By CLAUDIA CIOBANU<\/p>\n
WARSAW, Poland (AP) \u2014 Russia is shifting from individual recruits to \u2018professional\u2019 networks to carry out a campaign of sabotage and other attacks<\/a> across Europe, Poland\u2019s internal security service said in a report published Wednesday.<\/p>\n European officials and law enforcement have previously warned that Russia is waging a hybrid war against Europe, including sabotage, arson attacks, and vandalism, as well as influence operations. The Associated Press has tracked more than 150 such incidents linked to Moscow by Western officials since the invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n Many of the people involved were recruited online as disposable agents<\/a> and some had no idea they were working for Moscow. Russia is now moving away from using those low-cost, one-time recruits toward more \u201cprofessional\u201d operations, tapping into organized crime networks, according to the report published on Wednesday by the Internal Security Agency, or ABW.<\/p>\n Poland has conducted as many espionage investigations in the past two years as it did over the previous three decades, ABW said, noting that 62 people have been arrested.<\/p>\n Those espionage efforts are part of Russia\u2019s \u201cundeclared war with the Western world,\u201d ABW said, in which \u201cRussian intelligence is increasingly using methods typical of special forces (reconnaissance and sabotage).\u201d<\/p>\n In 2024 and 2025, 69 espionage investigations were initiated, the same total number as between 1991 and 2023, ABW reported.<\/p>\n \u201cThe long-term goal of the Russian Federation remains the disintegration of Euro-Atlantic structures, the isolation of specific countries and their internal socio-political and economic destabilization,\u201d the report stated. While Poland was primarily targeted by Russia, some of the espionage activities were also dictated by Belarus\u2019 secret services, which are \u201cclosely cooperating\u201d with Moscow, as well as by China.<\/p>\n The \u201cmass surveillance\u201d operations in Poland are meant to set the ground for acts of diversion, which ABW considers \u201cthe most serious challenge\u201d it faces. Russian intelligence services, who are escalating their actions in Poland, are accepting the possibility of \u201coccurrence of fatalities,\u201d the Polish agency observed.<\/p>\n ABW also noted an increasing \u201cprofessionalization\u201d of Russian sabotage activities in 2024-2025. According to the agency, in 2023, Russian services were still basing their operations mainly on so-called one-time agents, recruited ad hoc via the internet. That is a model that Russia is thought to have expanded following the expulsion of its intelligence officers<\/a> by Western European countries after Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.<\/p>\n In 2024-2025, however, Russia placed greater emphasis on the creation of \u201ccomplex sabotage cells\u201d relying on \u201cthe closed structures of organized crime,\u201d ABW noted.<\/p>\n \u201cRussians prefer individuals with experience in law enforcement (e.g., former soldiers, police officers, mercenaries from the Wagner Group),\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n ABW added that Russian services had also intensified training conducted on the territory of Russia itself, aimed at \u201cprofessionally preparing agents for terrorist activities.\u201d<\/p>\n In November 2025, Poland faced<\/a> what Prime Minister Donald Tusk called an \u201cunprecedented act of sabotage,\u201d when explosions and other malfunctions on a section of railway line used for deliveries to Ukraine<\/a> affected two trains, including a passenger train. There were no casualties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By CLAUDIA CIOBANU WARSAW, Poland (AP) \u2014 Russia is shifting from individual recruits to \u2018professional\u2019 networks to carry…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[182,238,40858,40857,181],"class_list":{"0":"post-76647","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-warsaw","8":"tag-poland","9":"tag-russia","10":"tag-russia-europe-attacks","11":"tag-russia-sabotage-cells","12":"tag-warsaw"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116531555626563870","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}