill the CEO of German arms firm Rheinmetall, which has produced ammunition and military equipment for Ukraine.
Russia is suspected of using social media platforms such as Telegram to recruit proxies to carry out such activities.
Speaking a few months after the DHL fire, the head of the UK’s MI6 intelligence service, Richard Moore, said he believed Russian intelligence services had “gone a bit wild”.
And experts think such incidents are unlikely to stop anytime soon.
Shashank Joshi, a former senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute who is now defense editor at The Economist, told BI that he believed the suspected Russian sabotage operations were part of a “quite extensive campaign wide” that could see the Kremlin. target any member of the EU or NATO.
“I don’t think anyone is particularly immune as such,” Joshi said.
A spokesman for Germany’s Military Counterintelligence Service, known as BAMAD, said the German military and NATO forces in Germany “continue to be a priority target for Russian espionage activities”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has denied Russia’s involvement in sabotage operations in Europe.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence services and the BND declined to comment further.
The RT logo at the company’s headquarters in Moscow. KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images
Western officials say Moscow has also launched cyber attacks and sought to spread disinformation as part of its alleged sabotage operations.
Russian state media sites such as RT have already faced sanctions in the US and the EU over allegations of disinformation.
Keir Giles, a senior adviser at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme, said Russian disinformation campaigns, espionage operations and sabotage efforts were “intensely interconnected”.
“Objectives in the information domain can be served by kinetic actions and vice versa,” Giles said. The information component of the war is seen as an integral and interdependent part of all other activities that Russia is undertaking.
“This is something that has been very clearly played out in Russia’s war against Ukraine after the full-scale invasion,” he added.