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Fires at DHL warehouses this year may have been part of Russian sabotage operations, officials say.
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The Kremlin is suspected of stepping up hybrid attacks on Europe in recent months.
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The air cargo sector is ready for further action.
Suspected Russian sabotage activities targeting the air cargo industry are on the rise this year and the sector is preparing for further action.
Brandon Fried, executive director of the Airforwarders Association, which represents U.S. air cargo companies, told Business Insider that the industry has been on high alert since September 11.
“So regardless of who is doing this, whether it is another country or a terrorist organization, our industry has been vigilant for quite some time,” he said, referring to two fires at DHL warehouses earlier this year linked to Russia.
“They want to cause fear and panic, but we as a community will not allow that. One of our most important messages is that we are vigilant,” Fried said.
Western officials have said the fires, which occurred in July at two DHL sites in Britain and Germany, may have been part of Russian sabotage operations that ultimately targeted North America, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week.
One package caught fire before being loaded onto a plane at a DHL freight center in Leipzig, East Germany, while a similar incident occurred at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham, Britain.
Thomas Haldenwang, the president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said in October that it was a “fortunate coincidence” that the package caught fire on the ground in Leipzig and not during the flight.
Haldenwang did not explicitly blame Moscow, but German news agency DPA reported that security services believed the attack was linked to Russia. Financial times.
A police spokesperson told BI that counter-terrorism officials were leading an investigation into the Birmingham incident and were working to identify any links to similar incidents across the continent.
According to the Wall Street Journal report, the fires were caused by electrical stimulators implanted with a flammable magnesium-based substance.
The devices that ignited in Britain were traced to Lithuania, where officials say they appear to have been part of a broader Russian plot to get such devices onto planes bound for North America, the Journal reported.
Frank Umbach, research director at the European Cluster for Climate, Energy, and Resource Security at the University of Bonn, said Russia’s hybrid warfare had escalated from spying on critical infrastructure to active sabotage across Europe.
“Hybrid warfare has intensified here in Europe, especially against Germany,” Umbach said, adding that there were concerns that German intelligence services had been “heavily penetrated” by Russian agents.
Moscow has already been linked to a number of sabotage incidents in Europe this year, including attempted arson and a reported plan to assassinate the CEO of German arms company Rheinmetall, which has made ammunition and military equipment for Ukraine.
Russia is suspected of using social media platforms such as Telegram to recruit proxies to carry out such activities.
A few months after the DHL fires, the head of British intelligence MI6, Richard Moore, said he believed Russian intelligence services had “gone a bit wild.”
And experts think such incidents are unlikely to stop anytime soon.
Shashank Joshi, a former senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and now defense editor at The Economist, told BI that he believed the suspected Russian sabotage operations were part of a “quite broad campaign” that could endanger the Kremlin. targets any EU or NATO member.
“I don’t think anyone is particularly immune as such,” Joshi said.
A spokesman for the German Military Counterintelligence Service, known as BAMAD, said the German military and NATO forces in Germany “remain a priority target for Russian espionage activities.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has denied Russia’s involvement in sabotage operations in Europe.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence services and the BND declined to comment further.
Western officials say Moscow has also launched cyber attacks and tried to spread disinformation as part of its alleged sabotage operations.
Russian state media sites such as RT have already faced sanctions in the US and EU over allegations of disinformation.
Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Program, said Russian disinformation campaigns, espionage operations and sabotage attempts were “closely linked.”
“Information objectives can be served by kinetic actions and vice versa,” Giles said. “The information component of warfare is seen as integral to and interdependent with all other activities that Russia undertakes.”
“That is something that is very evident in the Russian war against Ukraine after the large-scale invasion,” he added.
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