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 Economist, which documents Russia’s tactics in its hybrid war against the West. My next post will include examples of Russia’s tactics from other publications.

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Vladimir Putin’s spies are plotting global chaos: Russia is enacting a revolutionary plan of sabotage, arson and assassination, The Economist, October 13, 2024.

We’ve seen arson, sabotage and more: dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness,” said Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security and counter-intelligence agency, in a rare update on the threat posed by Russia and the GRU, its military-intelligence agency. “The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets,” he said on October 8th [2024].

Russia’s war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a crescendo of aggression, subversion and meddling elsewhere. In particular, Russian sabotage in Europe has grown dramatically… ” Sir Richard Moore, the chief of MI6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence agency, put it more bluntly: “Russian intelligence services have gone a bit feral, frankly.”

The Kremlin’s mercenaries have squeezed Western rivals out of several African states. Its hackers, Poland’s security services said, have tried to paralyse the country in the political, military, and economic spheres. Its propagandists have pumped disinformation around the world. Its armed forces want to put a nuclear weapon in orbit. Russian foreign policy has long dabbled in chaos. Now it seems to aim at little else.

Start with the summer [2024] of sabotage.

In April Germany arrested two German-Russian nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU.

The same month Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, a hub for arms to Ukraine, and Britain charged several men over an arson attack on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London. The men were accused of aiding the Wagner Group, a mercenary outfit now under the GRU’s control.

In June France arrested a Russian-Ukrainian national who was wounded after attempting to make a bomb in his hotel room in Paris.

In July it emerged that Russia had plotted to kill Armin Papperger, the boss of Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest arms firm.

On September 9th air traffic at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport was shut down for more than two hours after drones were spotted over runways. “We suspect it was a deliberate act,” a police spokesperson said. American officials warn that Russian vessels are reconnoitering underwater cables.

Even where Russia has not resorted to violence, it has sought to stir the pot in other ways. …But others are intended simply to widen splits in society of all kinds, even if these have little or no link to the war. France says that Russia was also behind the graffiti of 250 Stars of David on walls in Paris in November, an effort to fuel antisemitism, which has surged since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Much of Russia’s activity has been virtual.

In April hackers with ties to the GRU seem to have manipulated control systems for water plants in America and Poland.

In September America, Britain, Ukraine and several other countries published details of cyber-attacks by the GRU’s Unit 29155, a group that was previously known for assassinations in Europe, including a botched effort to poison Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer.

The GRU’s cyber efforts, which had been ongoing since at least 2020, were not just aimed at espionage, but also “reputational harm” by stealing and leaking information and “systematic sabotage” by destroying data, according to America and its allies.

“What Putin is trying to do is hit us all over the place,” argues Fiona Hill, who previously served in America’s national security council... In Africa, for instance, Russia has used mercenaries to supplant French and American influence in the aftermath of coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

Russia’s meddling in America takes a very different form.

In May Avril Haines, America’s Director of National Intelligence, called Russia “the most active foreign threat to our elections” above China or Iran. “Moscow most likely views such operations as a means to tear down the United States as its perceived primary adversary,” she said, “enabling Russia to promote itself as a great power.”

In July American intelligence agencies said that they were “beginning to see Russia target specific voter demographics, promote divisive narratives, and denigrate specific politicians”.

In September America’s Justice Department accused two employees of RT, a Kremlin-controlled media outlet that regularly spews out Russian talking points and lurid conspiracy theories, of paying $10m to an unnamed media company in Tennessee. The company, thought to be Tenet Media, posted nearly 2,000 videos on TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube. (Commentators paid by the company denied wrongdoing, saying they were “victims of this scheme”). The department also seized 32 Kremlin-controlled internet domains designed to mimic legitimate news sites.

Russian propagandists are also experimenting with technology. CopyCop, a network of websites, took legitimate news articles and used ChatGPT, an AI model, to rewrite them. More than 90 French articles were modified [this way].

The genuinely new part, says says [Sergey Radchenko, a historian of Russian foreign policy], “is that whereas previously special operations supported foreign policy, today special operations are foreign policy.”

Ten years ago the Kremlin worked with America and Europe to counter Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programme. Such co-operation is now fanciful. “It is as if the Russians no longer feel they have a stake in preserving anything of the post-war international order,” says Mr Radchenko.

Mr Putin embraces these ideas. “We are in for probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time most important decade since the end of World War II,” he said in late 2022. “To cite a classic,” he added, invoking an article by Vladimir Lenin in 1913, “this is a revolutionary situation.”

That belief—that the post-war order is rotten and needs rewriting, by force if necessary—also gives Russia common cause with China. “Right now there are changes the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years,” Xi Jinping told Mr Putin last year in Moscow, “and we are the ones driving these changes together.”

Russia’s foreign policy strategy, published in 2023*, offers the bland reassurance that it “does not consider itself an enemy of the West…and has no ill intentions.”. A classified addendum acquired by the Washington Post from a European intelligence service suggests otherwise. It proposes a comprehensive containment strategy against a “coalition of unfriendly countries” led by America. That includes an “offensive information campaign” among other actions in the “military-political, trade-economic and informational-psychological…spheres”. The ultimate aim, it notes, is “to weaken Russia’s opponents”.

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* This document was The Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, approved by Decree of the President of the Russian Federation,  excerpted in previous posts here and here.