Inside Russia’s Secret Campaign of Sabotage in Europe
Joshua Yaffa The New Yorker
Moscow, Russia. (photo: Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters) Inside Russia’s Secret Campaign of Sabotage in Europe
Joshua Yaffa The New Yorker
How Russian military intelligence is recruiting young people online to carry out espionage, arson, and other attacks across Europe.
Inside the locker, Anna found an assortment of items bundled in a blue ikea shopping bag, which she took home and stored in a closet. Three days later, Warrior2Alpha sent her a voice message with a new request. He wanted photographs of the bag’s contents. Anna opened the bag and pulled out a remote-controlled car still in its box. A bubble-wrap bag containing a bundle of wires was taped to one side of it. She also found several cellphones, charging cables, and a pair of black vibrators. Anna snapped a photograph and sent it to Warrior, as she came to call him, who instructed her to return the ikea bag to another locker at the train station.
By then, Anna was feeling increasingly uneasy about what she’d got herself into. Warrior’s profile on Telegram included images of a pistol and ammo cartridges, something that looked like a missile, and a Russian flag. Anna worried that, by helping him, she was somehow aiding the Russian war effort. She contacted her sister, who had a friend who worked in law enforcement back in Ukraine. He advised Anna to delete the picture that she’d sent to Warrior and promised to alert the appropriate authorities in Lithuania.
Within days, officers from Lithuania’s counterterrorism police showed up at Anna’s apartment. The investigators soon determined that the devices in the ikea bag were detonators, capable of triggering an explosion or a fire. They gave Anna a new set of instructions: she was to continue her correspondence with Warrior, only under surveillance, with the contents of the bag replaced with dummy goods and a hidden G.P.S. tracker. What had begun as a strange, out-of-the-blue favor was now a sting operation.
Anna returned the bag to the train station and sent Warrior a picture of the receipt for the locker. “Thank you,” he replied. Two days later, a young man appeared at the station’s luggage-storage area and opened the locker door. He took the bag and boarded a bus for Riga, the capital of Latvia, about two hundred miles away. Police tracked the man’s movements using the G.P.S. device hidden inside the bag. A commando unit moved into place.
Just before 2 p.m., at a gas station near the city of Panevėžys, in northern Lithuania, officers raided the bus. The young man appeared to be dozing in his seat; they shook him awake and told him that he was under arrest. Later, during an interrogation, he admitted everything. His name was Daniil Bardadim, a seventeen-year-old from southern Ukraine. He had committed one act of arson, he said, and he had been on his way to Riga to carry out another.
Two months earlier, Bardadim had crossed the border from Ukraine into Poland. He had previously lived with his parents and a brother in Kherson, a port city known for its fields of sunflowers and watermelons, which, in the early days of the war, was occupied by Russian forces. A former K.G.B. officer was installed as mayor; the schools and other public services remained closed for months. Bardadim, who was then fifteen, briefly worked at a gas station. In September, 2022, occupation authorities held a supposed referendum that led to Russia’s annexation of the city and its surrounding region, but the Kremlin’s rule over Kherson proved short-lived: in mid-November, after a sustained counter-offensive, the Ukrainian Army retook the city.
The first days of liberation were joyous, with crowds flooding the central square. But Russian forces, which remained just across the Dnipro River, routinely fired rockets and artillery into the city, killing people at bus stops, outside the grocery store, in their homes. Then came the drones, hunting anything that moved. The city began to empty out. In November, 2023, Bardadim moved with his family to Haivoron, a small town near the border with Moldova.
Haivoron was relatively quiet: Russian missiles and drones occasionally streaked across the sky, but the town itself was never targeted. Bardadim finished eleventh grade; by the following spring he was feeling restless. “During the war, wages were poor, and I had little money,” he later told investigators. In a few months, he would turn eighteen and have to register with his local draft office. At that point, he would be prohibited from leaving the country. He gathered his savings—three thousand hryvnia, around seventy-five dollars—and formed a plan with a friend from Kherson, who is identified in Polish case files as Oleksandr, to flee Ukraine. “So as to not have to fight,” Bardadim said.
The pair crossed the border into Poland in March, 2024; it was Bardadim’s first time outside Ukraine. A Ukrainian friend who worked at a furniture factory in Kluczbork, a small town in southern Poland, had arranged jobs for them loading sofas into trucks, which paid around fifty dollars a day in cash. After a month, another acquaintance from Kherson, a man named Serhiy Chaliy, invited them to Warsaw.
Chaliy, who, at thirty-one, was more than a decade older than Bardadim and Oleksandr, came from the same neighborhood in Kherson; he’d owned the gas station where Bardadim had worked at the start of the invasion. (Oleksandr had worked there, too.) Bardadim later described him as having a “short beard,” an “athletic build,” and “pockmarks on his face.” He always wore a “blue baseball cap,” “black clothes,” and a “thick gold chain” around his neck. During the occupation, Chaliy had been involved in a series of side hustles, including trading fuel on the black market, an enterprise that was possible only with the approval, tacit or otherwise, of the Russian forces stationed in the city. He sped around town in a BMW. “Like a gangster,” Oleksandr said. “I was afraid of him.”
Bardadim had heard that Chaliy was also involved in the stolen-car trade, running vehicles into Russia and either selling them there or moving them on to Europe. When Ukrainian forces liberated Kherson, Chaliy, fearing arrest, had fled to Crimea, which had been annexed by Russia in 2014. “The police are fighting over his head,” Bardadim had told Oleksandr at the time. By then, the pair may have already been associated with Chaliy’s criminal circle. A source in Ukrainian law enforcement told me, “Chaliy, along with his neighbors in Kherson, dismantled cars and transported them to Crimea.”
Chaliy now told Bardadim and Oleksandr that he had work for them in Warsaw—something to do with fixing cars, he said. He met them at a city bus station and drove them to a hostel in Stara Miłosna, a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. During the next few weeks, Chaliy sent them small sums of money, to pay for food and lodging. Write down the amounts, he told them. You’ll owe me later. Eventually, Chaliy gave Bardadim a job: he should travel to Romania by bus and pick up a BMW. “He said he wasn’t allowed to go there but didn’t say why,” Bardadim said, of Chaliy. (Another Ukrainian living in Warsaw said that Chaliy was “wanted by the police” for car theft in Romania.) After picking up the BMW, Bardadim drove for a day straight, from Bucharest to Warsaw, delivered the car to Chaliy, and then headed back to the hostel to sleep.
I visited the hostel one afternoon this fall. A metal gate stands before a set of steps and an unmarked front door; inside, handwritten signs posted on the walls announce payment rules and checkout times. A Ukrainian woman named Valentina, the hostel’s administrator, told me that she remembered Bardadim and Oleksandr. “They were calm, well- behaved guys,” she said. “They didn’t make noise, didn’t fight or drink.” They were also constantly short of cash, she added, staying for a night or two, then leaving for a while. At a certain point, they disappeared. Valentina had heard that they’d been arrested, though she didn’t know why. “If they were recruited into something,” she told me, “it had to have been for money.”
In late 2022, European law-enforcement and intelligence officials began to pick up on a new phenomenon. Anodyne offers for odd jobs were appearing in online chat groups, often on Telegram. Most were aimed at local Russian-speaking populations, meaning not only Russians but also Belarusians and Ukrainians. Payment was generally promised in cryptocurrency. The Polish intelligence services came up with a name for those who were recruited to carry out such supposedly simple tasks—jednorazowi agenci, or “single-use agents.”
In the spring of 2023, police in the Polish city of Lublin identified a network of more than a dozen single-use agents—Ukrainians and Belarusians, along with one Russian, a professional hockey player—some of whom were initially recruited to put up flyers and stickers that read “Poland ≠ Ukraine” and “nato go home.” The point, Polish authorities believed, was to get people to question the state’s support for Ukraine and to stir up doubts and animosity about the Ukrainian refugees already in the country. In France, single-use agents from Moldova, Bulgaria, and Serbia, among others, stencilled Stars of David on walls around Paris, defaced a Holocaust memorial, and left severed pigs’ heads outside mosques. In June, 2024, five wooden coffins draped with French flags appeared near the Eiffel Tower, bearing the inscription “Soldats Français de l’Ukraine.” Police apprehended three men—from Bulgaria, Germany, and Ukraine—who said they had been paid several hundred euros for the stunt. “The goal is clear,” a European intelligence chief said. “Heighten tensions or cause cracks within society or, at least, create the image of such a thing.”
Often, simple acts of vandalism lead to more complicated jobs. Members of what became known as the Lublin cell, for example, were later paid to place surveillance cameras along railway lines in Poland that transport military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. A man in Latvia looking to buy marijuana on Telegram ended up enlisted to draw graffiti outside a nato cybersecurity center in Estonia; later, his Telegram handler got him to take surreptitious photos of a Latvian military airbase. The man was arrested after dropping a sheet of paper on which he’d scribbled his handler’s instructions, along with a doodle of an airplane. A local woman later found the paper on the ground. “He turned out not to be the brightest person,” an officer in Latvian security services told me. “But for this job it was enough.”
Last fall, two Dutch teen-agers were arrested for allegedly using a phone app known as a packet sniffer, which intercepts data from surrounding networks, in a government district in The Hague that houses several embassies and E.U. law-enforcement agencies. According to a Dutch security source familiar with the case, they were given the job by an anonymous handler in a Telegram group linked to Russian hackers, who offered them several hundred dollars in cryptocurrency. The teen-agers managed to collect data from about a thousand networks—potentially useful information for creating a map of sensitive digital infrastructure and for probing security vulnerabilities. “With these kinds of crimes, the chances that we manage to catch someone are quite small,” the Dutch security source told me. “Clearly, many more cases go undetected.” As for the teen-agers, who are now awaiting trial, the source said, “I think they feel pretty stupid.”
There have also been several incidents of outright sabotage. A fire at a warehouse in East London that stored humanitarian aid for Ukraine led to the conviction of six British men who, the judge said, had joined a “campaign of terrorism.” The men had also discussed kidnapping Evgeny Chichvarkin, a well-known Russian restaurateur in London who has become a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, the handler of the Lublin cell, a Telegram user who went by the name Andrei, offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who could derail a train with cargo that was headed for Ukraine. No one in the group managed to pull off the feat before being arrested. But in November other single-use agents in Poland blew up a stretch of railway on the Warsaw-Lublin line—a key conduit for delivering supplies to Ukraine—with military-grade C-4 explosives. Polish investigators identified the culprits as two Ukrainians who had entered the country from Belarus and then managed to escape via the same route.
German police and intelligence agencies, meanwhile, have foiled at least two assassination plots. In June, 2024, an Armenian, a Ukrainian, and a Russian allegedly tried to set a trap in a Frankfurt café for a former Ukrainian soldier, in what prosecutors say was likely an attempted contract killing. The former soldier alerted German police, and the men were arrested. A month later, news broke of a warning issued by U.S. intelligence officials to their German counterparts: Russian agents were planning to kill the C.E.O. of Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest arms manufacturer, which supplies tanks, artillery shells, and other munitions for the Ukrainian military. The C.E.O. stepped up his security, and the attack was apparently called off.
The most brazen acts came later that summer, when single-use agents in cities such as Amsterdam, Vilnius, and Warsaw—none of whom knew about the others—were recruited to prepare and ship packages, via DHL, of seemingly random items: neck-massage pillows, sex toys, cosmetics, and sportswear. Some of the packages, which were sent to addresses in Europe, the United States, and Canada, contained G.P.S. trackers. Investigators believe they were meant to monitor global shipping routes and logistics. “Now the package is at the distribution center, now it’s loaded in the airplane, now it’s at customs—that’s all actionable information,” a European prosecutor who worked on one of the cases said. Other shipments contained homemade incendiary devices, essentially time bombs. One package caught fire at a DHL processing facility in Birmingham, England. Another burst into flames as it was being loaded onto a DHL cargo plane in Leipzig. The plane’s takeoff had been delayed owing to a late connecting flight. If it had stayed on schedule, the plane would have been midair at the time of the explosion.
In nearly every case, prosecutors have concluded that Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., has been the principal organizer of single-use-agent operations in Europe. A source in the German security establishment told me, “It’s a show of force, a way of taking off the mask and saying, ‘So, Germany, what are you going to do about it?’ ”
Russia knows that its sabotage campaign, which is a kind of hybrid threat—basically, any state-led attack that falls below the level of full military action—presents a particular conundrum for Europe’s rules-based legal systems. “They run an operation that costs a few thousand euros, carried out by people they don’t care about losing,” Bart Schuurman, the head of a research group on terrorism and political violence at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, told me. “And we in Europe follow up with an investigation that takes months, tying up finite resources across multiple countries. Meanwhile, they’re long on to the next one.”
The intent is not necessarily to undermine the West’s ability to aid Ukraine but, rather, to sway public opinion about the cost of the wider war effort. A European foreign-policy official paraphrased Russia’s intended message to the public: “It’s getting dangerous with these warmongers in office. You’re putting yourselves at risk. So you better go and vote for, say, Marine Le Pen’s party in France or the AfD”—Alternative for Germany—right-wing populist parties that have expressed opposition to continued Western support for Ukraine. Paulina Piasecka, a noted Polish academic and expert on hybrid threats, said, “Taken together, such incidents are meant to spread uncertainty, fear, distrust. The state looks incapable. And people begin to wonder, Look what’s happening all around us because we’re engaged in this war, which actually, maybe, isn’t—or shouldn’t be—our war.”
One day last April, Chaliy met Bardadim and Oleksandr at a McDonald’s in a shopping center in Warsaw. He’d told them to leave their mobile phones in his car before going inside. “This seemed suspicious, but we didn’t dwell on it,” Bardadim later told investigators. A Ukrainian man who briefly lived with Chaliy in Warsaw said that Chaliy treated Bardadim and Oleksandr “as if he were superior—gave them orders, bullied them, and spoke to them rudely.” The two teen-agers, in turn, he said, “did everything without objection.” Once, Chaliy had them clean the coffeemaker in his apartment.
At McDonald’s, Chaliy offered them a job. “You’ll always have money in your pockets,” he said. All they needed to do was leave a package in a shopping center. A few days later, Chaliy called Bardadim and told him to install Zangi, a relatively obscure Armenian-owned messaging app, on his phone. Bardadim was going to Lithuania.
Bardadim took a bus to Vilnius, where he wandered the streets till dawn. The next day, a Zangi user called Q—“I assumed he was an acquaintance of Chaliy’s,” Bardadim said—sent him a series of instructions: he should go to the Vilnius ikea, near the airport, and take some pictures. Q first wanted shots of the parking lot. He then told Bardadim to go inside and take videos on his phone as he walked the aisles. Q was especially interested in seeing closeups of the store’s mattress department. “I did not know why I was doing it,” Bardadim later said. “But I did what Q told me.”
Bardadim returned to Warsaw, where, a few weeks later, Chaliy told him to pick up a car. Q sent Bardadim an address and a photo of an archway under which the car would be parked. When Bardadim got there, he found a VW Golf. On the ground nearby, there was a bag of orange cables. Bardadim called Chaliy, who told him to take the cables and drive to Vilnius—and not to tell anyone where he was going. But it was too late for that: Bardadim had taken Oleksandr along with him.
In Vilnius, Q told Bardadim to leave the car parked somewhere on the edge of town. He was to take eight of the cables with him and to hide the rest. Bardadim put them in a pipe behind some bushes on the side of the road, then took a picture of the location and sent it to Q. The instructions were coming fast now. Chaliy told Bardadim to buy a used moped; he found one for two hundred euros. Q sent a shopping list: twenty packs of matches, three litres of gasoline, three litres of diesel fuel, and three bars of soap. Bardadim later said that he bought half as much fuel as Q had instructed. “I had begun to guess what they wanted me to do,” he told investigators. “I wanted the damage to be smaller.”
Once Bardadim procured the supplies, he took everything into the bathroom of his hotel room. Q sent a pictorial instruction manual for blending the fuel: Bardadim combined the gasoline and the diesel in a bottle, then added crushed soap to the mixture. This was, effectively, a recipe for homemade napalm—a highly flammable gel that ignites readily and is difficult to extinguish. Q asked for a photo to check his work. The heady smell of fuel leached out of the bathroom; Oleksandr poked his head inside. Later, he helped Bardadim, per Q’s instructions, scrape the sulfur heads off the matches with a knife. “He guessed what I was doing but said nothing,” Bardadim said. Bardadim cut a hole in the empty matchbox, fed a cable through it, then poured in the loose sulfur. He braided the cables together and attached them to a cellphone charger.
Bardadim could find the final component at the Vilnius train station, Q said, sending a photo of a receipt from a luggage locker. Bardadim picked up the package and, back at the hotel, opened it to see two Chinese-made smartphones. Q explained how to assemble all the elements of the contraption. When everything was in place, Q said, Bardadim should set the alarm on the phones to go off at four in the morning. Bardadim sent pictures to Q, who responded, “O.K.” On Q’s orders, Bardadim had left the moped parked at a gas station. He was now told to pick it up and drive to ikea.
Q had also instructed Bardadim to buy a motorcycle helmet and wear it not only while riding the moped but also inside the store. “He was very strict about this,” Bardadim recalled. Chaliy sent him the money for a helmet, but Bardadim didn’t buy one. Instead, he sent Q a picture of a helmet that he found on the internet and took an Uber to the store. The idea of walking around ikea with a helmet on his head, Bardadim later told investigators, “seemed ridiculous and suspicious.” Q had also told Bardadim to leave an explosive at each end of the mattress aisle. But Bardadim, having bought half as much fuel as Q’s recipe required, had only one bag. A security guard on duty at ikea that night, who later watched the store’s CCTV footage, described Bardadim’s movements: “He looks around, bending over to examine everything, holding a white plastic bag in his hand the entire time.” A minute later, Bardadim walks away, without the bag.
Outside of the ikea, Bardadim told Q that he’d finished the job. Q instructed him to return to the store at four that morning to “film what’s happening.” What Bardadim eventually witnessed was a relatively minor event. The incendiary device worked, but the store’s fire alarms went off almost immediately, as did the sprinkler systems; firefighters quickly put out the rest of the flames. The damage was estimated at a little less than five hundred thousand euros, a sizable sum, but hardly catastrophic for the world’s largest furniture retailer. Once back in Warsaw, Bardadim got a message on Zangi from an unknown user, which he assumed was Q using a different account. “Why didn’t you leave two packages like I told you?” the user asked. Bardadim didn’t respond.
Western intelligence officials believe that a specific G.R.U. division, the Department of Special Tasks, is behind Russia’s single-use-agent operations. The department appears to be an offshoot of an infamous G.R.U. unit known by its numerical designation, 29155, which has a long history of subversion and sabotage across Europe. In 2014, operatives from the unit set off two explosions that destroyed ammunition depots in the Czech Republic, killing two people. A couple of years later, on the day of parliamentary elections in Montenegro, G.R.U. officers tried to mount an armed coup, which ultimately failed. In 2018, in the U.K., two colonels from the unit poisoned the former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter with Novichok, a state-manufactured nerve agent. That action appears to have been a failure: both Skripals survived, an unrelated woman was killed, and the G.R.U. was identified as the perpetrator of the attack. (In response, Western countries expelled more than a hundred and fifty Russian diplomats.) A European intelligence official described the G.R.U.’s reputation as “wreaking havoc, creating disruption, behaving recklessly.”
As for the more recent sabotage operations carried out by the Department of Special Tasks, a European intelligence analyst who tracks the G.R.U. told me, “the composition is slightly different, but it’s a lot of the same people, carrying out very similar functions.” Schuurman, the political-violence expert at Leiden University, said, “There’s nothing inherently new, or even all that Russian, about using proxies in statecraft or war.” Ukrainian intelligence services, for example, have used unsuspecting local agents inside Russia to carry out targeted assassinations and to sabotage infrastructure. But, Schuurman went on, “what is noteworthy is the scale—and the audacity.”
Several factors help explain Russia’s new reliance on single-use agents. In the wake of the country’s invasion of Ukraine, European nations expelled an additional six hundred Russian diplomats, the majority of whom were intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover. Before 2022, Russian diplomatic-passport holders could travel to most European countries for ninety days without a visa—a useful allowance for intelligence officers on short-term missions. After the invasion, the E.U. revoked that provision. Charlie Edwards, a fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London, who last year wrote an authoritative report on Russian sabotage efforts, told me that, as a result, “the Russian services lost the capacity to do what they once had been doing, or would like to be doing, and had to get more creative.”
At the same time, the invasion unleashed a whole new set of imperatives for Russia’s spy services. In the Kremlin’s view, Russia is waging war not only against Ukraine but against the collective West. Ukraine is merely the current front line; the rear, as it were, is Europe, where arms are produced and assembled, military equipment is collected, and fiscal aid packages and other measures to support Ukraine are devised. “From a doctrinal point of view, Europe is absolutely part of the theatre of conflict,” Edwards said. And Russia, like any country at war, has an incentive to disrupt supply lines, sow confusion, and dampen public morale in enemy territory. Maciej Matysiak, a former high-ranking officer in Polish military counterintelligence, told me, “Russia’s intelligence services were left with more pressure from above, expected to take on more tasks, all while having less personnel on the ground.”
Traditional intelligence operatives, and the people they recruit and train in the field, are meant to penetrate specific facilities or networks to collect highly guarded secrets. “The goals or tasks tend to be sophisticated, and the value of any particular action can, if done well, be fairly high,” Arkadiusz Nyzio, a Polish researcher who has tracked the emergence of single-use agents, said. Historically, intelligence agencies have gone to great lengths to protect their assets, providing them with encrypted-communication platforms and detailed exfiltration plans. But with single-use agents what matters is the ability of all the agents, in aggregate, to tie up resources and create a general feeling of insecurity. (For this reason, Russia’s recruits are often referred to as “disposable agents.”) “It’s a swarm tactic,” Nyzio said. “And with little risk if things go wrong.”
Connecting single-use agents to higher-ups in the Russian state security apparatus is exceedingly difficult. Instructions are passed through several layers of middlemen, often figures from the Russian diaspora or the criminal underworld. The European intelligence official estimated that, on average, at least three levels of separation exist between single-use agents and what’s known as a “cadre” officer—an operative working as part of an official unit in the Russian services. “It’s a whole pyramid,” an officer in Poland’s security services said. “There are G.R.U. officers, and under them coördinators, recruiters, logisticians, separate people handling payments or preparing explosives, others in charge of cars.” The Polish officer spoke of a structure borrowed from organized criminal groups: “Everyone has his or her own assigned task. No one knows what anybody else is up to.”
The European intelligence official compared the G.R.U.’s deployment of single-use agents to the tactics of isis. “It’s very similar to how isis used remote tasking,” the official said. In that model, isis leaders in Syria or Iraq recruited followers in Western countries via online platforms and provided them with basic instructions for carrying out terror attacks. “It’s very cheap, offers a veneer of deniability, and the spread can be huge,” the official said.
Irena Lipowicz, a Polish legal scholar who was part of a government commission that recently studied the threat of foreign interference, described a common profile of individuals approached by Russian intelligence: “They try to look for people who are vulnerable—loners, outsiders, whether in the classroom or society at large, without experience and maybe not so savvy or wise.” She went on, “Ukrainian migrants, especially teen-agers, can fit that description perfectly.”
Oftentimes, young refugees from the war in Ukraine don’t have long-term residence papers or stable incomes in the countries to which they immigrate. They may not speak the language or be integrated into local communities. And, as the Polish security officer told me, “if we catch them, it only ends up helping Russia’s propaganda narrative: Look, you support them, and they attack you.” In 2022, ninety per cent of people surveyed in Poland were in favor of the country accepting Ukrainian refugees. That number is now less than fifty per cent, with a similar percentage believing that the Polish state is overly generous with the benefits—including cash subsidies and free health care—that it offers Ukrainians.
Since 2022, some seven million people have fled Ukraine, with nearly a third having entered Poland and Germany. At least a quarter of a million Ukrainian refugees are estimated to have travelled through Russia and Belarus before arriving in Europe, which means they likely passed through so-called filtration points, potentially ripe settings for recruitment. A high- ranking European official told me, “Europe might feel that it should more carefully vet who we’re letting in.” Of course, the official added, “that’s exactly what Russia wants.”
But, in nearly all cases, single-use agents are apolitical, in need of money, and ignorant of the cause they’re ultimately supporting. The Polish security officer told me that, of the sixty-two suspects who have been arrested in Poland as part of sabotage investigations in recent years, only two of them were believed to be primarily driven by pro-Russian sentiment. “It’s not a bad spy movie,” the Polish officer said. “No one comes out and says, ‘I’m with the G.R.U.’ ” But, the officer went on, “use your head.” Who is likely to ask you to, say, put up posters with anti-Ukrainian and anti-nato messages, or to take pictures of train lines that bring Western military equipment to Ukraine?
Still, it can be easy to feel a pang of sympathy for those lured into taking part in these plots, often young people like Bardadim, refugees arriving in a new country with few contacts or resources. The Polish officer dismissed such concerns: “Frankly, they’re idiots who want easy money and don’t ask a lot of questions.”
Back in Warsaw, Chaliy gave Bardadim a reward for the ikea fire: the BMW that he had driven from Romania was now his to keep. But, even after Vilnius, Bardadim and Oleksandr didn’t have any money. Chaliy not only hadn’t paid them any big sums, as he’d promised—he’d stopped covering their basic living expenses. Bardadim drove with Oleksandr to the hostel where they had previously stayed, but they didn’t have the funds for a room. They slept in the BMW.
Q, meanwhile, was messaging Bardadim. He sent a screenshot of an address in Warsaw. Bardadim could see that it was a large shopping center. Q told him to go there at four in the morning and to take a video with his phone. “I didn’t know what was supposed to happen,” Bardadim said. “But I had a guess.”
The Marywilska shopping center, in central Warsaw, was a stadium-size complex with more than a thousand stalls selling everything from puffer coats to pho. (Many of the center’s venders were originally from Vietnam.) On the morning of May 12, 2024, at around three-thirty, a fire started in the building’s H Wing, featuring shops offering shoes and cosmetics. A handful of security guards were on duty for the overnight shift. At least one of them grabbed a fire extinguisher, but the blaze quickly spread out of control. By the time firefighters arrived, eleven minutes later, two-thirds of the building was engulfed in flames, its roof buckling and collapsing in on itself. A high-ranking member of Poland’s fire service later told journalists that the blaze, which had spread with unusual speed and fury, was no accident: “Starting a fire like this is a masterful art.”
Bardadim had left the BMW around 3 a.m. He set off across Warsaw on a bus but fell asleep and missed his stop. He didn’t reach the mall until nearly four-thirty. He couldn’t see much. “By the time I arrived,” he said, “it had practically burned down.” As the sun rose, one of the capital’s largest shopping centers was reduced to an expanse of charred steel and ash.
Oleksandr woke in the BMW around 7 a.m. He checked his phone and saw the news of the Marywilska fire. An hour later, Bardadim showed up, saying he had been “taking care of business.”
Oleksandr showed him the notifications on his phone: Is this your business?
No, Bardadim said. I didn’t set the fire. I only recorded it.
Later that day, Q instructed Bardadim to go to Vilnius to pick up another package at the railway station. Oleksandr stayed behind. He later told investigators that he knew what Bardadim would be doing on the trip: “Setting something on fire.” At one point, Bardadim intimated that the acts of arson were the result of commercial disputes, not of state-backed sabotage—a story that he may have believed, or was simply incentivized to tell himself and others. In any case, he claimed that he had considered refusing the latest assignment but was afraid that “Chaliy would be angry.” Bardadim arrived in Vilnius at five in the morning, headed to the station, and opened a storage locker. Inside, he found an ikea bag containing a remote-controlled car, a few cellphones, and a pair of vibrators—the dummy items that Anna had left under the guidance of Lithuanian police.
The officer in the Latvian security services told me that Bardadim’s target in Riga remained a mystery. “We don’t know, and he didn’t know,” the officer said. “Most likely, he would have found out once he arrived.” That made Bardadim seem awfully incurious, I noted, setting off on bus rides across Europe to start fires in undisclosed locations. “For you and me, it might seem strange or illogical,” the officer said. “But he didn’t think in such categories. When you perform jobs for people you know to be criminals, you don’t ask a lot of follow-up questions.”
Russia is intentional about keeping its sabotage operations “below the threshold of war,” the officer from the Polish intelligence service told me. In Poland, for example, for all the vandalism, arson, and railway attacks, there have been no operations directed at military facilities or critical infrastructure. Such an attack would likely trigger a more forceful response, perhaps even military action. “Russia knows it’s not going to be very successful in an open conflict with nato,” the European intelligence official said.
The deployment of single-use agents allows Russia to maintain at least a semblance of deniability. In 2024, after the DHL plot was uncovered, officials in the Biden Administration tried to intervene, worried that, if unchecked, Russian sabotage operations would lead to a major catastrophe. (“You don’t launch a plan like this if bringing down an airplane isn’t an outcome you’re comfortable with,” the European prosecutor told me.) Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national-security adviser, placed a call to Yuri Ushakov, a top aide to Putin; William Burns, the director of the C.I.A., also contacted his counterparts in Russia’s security services. The message, according to a person familiar with those conversations, was, in essence, “Knock it off.” The Russian officials played dumb. “ ‘We don’t know what you’re talking about,’ ” the European official said, paraphrasing the reaction.
At the same time, the Russian state wants Europe to be aware that it’s behind the acts of sabotage—otherwise the attacks serve no purpose, a tree falling with no one to hear it. “It’s a fine line,” Schuurman, the researcher at Leiden University, told me. “There should be enough of a link to cause speculation and, most important, unease.”
Tomasz Siemoniak, a Polish government minister who oversees the country’s special services, told me that it was Bardadim’s arrest, and the information gathered by Lithuanian colleagues, that set in motion the investigation that linked the Marywilska fire to Russia. Key questions remain—namely, who started it? The mall’s CCTV footage from that evening was destroyed in the blaze. But, Siemoniak went on, the intended message was clear: “If we can set fire to a large shopping center in the center of Warsaw, we can do anything we want in your capital.”
Other officials described feeling trapped: the more vigilant their governments are in responding to the threat of Russian sabotage, the more fear and disquiet spread in society. “If you say every day, ‘Russia is attacking us,’ then they don’t really have to attack us anymore,” the European intelligence official said. The official described how, in 2024, after undersea cables in the Baltic Sea mysteriously snapped, agencies across Europe convened working groups under the assumption that Russia was the culprit. A months-long multilateral investigation, however, uncovered no conclusive evidence of sabotage.
Piasecka, the Polish academic, told me about three separate electricity transformers that caught fire in quick succession last summer, causing power outages, including in Warsaw. “I don’t believe in accidents of this type,” she said. “I told everyone, ‘It must be the Russians.’ ” Later, after she spoke with experts and read detailed reports on the fires, she became convinced that, in fact, they were caused by an unseasonable heat wave. “I study hybrid threats, and I, more than anyone, should have known better than to get sucked into this paranoia,” she told me. “That’s the problem—there’s no winning.”
There’s also no clear end in sight. Even if the war in Ukraine comes to a close, Russia will still regard Europe as a strategic adversary. “It’s the capability itself that’s worrying,” the European intelligence official told me. “Today, it’s being used on a relatively low level. But there’s no reason you can’t do the same but escalate the stakes.” The methods and tactics required for having agents ship flammable parcels on cargo planes or set fire to shopping centers could be used to unleash terrorist attacks that inflict mass casualties. “We think of it like a dial,” the official said. “Maybe right now it’s set to Level 1. But what if it goes to 10?”
After Bardadim was arrested in Lithuania, Chaliy, back in Warsaw, began to panic. Polish prosecutors later pieced together his movements. The next day, he tried to cross the border into Belarus, in a Range Rover, but his name was on a blacklist for entry. He called a contact in Warsaw and asked him to book a room at a hotel—Chaliy, fearing that the police were already looking for him, didn’t want to use his own name. That same contact bought Chaliy a bus ticket to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, but Chaliy wasn’t allowed to board the bus, because his passport didn’t match the name on the reservation.
Chaliy next called a man named Pavlo Tkachuk. Tkachuk, who owned a taxi company, had done a few odd jobs for Chaliy, including picking up Bardadim and Oleksandr when they first crossed into Poland. Now Chaliy offered Tkachuk around four hundred dollars to drive him to Bratislava, a six-and-a-half-hour trip. On the way, Tkachuk overheard Chaliy talking on the phone about plane tickets to either Istanbul or Dubai. Eventually, Chaliy told Tkachuk that a friend had booked him a ticket departing from Prague, so they’d need to drive there instead.
According to Polish investigative files, Tkachuk asked Chaliy what was going on. Chaliy started talking about Bardadim, how he sent him to Vilnius with instructions to pick up a bag containing some “fuses.” Tkachuk asked what that meant. “A mechanism for starting a fire,” Chaliy answered. By then, the Marywilska fire was all over the news. Tkachuk asked if that was him. Chaliy said, “No, that wasn’t me,” but he added that he knew who had organized it.
Tkachuk later listened as Chaliy made a call to a man named Dmitry. “He was talking through the phone receiver, not on speaker, but I could hear very well what he was saying,” Tkachuk told investigators. Chaliy asked Dmitry whether his face had been captured by surveillance cameras at the Marywilska mall. “Chaliy didn’t tell me directly that this Dmitry was involved in the arson,” Tkachuk said, “but that’s what I figured.”
As they neared the airport in Prague, Chaliy got another call. Tkachuk heard someone telling Chaliy that Oleksandr had been arrested in Warsaw. Chaliy told Tkachuk to stop the car. At a gas station, he placed a call to a man he referred to as Uncle Sasha. Polish and Lithuanian officials believe that Uncle Sasha is Oleksandr Varivoda, a forty-eight-year-old Ukrainian living in Krasnodar, Russia. Tkachuk told investigators that he had heard Chaliy talk about Varivoda before, describing him as a kind of senior comrade and boasting of his links to Russian government officials and vory v zakone, or thieves in law, Russian slang for powerful figures in the criminal underworld.
During Kherson’s occupation, Varivoda, like Chaliy, was involved in the stolen-car trade. Last year, a Ukrainian court convicted him in absentia of large-scale theft. A witness described Varivoda showing up at car dealerships in the company of Russian soldiers, describing himself as an adviser to the Russian commandant in charge of Kherson. Varivoda, the witness said, “walked around the store’s premises and threatened our director with confiscation of all the cars.” The court determined that Varivoda had stolen at least a hundred and seventy vehicles, passing many of them to Russian officers or members of the occupation’s law-enforcement arm. Another witness said, “The occupiers also handed over a network of gas stations to Varivoda.”
There is a long history of the G.R.U. using criminal figures as middlemen and proxies. “Criminals are close by, accessible, easy to manipulate,” the Latvian security-services officer said. “They want to survive and stay out of prison, and, in a place like Russia, having certain ties to the services can help.” As Tkachuk understood it, Varivoda “collected orders for committing various crimes in the E.U.,” and Chaliy “carried them out.” That included car theft, illegal border crossings, document fraud, and, as European law-enforcement and intelligence officials believe, arson and sabotage on behalf of the Russian intelligence services. According to Polish investigators, Varivoda played a central role in Bardadim’s arson campaign: he is assumed to be the person behind Q, Bardadim’s anonymous interlocutor.
After the call to Uncle Sasha, there was another change of plans. Varivoda had a guy in Vienna who could help Chaliy flee Europe using forged documents, with a route out via Sicily. Varivoda told Chaliy to climb into the back seat of Tkachuk’s car, so that his face wouldn’t be photographed by traffic cameras. “I was afraid of him,” Tkachuk said, of Chaliy. “He is a bad person by nature.” Another Ukrainian in Warsaw agreed: “He’s a fucker.” The person told me, “He abuses people’s trust and creates problems for them. A lot of people have suffered as a result.”
They arrived in Vienna at five in the morning. Tkachuk paid for Chaliy’s hotel room, just to get rid of him. “I wanted to leave there as quickly as possible,” Tkachuk said. Days later, Tkachuk was arrested in Warsaw. He was ultimately sentenced to six months in prison for aiding in Chaliy’s escape. (“Please don’t ruin my life,” he pleaded under interrogation.) His former partner, Yulia, relayed how, after his arrest, one of the prosecutors told her, “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time—and with the wrong people.”
Chaliy disappeared. In May of 2024, an Interpol Red Notice appeared for him, citing criminal charges in Poland for “participation in an organized group or association of an armed nature or aimed at committing a crime of a terrorist nature.”
Polish prosecutors filed a similar Interpol warrant for a thirty-seven-year-old Russian citizen named Yaroslav Mikhailov. Beginning in 2015, he was charged by Russia’s main intelligence agency, the F.S.B., with a number of smuggling offenses, but it appears that at some point the warrant for his arrest became inactive—a sign that he might have been recruited by the Russian security services. Lithuanian investigators suspect that Mikhailov has also operated under the name Daniil Gromov, the man who initially asked Anna to pick up the package at the train station in Vilnius. The Polish charges against him, however, don’t concern the ikea fire but, rather, the DHL-packages case. Mikhailov, operating under another alias, the Telegram handle Jarik Deppa, allegedly gave instructions to several single-use agents in Lithuania and Poland, telling them to pick up and drop off packages in circuitous routes that crisscrossed much of Europe. In at least one case, he described how to activate the timing mechanisms on incendiary devices. Polish prosecutors believe he is currently hiding in Azerbaijan. One of them told me that he’s wanted for crimes connected to “participation in Russian intelligence activities,” including “organizing and supporting acts of diversion and sabotage.”
One afternoon this fall, I walked through the quaint, storybook streets of Vilnius’s Old Town on my way to the city’s neoclassical courthouse. I entered through heavy wooden doors and found my way to courtroom No. 8. Bardadim had been on trial for several months, though the proceedings were sealed, the evidence kept secret. Now the judge was scheduled to issue her verdict, a hearing that, by law, must be open to the public.
Around two in the afternoon, the courtroom’s bailiffs hurried Bardadim past a scrum of local reporters. He was in handcuffs, wearing a green puffer jacket, its hood pulled over his eyes. He looked at the floor, the table, his hands—anywhere but at the cameras or the judge. A Russian-language interpreter whispered the verdict into Bardadim’s ear. The judge pronounced him guilty of carrying out a “terrorist act” as part of a “terrorist group” and sentenced him to three years in prison. With the time he’d already spent in pretrial detention and his eligibility for parole, he could be released in one. After he was hustled out of the courtroom, his lawyer indicated that he would not appeal. He may, however, face another trial in Poland, where prosecutors are still investigating the Marywilska fire.
While in Vilnius, I paid a visit to Vidmantas Kaladinskas, a top Lithuanian national-security official. I asked him about the seeming randomness of Bardadim’s target: How does a fire at a Vilnius ikea help disrupt, say, Western support for Ukraine? “I agree,” he said. “One ikea burning is something very minor, no more than a tactical signal.” But, I pressed, if Bardadim hadn’t returned to Vilnius to pick up the package to take to Riga, he might not have been caught, and then the ikea arson would never have been linked to Russia. So what good is it, I asked, if no one knows it was you?
Kaladinskas urged me to view the fire in the context of a larger series of attacks and mysterious accidents in Lithuania and the wider Baltic region: acts of vandalism, cyberattacks, surveillance of military sites, and arson in warehouses and factories—not to mention the packages mailed from Vilnius as part of the DHL plot. “Five, ten incidents like that, it starts to have a more strategic effect,” he said. Or perhaps, he added, it was merely a diversion. “Sometimes I think they just want to keep us engaged and busy, investigating all these various operations of very minor significance, when the really big things are happening behind our backs.”