Six Western security officials said the Russian-born German suspect had discussed potential targets in Germany, including the Grafenwohr facility, via encrypted messaging apps with a person with ties to Russian military intelligence.
Dieter Schmidt, 39, and an alleged co-conspirator were indicted on espionage charges in April, marking the first arrest in Germany of saboteurs allegedly working for Moscow. Europe has been wracked in recent months by a surge in Moscow-led sabotage and conspiracies as Russia shifts its focus to the rising costs of Western aid to Ukraine.
“Russia is fighting the West in the West, on Western soil,” said the senior NATO official, who, like the other officials, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters. “That’s really where our focus is.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a NATO meeting in Prague last month that “virtually all allies” had raised the issue of “the Kremlin’s intensifying hybrid attacks against frontline states and NATO allies, arson and sabotage of supply depots, disregard for maritime borders and boundaries of the Baltic states, launching an increasing number of cyber attacks, and continuing to spread disinformation.”
The question of how far Moscow will escalate its attacks, and how the West should respond, is likely to dominate a NATO summit in Washington this week. Western officials say the Russian operations they have detected, while stoking public fears, appear to be designed to fall below the threshold for armed attack, and they are growing in number.
In Britain, four men were charged in April with setting fire to a London warehouse storing aid supplies for Ukraine. Authorities said the attack was funded by Russian intelligence. In early May, a fire broke out at the Deal arms factory outside Berlin, and investigators said they were looking into possible links to Russian intelligence. In Poland, arson also burned down a shopping mall outside Warsaw in May, and Polish police arrested nine men shortly thereafter. They are suspected of being part of a Russian ring involved in “assaults, arson and attempted arson,” including the setting fires at a paint factory in Wroclaw and an IKEA store in Lithuania.
In June, French police arrested a dual Russian-Ukrainian national on suspicion of plotting violence after explosives-making materials were found after an accidental explosion at a hotel outside Paris. Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said a Latin American man accused of attempted arson at a Prague bus station last month was “probably” funded and hired by Russian agents.
Kremlin archives The documents, obtained by European intelligence agencies and reviewed by The Washington Post, show the breadth of Russia’s efforts to identify potential recruits.
According to the documents, in July 2023, Kremlin political strategists were examining the Facebook profiles of more than 1,200 people believed to be employees of two major German plants – Aurbis in Ludwigshafen and BASF – to identify employees who could be manipulated to foment unrest.
The strategists created Excel spreadsheets, analyzing every employee’s profile and highlighting posts that expressed anti-government, anti-immigrant, or anti-Ukraine views.
At a BASF chemical plant, particular attention was focused on workers’ attitudes toward the closure of several facilities at the plant in spring 2023 and the loss of 2,600 jobs due to rising production costs, including soaring natural gas prices. At the Orbis metals plant, strategists noticed anti-immigrant views in some workers’ posts, one of the documents showed.
“You can focus on stoking ethnic hatred, or you can focus on organizing strikes over social security,” one strategist wrote.
German authorities said they were not aware of any incidents at BASF or Aurvis that could be linked to Russia, but added that they took the Kremlin’s activities very seriously and believed they indicated Moscow was using social media to recruit operatives.
BASF spokeswoman Daniela Rechenberger declined to comment about the employees but said the company is “continuously strengthening our capabilities to prevent, detect and respond to safety risks.”
“We have no evidence of this, nor are we aware of any social unrest within the company,” Allbis spokesman Christoph Tesch said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Post that allegations of Russian sabotage “only serve to fuel Russophobic hysteria.”
“These speculations and allegations are without any basis,” he said, adding that the veracity of the claims was “doubtful.”
The expulsion of hundreds of suspected Russian spies posing as diplomats in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was aimed at curbing Moscow’s ability to carry out covert operations, but officials say Moscow is increasingly operating through proxies, including those it recruits online.
“The response we tried was the same as what we did during the Cold War, but that’s not the way Russia operates today,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said in an interview. “There are plenty of opportunities, just on social media, to find people who will support their activities. So maybe they don’t even need handlers in NATO countries if they can do it online.”
While social media activity poses a high risk of detection, Moscow appears prepared to cast a blind net in search of allies, with communications through encrypted apps and seemingly random targeting making it harder to detect Russian activity, officials said.
“It’s very decentralized,” Landsbergis says. “Refugees, people who are down on their luck, criminals, you name it. They make a few thousand euros. [committing sabotage for Russia] “It’s a good idea and probably not that risky.”
Russia also may believe that outsourcing such operations gives it some deniability while maximizing its chances of causing chaos, the officials said. “They’re doing what they can,” one senior European security official said.
One Russian academic with close ties to senior Russian diplomats argued that Moscow cannot be linked to all of the incidents cited by Western security officials, “but if the conflict continues, both sides will increasingly resort to such perverse methods of warfare,” he added.
Schmidt, who was arrested for spying on U.S. military facilities in Germany, had posted on Facebook about his exploits fighting Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine from 2014 to 2016. German security officials said Schmidt’s deployment appeared to be a successful case of identifying a potential ideological ally. Law enforcement officials said they were still investigating whether Schmidt received financial compensation for his activities.
Schmidt, a dual German and Russian citizen who moved to Germany as a teenager, was also tasked with finding people in the German-Russian community in his Bavarian hometown of Bayreuth who could help with the sabotage, investigators said.
One of these new members was Alexander Jungblut, a German citizen of Russian birth who, along with Schmidt, was arrested in April and charged with espionage.
“Jungblatt assisted Schmidt with his research, mainly via the Internet,” a German security official said, adding that he also gathered intelligence on U.S. companies with branches in Bavaria.
Lawyers for Schmidt and Jungblatt did not respond to requests for comment.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in June that allied defense ministers had agreed to step up intelligence exchange, strengthen protection of critical infrastructure and further restrict Russian spies to curb Moscow’s activities.
But Lithuania’s Landsbergis said a much bigger effort was needed. “From our perspective, it doesn’t seem like Russia is particularly avoiding casualties,” Landsbergis said. “It’s just a coincidence that there haven’t been any casualties yet. We need to respond… When Russia is launching an invasion on our territory, the best response is to allow Ukraine to fight back.”
Belton reported from London and Rauhala from Brussels. Kate Brown in Washington and Ellen Francis in Brussels contributed to this report.
