Russia Recruits Criminal Networks for Sabotage Campaign Against European Defense Plants

The Telegraph reported, citing Western intelligence sources, that Russia has launched a fresh wave of sabotage attacks on European weapons factories, recruiting local criminal gang members to obscure Kremlin involvement and keep the attacks calibrated below the threshold that would trigger NATO's Article 5 mutual-defense clause 123. Latvia this week detained three of its own nationals on suspicion of the August 15 arson of a Milrem Robotics building in Tallinn, an Estonian firm supplying unmanned ground vehicles to Ukraine 12. The same reporting links the incident to explosions this month at Bulgaria's EMCO ammunition plant on August 10, reportedly sparked by a fire in a lorry parked near a storage warehouse, and at the KNDS Ammo Italy facility near Rome three days later, traced to an unexplained fire in a gunpowder processing unit, alongside an earlier fire at a Czech drone and thermal-optics plant that led to four detentions over suspected Russian involvement and an attempted arson at a Lithuanian factory supplying radio-wave scanners to Kyiv that resulted in six people being charged 123. Citing Latvia's state security service chief Normunds Mežviets, the Telegraph reported that GRU officers recruit intermediaries through Telegram rather than traveling to target countries, with local recruits paid in cryptocurrency 13. Italian and Bulgarian officials have not attributed their incidents to Russia 123.