Russia’s spies and saboteurs are on a roll. The year 2024 will be remembered for the unleashing of a hugely escalated campaign of political murder and sabotage abroad, combined with increasingly brutal repression at home.
In Russia, Alexey Navalny, Putin’s archenemy, whose name the Kremlin had never dared to mention, died in a labor camp north of the Arctic Circle in February. Whether the state’s agents delivered the mortal blow hardly matters — this was murder through thuggery or negligence.
Outside the country, Russian agencies increased the heat by intensifying sabotage operations and attacks on dissidents and defectors in Europe. Acts of arson, explosions, and the disruption of transportation systems and severing of subsea infrastructure occurred frequently across continental Europe and in the UK this year.
In April, German authorities arrested two men with dual German and Russian citizenship on suspicion of plotting sabotage attacks on a military base in Bavaria. In May, Poland detained three men — two of them Belarusian and one a Pole — for arson attacks and sabotage on Russia’s behalf.
In March, a Ukraine-linked warehouse in Leyton, East London, was set ablaze. The police arrested four people on charges that included planning arson and assisting Russian intelligence. The following month, a facility in South Wales belonging to the British defense, security, and aerospace company BAE was hit by an explosion and caught fire.
This year, the Kremlin continued the hunt for dissidents, opposition politicians, and defectors abroad. In the meantime, the Russian secret services started targeting European Union citizens, something Soviet intelligence had never indulged in during the Cold War.
The assassination of a Russian helicopter pilot, Maxim Kuzminov, in Spain in February — six months after his defection to Ukraine — demonstrated the capabilities of Russian intelligence in killing its enemies abroad, and also the unpreparedness of European countries to deal with this kind of attack. And the murder of the pilot-defector was hardly a surprise — soon after Kuzminov’s defection, Russian TV aired an interview with a group of masked men, said to be the GRU officers, who had promised to kill him.
The most outrageous of Russian intelligence operations was an attempt to assassinate a prominent German businessman. In mid-July, media reported that US and German intelligence had disrupted a plot by Kremlin agents to assassinate Amin Papperger, the head of leading German arms maker Rheinmetall, a major supplier of artillery shells to Ukraine. The targeting of a foreign national marks a dramatic change in Russian tactics abroad.
The conspiracy to kill Papperger was not the first attack on a European in Western Europe attempted by Russian intelligence. The hearings at London’s Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, exposed a Russian spy cell of Bulgarian nationals living in the UK who had plotted to kidnap Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian investigative journalist, along with a Russian journalist in exile, Roman Dobrokhotov.
This reflected the Kremlin’s aggressive new 2024 strategy. So did an attempt to capture and extradite Russian musicians who had left the country after the war in Ukraine started. In January, the popular rock band Bi-2 was detained in Thailand by local immigration authorities at the request of the Kremlin for their anti-war activity, which is considered a crime in Russia. Fortunately, within 48 hours, all the musicians were released following intervention by the Israeli and Australian authorities. Soon after, they left for Tel Aviv.
But the huge Russian diaspora, which now numbers in the millions when including all those who have left in the past 30 years, learned the lesson. Many anti-war artists in exile now stay clear of countries friendly to the Kremlin — and that list has been getting longer this year.
And yet, 2024 once again proved — as Robert Browning said in another context — that Russian intelligence’s reach exceeds its grasp. This was another year of bloody and costly failures. Once again, Putin’s main pillar of stability — the FSB — proved to be good at repression and killing but not as nearly good at collecting intelligence.
The FSB, in its role as a counterterrorism agency, failed to prevent the attack on Crocus city center in Moscow by the Islamic State in March, which left 145 people dead and 551 wounded. As an intelligence agency, the FSB failed to prevent the Ukrainian intrusion into the Kursk region in August — and failed to stop it as an agency put in charge of defending Russian borders. And on December 17, it failed to protect Lt Gen Igor Kirillov, head of military radiological protection units, from assassination by Ukrainian agents in Moscow.
But as in 2023, Putin chose not to punish his top security officials for their blunders, despite the high price paid by a regime that defines itself by decisiveness and strength, and which puts political stability above every other virtue. While the FSB lost several officers to repression, most were mid-level operatives arrested and prosecuted on corruption charges.
Other agencies were not targeted by repression at all, a message of impunity that emboldened them to become still more aggressive.
Not that the Kremlin has suddenly lost its appetite for repression. Quite the contrary. This year saw several key ministries targeted.
During the fall, the Ministry of Energy lost two deputy ministers detained and imprisoned; the Ministry of Transport had a former deputy minister arrested; the Moscow government’s former culture chief was arrested; and the deputy head of the Ministry of Digital Communications and Development has been in jail since last year. The Ministry of defense has been taking the biggest hit, with scores of top-level and middle-level officials being detained.
Why all these deputies and departmental heads? It’s no accident. The Kremlin playbook is to haul in the deputy and squeeze him (it normally is a man) for compromising material about his bosses and colleagues.
Everyone understands the rules, which helps to keep Putin’s servants on a short leash and minimize the likelihood of dissent among the elite.
All of which will provide much food for thought at this year’s Chekist celebration. They will share drinks in their Lubyanka offices in the belief that another year of repression will bring another year of political stability. And perhaps it might, or perhaps the FSB will be caught unawares once again.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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