Illustration by Álvaro Bernis
Russian military intelligence is recruiting young people online to carry out arson and other acts of sabotage across Europe. In this week’s issue, Joshua Yaffa reports on the Kremlin’s secret campaign to undermine the West’s support for Ukraine—and breaks down how “single-use agents” are being deployed across the Continent. Some of their missions are small—putting up posters, or picking up a package—while others involve physical attacks, for example setting off explosives and starting fires. In 2024, a young man was given the job, by an anonymous handler, of placing an incendiary device inside an IKEA in Vilnius, Lithuania. I recently spoke to Yaffa to learn more about how these spy games are being played.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
So, why did Russian intelligence want to set an IKEA on fire?
At first, it seemed mystifying. But in the course of my reporting, I spoke to a Lithuanian national-security official who said, “One IKEA burning is something very minor, no more than a tactical signal.” Which means that it’s not going to turn the tide of the actual war with Ukraine, or what Russia sees as its larger struggle with the West. But these kinds of acts add up to have a more strategic effect.
In Lithuania, you have the IKEA fire. In Poland, you have a shopping center that same year burning to the ground in the middle of Warsaw. You have a warehouse catching fire, a train line being sabotaged. You have some anti-NATO stickers and graffiti going up around town. You have these bizarre cases in France of coffins showing up at the Eiffel Tower, and someone defacing a Holocaust memorial. One researcher whom I talked to calls it a “swarm tactic.” Added together, you end up with this picture of general disorder and fissures in society across Europe.
Who are these agents? Are they pro-Russian, or are they mostly doing it for the money?
I was struck by something I heard from an official of the security services in Poland, which is one of the countries at the epicenter of these kinds of attacks. He told me that, of the sixty-two agents of this type that Poland has apprehended in the last few years, only two of them appear to have been motivated primarily by ideological reasons.
On the whole, these are people who respond to seemingly random, often innocuous requests on the messaging service Telegram for what seem to be odd jobs. Often, the people carrying out these jobs might not know that Russian intelligence is at the end of the chain. But, as the Polish security officer told me, it should be clear to people by the nature of these requests who might be making them. “Use your head,” he said.
In your piece, you note that some of these agents are Ukrainians themselves.
Ukrainian refugees are often recruited, primarily because they are a vulnerable population in a new country with a new language, and they are often facing financial difficulties. And many speak Russian, which makes things even easier for the Russian intelligence services. Put together, they make an attractive recruiting target. And if Ukrainian people are caught carrying out these actions, you manage to discredit the image of Ukrainians in the eyes of, say, the Polish or the Lithuanian people, in the countries that have taken refugees in. That’s a win-win for Russia.
What is the United States doing about this kind of covert action?
What got the U.S. really worried was a series of similar events in 2024. Single-use agents had been recruited to place devices inside packages and send them via DHL to Europe, Canada, and the U.S. Some of the packages had tracking devices inside that were there to gather information. But other packages contained incendiary devices. And in one incident, one of the packages caught fire on a runway in Leipzig, Germany, before being loaded onto a plane. There was a delay of an incoming aircraft, and, if the flight had taken off according to schedule, that package could have caught fire in midair.
The idea of burning planes dropping from the sky so worried the Biden Administration that the national-security adviser and the C.I.A. director called their counterparts in Moscow and, as I report in the piece, delivered the message of, essentially, Knock it off.