The Scale of Russian Sabotage on European Critical Infrastructure

The resurgence of covert conflict across Europe has become one of the defining, if least openly acknowledged, features of the continent’s security environment since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. While the Kremlin’s conventional military strength has been tested and exposed on Ukraine’s battlefields, she has simultaneously intensified a parallel campaign of sabotage, espionage, cyber-intrusion and psychological disruption directed at European critical infrastructure. This hidden war is not merely ornamental theatre intended to unsettle European publics; it is a sustained, multi-domain effort to degrade the continent’s resilience, drive wedges between allies and manufacture a sense of pervasive vulnerability. Understanding the scale of this campaign requires a view that stretches across the physical, digital and informational domains, for it is precisely at their intersections that Russia has been seeking to probe Europe’s weaknesses.

The most visible manifestations of Russian sabotage have occurred in the physical world. Rail networks in Germany, Poland and the Baltic States have experienced suspicious outages, signalling failures and arson attacks that investigators increasingly link to Russian intelligence assets or to individuals acting under her guidance. These incidents often appear modest in scope—cut fibre cables, damaged relay cabinets, fires at depots—but their cumulative effect is troubling. Railways are vital not only for the movement of European commuters but also for the steady flow of matériel to Ukraine; interruptions provide both tactical advantage to Russia and strategic messaging to Europe. In Sweden and Finland, the sudden proliferation of drone sightings near energy facilities and ports has raised concerns of reconnaissance operations aimed at mapping vulnerabilities ahead of potential future action.

Undersea infrastructure has also been repeatedly targeted, reflecting its strategic importance and its inherent susceptibility to clandestine interference. The Balticconnector gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia suffered a major rupture in 2023; while China’s involvement via a passing vessel complicated early narratives, European intelligence ultimately assessed Russian responsibility as highly probable, given the incident’s geopolitical context and Moscow’s parallel interference patterns. Earlier damage to the fibre-optic cables and electricity interconnectors linking Svalbard to mainland Norway, as well as Norwegian gas pipelines in the North Sea, further strengthened the impression that Russia is systematically testing Europe’s ability to detect, attribute and respond to underwater threats. Europe’s seabed is laced with thousands of kilometres of cables and pipelines; defending them is a colossal task and Russia is acutely aware of this asymmetry.

Meanwhile, Europe’s energy infrastructure has emerged as a primary target. Saboteurs linked to Russian intelligence have been implicated in attacks on wind farms, storage facilities and electricity substations in Germany and the Czech Republic. In France and the Netherlands, suspicious fires at electricity distribution centres have prompted counter-intelligence investigations. These attacks are seldom spectacular, but they serve a strategic purpose: they reveal vulnerabilities, compel European states to disperse resources and generate public anxiety regarding the security of energy supplies at a time when the continent is already adjusting to the loss of cheap Russian gas. When an adversary can destroy a transformer with a simple accelerant and a timer, the cost-benefit calculus of defensive spending shifts unfavourably.

The cyber domain, however, is where the breadth of Russian sabotage becomes most apparent. Since 2022, Russia-aligned hacking groups, including state-sponsored actors and nominally independent organisations operating under Kremlin influence, have dramatically escalated attacks against European networks. Parliaments in Denmark, Sweden, Britain and Germany have all faced intrusions. Hospitals, tax authorities, transport operators and satellite service providers have been targeted. These attacks range from simple distributed denial-of-service inundations to sophisticated supply-chain penetrations intended to provide long-term access to sensitive systems. While Europe has improved its cybersecurity posture, it remains uneven, and Russia has skilfully exploited this patchwork. Hybrid attacks, combining cyber intrusion with physical sabotage or disinformation campaigns, have become increasingly common, suggesting a deliberate attempt to erode European cohesion and response capacity.

Disinformation forms the final, but essential, layer of Russia’s sabotage strategy. By amplifying the effects of physical and cyber incidents, Russia seeks to create an atmosphere of pervasive crisis and institutional incompetence. A minor outage at a power station becomes, through coordinated social media campaigns and bot networks, evidence of governmental mismanagement or NATO duplicity. The aim is not necessarily to convince but to confuse, overwhelming European societies with a fog of competing narratives. This technique has significant implications for Europe’s political stability, especially in states where far-right or Eurosceptic parties are already receptive to anti-Ukrainian or anti-American messaging. It is impossible to divorce the physical acts of sabotage from the accompanying psychological operations; both serve the same strategic objective of undermining Europe’s resolve.

When examined collectively, these domains reveal a pattern of Russian sabotage that is both broad and deliberate. It is not a random collection of mischief but a multi-layered campaign designed to stress-test Europe’s resilience, probe its defences and prepare the ground for potential escalation. The strategic logic is clear. Russia cannot defeat NATO militarily, nor can she coerce Europe into abandoning Ukraine through diplomacy alone. Instead she must weaken the sinews of European solidarity by attacking the infrastructure upon which that solidarity depends. Railways, pipelines, cables, servers, substations and information networks are the circulatory system of modern society; disrupt them, and confidence erodes. Erode confidence, and political will falters.

Europe has begun to respond, albeit unevenly. The creation of NATO’s Undersea Infrastructure Coordination Cell, the strengthening of EU-level cybersecurity frameworks and the reinforcement of counter-intelligence capabilities across Scandinavia and Central Europe mark important steps. Yet the challenge remains immense. Europe’s infrastructure is vast and its vulnerabilities manifold. Defence requires not only investment in physical protection and cyber resilience but also a cultural shift towards anticipating hybrid threats as a permanent feature of the security environment. Above all it requires political unity, for Russian sabotage thrives in the spaces where European states hesitate or disagree.

The scale of Russian sabotage on European critical infrastructure is therefore best understood not in the magnitude of individual incidents but in their accumulated strategic effect. Each cut cable, corrupted server or manipulated narrative is a thread pulled from the fabric of European security. The Kremlin will continue to tug at these threads as long as the war in Ukraine persists and as long as she calculates that Europe’s reaction will be fragmented. The task for European leaders is to reinforce the structural integrity of their institutions and infrastructure before these threads unravel further.