Wave of Russian sabotage attacks exposes counter-intelligence gaps on Nato’s eastern flank

This story is a part of the weekly newsletter about security, defence, and tech in the eastern flank of Nato, How we cee it. The last days of August kept Polish firefighters in Skarżysko and Lublin busy. Sites belonging to a drone manufacturer and other defence companies were set aflame. A couple of years ago, this incident would have come as a big surprise. But as Russia heats up its hybrid campaign against Nato countries, the incident in Poland is just one in a series of such events. Just last week, a site belonging to a Ukrainian-founded drone manufacturer was nearly set on fire, had the Slovak police not foiled the attempt. Although the incident was not clearly attributed to Russia, there has been another one that was. On Tuesday, Germany officially blamed Russia for the drones with explosive payloads that disrupted and could potentially have caused a serious accident at Leipzig airport. Together with the recent fires at the Estonian company Milrem Robotics, the Russian cruise missile in Poland, a recent drone crash in Moldova, and countless other “accidents,” a pattern emerges: a rising number of sabotage operations across central and eastern Europe, and beyond. "There has clearly been a horizontal escalation, a broadening of the ways and methods, as well as of the frequency of attacks," says Estonian security expert Meelis Oidsalu. Anxiety about what could come next has also grown following signals from US intelligence, suggesting there could be some kind of provocation from Russia in the near future. This could be either a more serious hybrid attack and sabotage war, or, in the longer term, a minor incursion onto Nato territory, Oidsalu explains. This fear was amplified further during CIA chief John Ratcliffe's recent visit to Moscow. Full protection against sabotage is impossible. But there are solutions Illustrative image showing fragments of Russian drones at a research institute in Kyiv. Source: Tomáš Hrivňák. Probably the most serious hybrid attack Poland has experienced took place in November 2025, when explosives were detonated on a railway between Lublin and Warsaw. This is the most important railway route connecting central Poland with Ukraine. There is no telling what carnage the bomb might have caused, had it exploded under a moving train.