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On Tuesday, workers at Germany\u2019s<\/a> Leipzig\/Halle airport discovered a drone<\/a> in a cordoned cargo zone near a runway. The drone carried a detonator and military-grade Semtex explosives, and it had landed beside a Ukrainian<\/a> cargo aircraft. Around the same time, a second flying object apparently struck a diverted DHL cargo plane, which landed in Hanover with minor damage. The freight hub suspended operations, flights were directed to other cities, and Germany opened a counterterrorism investigation. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt described a hybrid attack scenario, while leaving questions of origin and authorship to investigators.<\/p>\n German prosecutors have yet to name a suspect, and it will take time for them to do so. Still, the incident matches, in method and in target selection, a campaign of sabotage across Europe<\/a> that Western security services have repeatedly traced back to the Russian intelligence services. It\u2019s a campaign with a long history. GRU military intelligence operatives\u00a0blew up<\/a>\u00a0ammunition depots at Vrbetice in the Czech Republic in 2014, destroying stocks bound for Ukraine and killing two workers. The same unit has been\u00a0linked<\/a>\u00a0to a series of explosions at Bulgarian arms depots and to the 2015 poisoning of arms dealer Emilian Gebrev, followed by the 2018 nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia<\/a> intensified its efforts. In the summer of 2024, flammable devices were discovered hidden in parcels that were ignited at DHL logistics depots in Leipzig, Birmingham, England, and near Warsaw, Poland. Western agencies\u00a0attributed<\/a>\u00a0the operation to the GRU and warned that one package had been destined for a cargo aircraft. That same year, allied services disrupted an alleged Russian\u00a0plot\u00a0to assassinate<\/a> Armin Papperger, chief executive of Rheinmetall, Germany\u2019s largest arms maker. In September 2025, drone incursions closed airports across Denmark, and a mass violation of Polish airspace forced NATO jets to open fire over allied territory for the first time in the alliance\u2019s history. In November 2025, saboteurs reportedly recruited by Russian services\u00a0blew up<\/a>\u00a0a section of the railway line linking Warsaw to Ukraine. Alongside these attacks\u00a0came<\/a>\u00a0severed cables on the Baltic seabed,\u00a0the arson<\/a>\u00a0at a Warsaw shopping center, and the recruitment of local criminals for deniable, one-off jobs.<\/p>\n Operations of this kind serve three functions.<\/p>\n The first objective is to exert psychological pressure on the population. An armed drone inside a major airport tells ordinary Germans that the war they read about has physical reach into their daily life. The second is coercion directed at the government. The drone signals to Berlin, Ukraine\u2019s largest European backer, that its support carries a potentially high price. The third is escalation management on Moscow\u2019s terms. Each incident tests the threshold of Western response, normalizes the previous level of aggression, and moves the line of the tolerable while remaining below the threshold of what would trigger a collective military reaction.<\/p>\n TOM ROGAN: A MULTIPOLAR WORLD WOULD BE DISASTROUS FOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY<\/a><\/p>\n