The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism has recorded at least 151 incidents in Europe since the start of the war that it attributes to Russian services, Rzeczpospolita reported on Monday.
The report said 172 suspected saboteurs have been detained since the war began, 41 more than in last year’s edition, and that 95% were “ordinary citizens” without formal ties to Russian special services, taking on tasks for economic reasons, according to analysts Julian Lanchès and Kacper Rękawek.
More than a quarter of newly identified incidents occurred in Poland, the paper said, citing 31 cases. France recorded 20, Lithuania and Germany 15 each, followed by Britain with 12 and Estonia with 11, it said.
“Interestingly, relatively few acts of state terrorism by Russia take place in Scandinavian countries, which also provide significant support to Ukraine,” Lanchès and Rękawek wrote, as quoted by Rzeczpospolita.
The report linked incidents to Russia-backed Telegram channels that, “posing as right-wing extremists,” encouraged violence in exchange for payments, including cryptocurrency, and circulated PDFs with bomb-making instructions and 3D-printed weapon designs, the paper reported.
It said perpetrators were mainly from former Soviet states, with a separate group tied to hooligan networks and far-right circles. More than one third had prior criminal records ranging from minor crimes to serious offenses, including murder, and Russian prisons had become an important recruitment pool, Rzeczpospolita said.
“A new trend is the growing involvement of Colombians in Russian sabotage activities, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states,” the report said, adding that the reasons were not fully clear but the pattern “correlates with the increasing presence of Colombians on the battlefield in Ukraine, on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides.”
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Source: PAP