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Russia is waging a sabotage campaign across Europe that is far more extensive, deliberate and structurally embedded than most European governments have publicly acknowledged. And according to a new strategic assessment, Moscow is succeeding not because its operations are flawless, but because Europe remains politically reluctant, operationally fragmented and structurally vulnerable.
The assessment comes from The Scale of Russian Sabotage Operations Against Europe’s Critical Infrastructure, an August 2025 report by Charlie Edwards and Nate Seidenstein of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
The authors pull together the most detailed public dataset to date of confirmed and suspected Russian sabotage incidents, showing a dramatic increase since 2022. Their message is blunt: Russia’s campaign is coherent, deliberate and ongoing, and Europe has not yet mounted a serious deterrent.
The report lays out a pattern of operations that is unmistakably strategic. Russia has targeted almost every major category of European critical infrastructure—energy, communications, railways, undersea cables, water systems, government facilities and military logistics. These are not random “nuisance” attacks, but calibrated pressure: sabotage of rail lines used for NATO movements, covert filming of transport corridors feeding Ukraine, arson at defence-linked factories, tampering with water supplies at major bases, and underwater cable disruptions that carry real economic and strategic cost.
The report’s findings are stark: Russia has found a sweet spot where it can hurt Europe, impose costs and shape political calculations without triggering escalation. And Europe has left that space wide open.
A harsh but unavoidable conclusion runs through the analysis: Europe’s infrastructure is perfectly designed for exploitation by a hostile adversary. Ageing grids, outdated digital systems, decades of deferred investment, and a patchwork of privately run assets mean that Europe is, in many sectors, running 21st-century economies on 20th-century infrastructure. Rail networks can be halted by single points of failure. Water-management systems rely on outdated remote-operated software. Submarine cables—the arteries of the European economy—remain physically exposed and largely undefended.
Russia has exploited these weaknesses with precision and consistency. A series of incidents described in the report—sabotaged high-speed rail lines in France hours before a global event, organized surveillance of Polish military transport routes, multiple attacks tied to the same GRU-directed network—illustrate both capability and intent. The message is simple: Europe’s systems are brittle, and Moscow knows precisely where to press.
One of the report’s starkest insights is Russia’s pivot to what the authors call “gig-economy sabotage.” After hundreds of Russian intelligence officers were expelled from Europe in 2022, Moscow adapted. It now recruits low-cost, disposable operatives online—often through Telegram—drawn from migrant communities and third-country nationals. They are instructed to conduct arson, vandalism, cable sabotage or reconnaissance for small sums of money. The result is a large, unpredictable pool of deniable actors who can be rapidly replaced.
This method has allowed Russia to run operations at scale while keeping its own officers insulated from consequences. Quality varies—many recruits are sloppy or inept—but the volume compensates. And because Europe often treats these incidents as isolated crimes rather than parts of a coordinated campaign, Russia’s strategy continues to work.
The report documents a sharp increase in sabotage between 2023 and 2024, along with a string of incidents in 2025 targeting NATO-linked logistics. The parcel-bomb devices hidden inside electric massagers that ignited at DHL hubs in Germany, Poland and the UK are presented as clear test runs for attacks on cargo aircraft. Arson attempts at defence-industry sites in Germany and Poland, and an explosion at a Spanish warehouse storing communications equipment for Ukraine, point to an increasingly assertive operational tempo.
The maritime dimension is equally alarming. Anchor-dragging by Russian-linked vessels has severed undersea cables in the Baltic Sea—operations that cost tens of millions to repair but require virtually no sophistication. When a hostile state can inflict strategic damage with nothing more than a commercial anchor, the deterrence problem becomes brutally clear.
According to the report, Europe’s response has been uneven, reactive and often timid. Efforts like Baltic Sentry and NorthSeal represent progress, but they are expensive and difficult to sustain. The political reluctance to publicly attribute attacks—sometimes to avoid escalation, sometimes to avoid diplomatic complications—has created a permissive environment for Russian activity. The report argues that Europe’s reliance on the vocabulary of the “grey zone” has become a bureaucratic excuse: a way to avoid confronting what Russia is actually doing.
The authors’ hardest-edged conclusion is that Russia sees this sabotage campaign as part of an ongoing confrontation with the West, while Europe continues to behave as though it is dealing with scattered incidents. This strategic mismatch leaves Europe’s critical infrastructure exposed, its deterrence hollow, and its political will untested.
Unless Europe moves beyond reactive “resilience-building” and starts imposing meaningful costs, the report warns, Russia will continue to operate freely—because nothing yet suggests it has reason to stop.
Ramananda Sengupta
In a career spanning three decades and counting, I’ve been the foreign editor of The Telegraph, Outlook Magazine and the New Indian Express. I helped set up rediff.com’s editorial operations in San Jose and New York, helmed sify.com, and was the founder editor of India.com. My work has featured in national and international publications like the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, Global Times and Ashahi Shimbun. My one constant over all these years, however, has been the attempt to understand rising India’s place in the world.
I can rustle up a mean salad, my oil-less pepper chicken is to die for, and it just takes some beer and rhythm and blues to rock my soul.
