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Germany was investigating possible Russian sabotage at two military bases where attempts were apparently made to contaminate drinking water, according to a senior legislator in Berlin.
Hackers with links to the Kremlin targeted a former US ambassador to Ukraine as part of a spree of attacks on Russian and foreign civil society targets, security researchers say.
Russia fights wave of drones as Ukraine claims troops advancing
Russia said its air defences downed 117 drones and four tactical missiles, one of the largest overnight attacks of the war, as Ukrainian forces claimed to be continuing advances on Russian territory.
The Defence Ministry in Moscow said its forces destroyed unmanned aerial vehicles over almost all regions bordering Ukraine as well as in the Nizhny Novgorod region to the east of the Russian capital. Regional Governor Gleb Nikitin said drones attacked the Kulebaksky district, which is home to a military airbase about 700km from the Ukrainian border.
The overnight operation was the biggest involving long-range drones and targeted four Russian airbases to undermine its military’s ability to use glide bombs, said a Ukrainian official with knowledge of the situation, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters. A Russian Su-34 fighter bomber was also shot down in the Kursk region, according to Ukraine’s General Staff.
Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi told President Volodymyr Zelensky that his forces had advanced by as much as 2km in Russia’s Kursk region on Wednesday, according to a post on Zelensky’s Telegram channel. Syrskyi said on Tuesday that Ukrainian troops controlled 74 villages and towns in the Kursk region.
The claims couldn’t be independently verified.
Read more: Zelensky vows ‘new steps’ amid advances near Russia’s Kursk
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders northeastern Ukraine and has been subject to raids and drone attacks, announced a state of emergency on Wednesday.
The wave of overnight attacks came as Russia continued to rush reinforcements to the Kursk border region, which neighbours Belgorod, to counter the Ukrainian incursion that was in its ninth day. Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Moscow-appointed governor of Sevastopol in occupied Crimea, confirmed that marines from its 810th brigade were redeployed to Kursk.
Zelensky’s office late on Tuesday posted a video of his meeting in Kyiv with Lithuanian Defence Minister Laurynas Kasčiūnas, who said Russia had moved some military units from its Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad in response to the Ukrainian intervention in Kursk, without giving further details.
Kasčiūnas said Lithuania would lobby other Ukrainian allies to lift restrictions barring Kyiv from using long-range weapons to strike targets in Russia.
With the Ukrainian incursion exposing manpower pressures facing Russia’s military, the Defence Ministry in Moscow posted a fresh video appeal on Wednesday for people to join the war that Putin started and which has now spread on to Russian territory, prompting at least 180,000 residents in the Kursk region to flee their homes.
Western estimates have put Russian military casualties at as high as 500,000 from an invasion that the Kremlin expected to take days and which is now in its third year.
Germany suspects Russian hand in sabotage at military bases
Germany was investigating possible Russian sabotage at two military bases where attempts were apparently made to contaminate drinking water, according to a senior legislator in Berlin.
The two facilities allegedly targeted are a Bundeswehr base at Cologne-Wahn and a Nato airfield in nearby Geilenkirchen. Ulrich Fonrobert, a spokesperson for the German military, said a hole had been cut in the fence around the Cologne base overnight though the person or people responsible had not been located.
A warning system had indicated “abnormal values” in water quality, suggesting the water system was being targeted, Fonrobert told reporters on Wednesday.
Donny Demmers, Nato spokesperson at Geilenkirchen, said a suspect tried to get access to the facility on Tuesday evening, but security guards thwarted the attempt.
“Because we know what happened in Cologne, we checked our water facilities. They weren’t accessed by any intruders,” he added.
Marcus Faber, the chairman of the defence committee in the lower house of parliament in Berlin, told Bloomberg that “the suspicion of sabotage is firming up” at the Cologne site, which is a hub for the aircraft used by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his cabinet.
“Further investigations will show whether my initial suspicions are confirmed that Russia is behind this,” Faber said, adding that committee members were being continually updated on the probe.
A spokesman for the Russian government didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Read more about Russian hybrid warfare:
- Allies foil Russian plot against German arms company chief
- Germany arrests two alleged Russian spies planning sabotage
- Russian sabotage, spying and intimidation spreading in Europe
Konstantin von Notz, the chairperson of the parliamentary committee that oversees Germany’s intelligence services, reiterated a warning about an intensified hybrid war being waged by Russia following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Germany is the second-biggest military and financial backer of the government in Kyiv after the US.
Russian hackers targeted former US ambassador in spy effort
Hackers with links to the Kremlin targeted a former US ambassador to Ukraine as part of a spree of attacks on Russian and foreign civil society targets, security researchers say.
Beginning in February, attackers attempted to steal passwords from former officials and academics in the US and prominent exiled Russian opposition figures and media organisations that may have been selected due to their networks among politically sensitive communities, according to reports published on Wednesday by civil society groups including Access Now and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
In one case, the researchers found, the hackers tried to trick Steven Pifer, who served as US ambassador to Ukraine between 1998 and 2000, into handing over his password. The hackers pretended to be another former US ambassador who was known to Pifer to win his trust and lure him into entering his credentials on a malicious website. It wasn’t immediately clear whether attackers successfully infiltrated Pifer’s email account.
Pifer, who is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, could not be reached for comment.
The attackers are part of a group known as Cold River, researchers concluded after analysing malicious files the hackers had sent victims. Western governments and cybersecurity companies have previously linked Cold River to Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB.
The US and UK governments in December accused the Cold River group of involvement in a wide range of cyber-espionage campaigns. British officials said the same attackers had hacked legislators, stolen and leaked trade documents, and targeted universities, journalists and non-government organisations.
Representatives for the FSB and Russia’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Ukrainian suspected of Nord Stream involvement flees Poland
A Ukrainian citizen suspected by German authorities of involvement in the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline fled Poland after a European arrest warrant was issued, the top Polish prosecutor said.
The National Public Prosecutor’s office confirmed a media report that it received the warrant from Germany in June and pursued the suspect, identified as Volodymyr Z, but that he had fled to Ukraine last month.
The suspect “was not detained because at the beginning of July this year, he left Polish territory and crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border”, a spokesperson for the prosecutor, Anna Adamiak, wrote in an e-mailed response to a Bloomberg query.
The suspect had been identified by Germany’s federal prosecutor as a skilled diver suspected of being involved with the explosion that destroyed part of the natural gas link between Russia and Germany, according to an investigative report by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, broadcaster ARD and Die Zeit weekly.
The German prosecutors identified a Ukrainian man and woman who were also believed to be part of a five-member crew suspected of launching the attack from a sailing vessel, the Andromeda, though no arrest warrant had been issued for them, according to the report.
After an investigation into the blasts, Danish authorities concluded in February that there was “deliberate sabotage of the gas pipelines”, but found no “sufficient grounds to pursue a criminal case”.
The undersea link to Germany via the Baltic Sea was the main route for Russian pipeline gas flows before the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The explosions damaged both channels of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline as well as one of two for Nord Stream 2 in the waters near the island of Bornholm in eastern Denmark.
Russia’s bigger shadow fleet helps it beat oil sanctions
Russia’s efforts to bolster its so-called shadow fleet of oil tankers in the first half of this year helped to offset the impact of Western sanctions, according to the KSE Institute.
Some 74 new vessels started carrying Russian crude in the period, having not done so last year, the institute said in a report. That’s more than the 49 tankers that have been sanctioned. The additional ships help to explain why discounts for Russian oil haven’t been widening, it said.
The KSE Institute is part of the Kyiv School of Economics and a supporter of tough sanctions on Moscow.
Russia assembled a vast fleet of ships to help carry its oil to customers in the wake of sanctions imposed following its invasion of Ukraine. The US, UK and European Union have variously sanctioned some vessels within that fleet in recent months, while the global shipping watchdog has also voiced concern about its growth.
“Altogether, the shadow fleet’s potential deadweight tonnage has remained largely unchanged,” the institute said. “The absence of capacity constraints explains why the discount on Russian oil prices has not risen in recent months and export earnings have been robust.” DM
