Russia

Russia’s spy services have a shadowy new unit taking aim at the West with covert attacks across Europe and elsewhere, Western intelligence officials say.

Known as the Department of Special Tasks, it is based in the Russian military-intelligence headquarters, a sprawling glass-and-steel complex on the outskirts of Moscow known as the aquarium. Its operations, which haven’t been previously reported, have included attempted killings, sabotage and a plot to put incendiary devices on planes.

The department’s creation reflects Moscow’s wartime footing against the West, the officials said. It was set up in 2023 in response to Western support for Ukraine and includes veterans of some of Russia’s most daring clandestine operations in recent years, according to two European intelligence chiefs and other U.S., European and Russian security officials.

A modern-day Pavlik Morozov has informed on hundreds Russians who are accused of criticising the war in Ukraine

During the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union of the 1930s a boy named Pavel Morozov became a national hero for denouncing his father and then allegedly being killed in revenge by relatives.

Morozov, known as Pavlik, was said to have informed on his own father for selling state documents to “bandits and enemies of the Soviet state”. The boy’s deeply mythologised story was used to encourage other Soviet bloc children to inform on their parents.

ABOARD A RUSSIAN PRESIDENTIAL JET—The spy at the front of the cabin drew open the curtain.

Wearing a sand-colored jacket and brown shoes, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, the man had spent the past few hours organizing the final preparations for the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War. Now, as the pilots started the engines to take off for an airport in Turkey’s capital, he came out to look at the 16 prisoners he was escorting to freedom, a haul of Americans, Russians and Germans in their first hours fresh from jails and penal colonies.

Scanning the passengers, he locked his eyes squarely on one of those prisoners—me. He said nothing, staring in silence for nearly a minute. Then he turned and walked back to his curtained-off section of the presidential jet. I was left to wonder about this man at the helm of the exchange, who appeared to hold my fate in his hands.

Bashar al-Assad has been overthrown, fleeing Damascus after a rapid rebel advance. But the Syrian dictator is far from the only president likely to be despairing today, for Vladimir Putin is another big loser here.

For Putin, the collapse of the Syrian regime and removal of Assad from power poses two critical problems. Firstly, it represents a critical strategic loss. Secondly, it represents a stark decline in Russia’s global prestige.

I never use the word based, but if I did, I would use it to describe this clip of Tucker Carlson food shopping at a Russian supermarket, wow. pic.twitter.com/weuMOYpzYj

— The Rubber Duck ™ (@TheRubberDuck79) December 6, 2024

Taken in isolation, they could just about be explained away as coincidences – freak accidents, one-off attacks, unfortunate infrastructure failures. The DHL cargo plane that crashed on Monday as it approached Vilnius airport. The recent bomb scares that have hobbled London, from Euston Square and Gatwick Airport to the US Embassy. The drones spotted circling near US Air Force bases in the UK. The explosion at a weapons manufacturing facility in Wales in April.

When sexual aids spontaneously burst into flame, one does not automatically assume it to be the work of Vladimir Putin. However, that is the prospect now being considered by Western security officials, who believe that two electric massagers which ignited in logistics hubs in Germany and the UK back in July were in fact part of a wider Russian sabotage operation. The European erotic gadget inferno was, they suspect, a “practice run” aimed at ultimately placing similar incendiary devices aboard cargo or even passenger aircraft flying to the US and Canada.