Sarah Archer

Something very strange is happening across Europe. In the span of a single week, NATO countries have seen a remarkable series of incidents involving ammunition production, energy infrastructure, military facilities, and russian intelligence operations. Let me start with what we know. 🇵🇱 POLAND On 7 August, Polish security services detained a russian citizen, recruited by russian intelligence, whose task was to execute a man holding both American and Ukrainian citizenship – in Warsaw. Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced it yesterday. According to him, this is the first time someone acting on russian orders has tried to kill an American citizen on the territory of another NATO country. 🇩🇪 GERMANY On 6 August, a drone carrying explosives was found near a runway at Leipzig/Halle airport – next to a Ukrainian Antonov Airlines cargo aircraft. Two days later, two drones were spotted over the Bundeswehr base at Mechernich. Also not a rumor. 🇮🇹 ITALY A fire in the powder compression department at the KNDS Ammo Italy plant in Colleferro, southeast of Rome, was followed by a massive explosion. No one was killed. The plant produces 155 mm artillery ammunition supplied to Ukraine through European partners. 🇳🇱 NETHERLANDS Within a few hours at Europe’s largest port: a transformer fire, a major power failure, an emergency shutdown at the ExxonMobil refinery in Botlek, and then an explosion at the Gunvor Energy refinery and terminal that killed one worker and injured six. I wouldn’t be surprised if russia is responsible for all these “accidents”. I wrote about this problem two years ago. Back then, Europe was already experiencing an extraordinary wave of suspicious incidents: 🇱🇹 IKEA set on fire in Vilnius. 🇬🇧 An arson attack on a Ukraine-linked warehouse in London. 🇩🇪 Sabotage plots against military and industrial targets in Germany. 🇨🇿 Attempts to attack infrastructure in the Czech Republic. 🇪🇪 An attack on the car of Estonia’s interior minister. 🚆 Attempts to disrupt European railway systems. 📦 And later, incendiary devices sent through European logistics networks – including devices that detonated or ignited in Germany, Poland and Britain. At the time, people could argue these were isolated incidents. Today, we know much more. European investigators and courts have connected multiple sabotage operations directly to networks organized or coordinated by russian intelligence. The pattern was real. It was simply diagnosed late. That is the design. Hybrid war works by staying below the threshold at which any single incident forces a response. Every event, taken alone, is deniable. Only the sequence gives it away. So when another extraordinary cluster of explosions, fires, drones, power failures, and intelligence operations appears across Europe in one week, perhaps we should stop treating every incident as if it exists in a vacuum. Europe no longer has the luxury of automatically assuming accidents and coincidence. Russia is waging a hybrid war against Europe. Sabotage. Arson. Cyberattacks. Assassination plots. GPS interference. Attacks on logistics and critical infrastructure. These are not theoretical threats. They have already happened.