Several people were convicted in connection with small acts of vandalism carried out at the behest of Russia’s military intelligence service, prosecutors announced Thursday.
Setting aside efficiency, I really don’t get this whole “pay criminals to engage in sabotage” campaign in Europe that Russian intelligence has going.
The actual acts don’t cause that much damage. It’s not hamstringing countries.
If it can’t be linked to Russia, then it seems unlikely that it has much deterrent power. Russia can’t say “do things I don’t like, and we’ll do more of this”.
If it can be traced to Russia, then the elaborate string of subterfuge doesn’t seem to have a point.
And stuff that can be attributed to Russia is an escalation that the other country knows about. Escalating with NATO, even in limited ways, seems to me like a losing game for Russia. Russia’s best hope from NATO is disinterest, not winning a “who inflicts more pain” game.
Maybe the idea is to artificially create the impression of unrest or disagreement with the government, but that seems questionable at this scale. I mean, would some of these even have made news had they not been traced back to Russian intelligence? If they could instigate widespread riots or something like that, okay, that might be different, but…
EDIT: It might be trying to find a form of asymmetric warfare, which the article mentions. I can easily believe that Estonian intelligence and law enforcement expended more then 10k EUR in resources investigating your window-kicking incident that cost Russia 10k EUR. But…Russia trying to drain resources in NATO seems impractical too. It’s too-large a pool to reasonably drain, and even more so with the scale of this campaign.
Setting aside efficiency, I really don’t get this whole “pay criminals to engage in sabotage” campaign in Europe that Russian intelligence has going.
The actual acts don’t cause that much damage. It’s not hamstringing countries.
If it can’t be linked to Russia, then it seems unlikely that it has much deterrent power. Russia can’t say “do things I don’t like, and we’ll do more of this”.
If it can be traced to Russia, then the elaborate string of subterfuge doesn’t seem to have a point.
And stuff that can be attributed to Russia is an escalation that the other country knows about. Escalating with NATO, even in limited ways, seems to me like a losing game for Russia. Russia’s best hope from NATO is disinterest, not winning a “who inflicts more pain” game.
Maybe the idea is to artificially create the impression of unrest or disagreement with the government, but that seems questionable at this scale. I mean, would some of these even have made news had they not been traced back to Russian intelligence? If they could instigate widespread riots or something like that, okay, that might be different, but…
EDIT: It might be trying to find a form of asymmetric warfare, which the article mentions. I can easily believe that Estonian intelligence and law enforcement expended more then 10k EUR in resources investigating your window-kicking incident that cost Russia 10k EUR. But…Russia trying to drain resources in NATO seems impractical too. It’s too-large a pool to reasonably drain, and even more so with the scale of this campaign.