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Russia Is Stepping Up Its Covert War Beyond Ukraine

Over the past three years, Russia has waged an increasingly brazen campaign of sabotage and subversion against Ukraine’s European allies. In 2024, Moscow significantly escalated its tactics—turning to assassination, compromising water facilities across several European countries, and targeting civil aviation.

Based on an overview of Russian operations in the physical domain, excluding most cyber operations, Leiden University’s research highlights how Moscow is increasingly escalating beyond its long-standing campaigns of espionage and digital disruption. Even using a conservative metric for attribution, Russian operations against Europe have surged from 6 in 2022 to 13 in 2023 and 44 in 2024.

However, Leiden University’s analysis suggests that escalation is more likely to occur below the nuclear threshold—and offers a glimpse of what that might entail: bombings of civilian airlines, sabotage of undersea infrastructure that could leave large portions of Europe without power or internet access, targeted assassinations of key industrial leaders, and attacks on water supplies that could jeopardize the health of hundreds of thousands of Europeans.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/01/10/russia-is-stepping-up-its-covert-war-beyond-ukraine/