Note: I’m on quasi-vacation for the rest of the month. This series will consist mostly of excerpts from published articles.

The excerpts in this post are from a recent article in The New Yorker, which documents Russia’s tactics in its hybrid war against the West, with a focus on Norway.

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Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic by Ben Taub/The New Yorker, September 9, 2024

For years, Russia has been using the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, which borders its nuclear stronghold, as a laboratory, testing intelligence operations there before replicating them across Europe.

A fishing boat was no longer just a fishing boat, in the eyes of Norwegian authorities. That summer, the Russian government had declared that commercial vessels could be co-opted by the military for any purpose.

Recently, crew on a vessel that had been associated with the destruction of subsea communications cables had steered a motorboat into restricted waters near a Norwegian Army garrison. Were they testing their equipment, or the speed of the Norwegian response? A search of two trawlers had revealed radios that could tune into military frequencies which are used by the Northern Fleet. [The Northern Fleet is the fleet of the Russian Navy in the Arctic.]

For the past few years, civilian life in northern Norway has been under constant, low-grade attack. Russian hackers have targeted small municipalities and ports with phishing scams, ransomware, and other forms of cyber warfare, and individuals travelling as tourists have been caught photographing sensitive defense and communications infrastructure.

Norway’s domestic-intelligence service, the P.S.T., has warned of the threat of sabotage to Norwegian train lines, and to gas facilities that supply energy to much of Europe.

A few months ago, someone cut a vital communications cable running to a Norwegian Air Force base.

Countries throughout Europe now acknowledge that their people and infrastructure are under ceaseless attack. Yet each incident is, by itself, below the threshold that would require a military response or trigger Article 5 .*

In recent months, agents of Russian intelligence are believed to have assassinated a defector in Spain, planted explosives near a pipeline in Germany, carried out arson attacks all over the Continent, and sabotaged subsea cables and rail lines.

A Russian operative injured himself in Paris while preparing explosives for a terrorist attack on a hardware store, and U.S. intelligence discovered a Russian plot to assassinate the C.E.O. of one of Europe’s largest arms manufacturers.

Russia’s low-grade attacks are accompanied by threats of nuclear annihilation, both by Kremlin officials and by pundits on state television.

In May, the Russian military carried out an exercise in which it practiced initiating a tactical nuclear war. In the context of nuclear escalation, Kirkenes is in one of the most strategically sensitive regions on earth.

[Quoting a Norwegian counterintelligence officer:] “The whole Russian plan is that, if things really heat up with NATO, they need to create a buffer,” to preserve the capability to carry out nuclear strikes. “That means the ability to control their closest neighboring territory”—the region that includes Kirkenes—“and control access to the waters, to prevent anyone from getting close.” The goal is “the ability to deny access to the Barents Sea,” to protect the Northern Fleet.

Vardø is a fishing village, but its skyline is dominated by successive generations of gigantic radar systems, known as Globus I, II, and III. Officially, the Globus systems monitor “space junk.” But they have another use: they can track and calculate the trajectories of ballistic nuclear missiles… Russia has signalled its displeasure with the Globus systems by practicing to blow them up.

In some cases, the [Russian security agency] used cultural projects as cover to send intelligence agents into Norway. But the larger effort has been to gradually establish the narrative that the people of East Finnmark [a county in northern Norway] owe their freedom—and perhaps also their land and their history—to Russia.

[Over the past millennium a small seafaring group] left traces of Orthodox crosses wherever they had been [in Norway]. In the past decade, representatives of the Orthodox Church have systematically restored [the old] crosses and erected new ones. The area coincides with the exact territory that would be most strategically useful to Russia’s nuclear defense…“Now that they have the crosses, and a Russian Orthodox priest has been there, sprinkling his holy water, the narrative back home is that these are Russian holy lands,” [says on local official].

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* “Article 5 provides that if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked.” https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_110496.htm