For some time, arson and damage to public infrastructures in some European countries have been repeated in a serial and at this point suspicious manner. In the Baltic countries, the United Kingdom and Germany, in particular, an alert was launched – deemed credible by the security forces and still ongoing – for the possible strategy of a foreign country aimed at destabilizing the Old Continent from external. The direction and coordination of these criminal actions already have a name and an address: Dzerdzinskij square, Lubyanka building, Moscow. That is, the historic headquarters of the Soviet KGB and today of the SVR intelligence service, which carries out internal secret police functions, but also operates outside its borders. This was indirectly confirmed by officials from five European security agencies: Germany, Estonia, Austria and Latvia. Asked for an in-depth investigation by investigative journalists from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), four of these agencies confirmed to reporters that the cases of saboteurs recruited online by the Kremlin are real, and that investigators are “carefully monitoring the situation,” whatever that means.
The intelligence services of the Russian Federation this time they would therefore have launched a new campaign of attacks on Europe which is not limited to hacking, but aims at a “qualitative leap”. Neither the intelligence agencies nor the European police have for the moment managed to link these actions to the war in Ukraine, but the general belief is that they are directly attributable to the political-diplomatic fracture that the Russian invasion has generated in the relations between Brussels and Fly. Terrorize the West and undermine its economic foundations. This would be the aim of the mysterious saboteurs. To understand how they operate, the aforementioned group of undercover journalists investigated thoroughly, discovering the recruitment system of the laborers who are called upon to carry out the attacks. Those responsible for the fires and damage are not Russian state officials and do not belong to Moscow’s intelligence. In fact, most don’t even have Russian passports. However, they have one thing in common: they were all recruited online by Putin’s men through Telegram chats, where bored young people with confused ideas proliferate, but are sufficiently pro-Russian to be encouraged for a few hundred euros (in cryptocurrencies) to carry out boycotts to the symbolic places of capitalist Europe. OCCRP also posted a recruiting thread in which the Privet Bot account asked an Estonian boy to learn how to make and throw Molotov cocktails, for money. It has not escaped notice that Privet Bot is advertised on Gray Zone, the largest pro-Russian Telegram channel associated with the mercenary group Africa Korps.
Whether it works that way or not, it is a fact that a chain of inexplicable actions took place on the continent which, added to the hacker attacks, gives a broader picture. One that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, commenting on the fire that occurred last May at the Ikea in Vilnius, Lithuania, defined as “the work of a foreign saboteur”. Tusk himself said that Polish authorities had arrested nine people in connection with this and other crimes alleged to have been commissioned by Russian intelligence. Also in May, a large fire destroyed Poland’s largest shopping center in Warsaw, and the authorities are investigating in the same direction as the Lithuanian lead. According to this reading, in the last two years sabotage attempts have grown in level and intensity, including those interventions that Indrek Kannik, director of the International Center for Defense and Security of Estonia, defined as “pure terrorism”, underlining how this type of large-scale recruitment does not end because it “has minimal costs”. The issue of “lone wolves” has always been a complex matter (remember jihadist terrorism). Attributing violent actions to a single organization or state is an idea that is far too “reassuring”, because it suggests that everything will end once the enemy has been defeated. An inadequate explanation. In 1998 the American FBI launched the operation that would give its name to the global phenomenon, “Operation Lone Wolf”, against a group of elusive white supremacists operating along the west coast of the United States. Alex Curtis, their leader, stated in an email to followers: «Intelligent and cool-headed lone wolves can succeed in any undertaking. It is now too late to try to educate the masses.” As if to say that there is no longer any need for armies, because a few “agents of chaos” hidden among ordinary people are more than enough to wear down the enemy and convince him to give up. An important lesson that is studied in every police academy, but whose application is the prerogative of few. Including the Russians.
