For years, Allan Hantsom was a fixture in Estonia’s tight-knit pro-Russian political movement. He belongs to a political party sympathetic to Russia’s war in Ukraine, he frequently railed against the United States and NATO on social media, and he contributed to a Kremlin-sponsored propaganda outlet.
On Thursday, Estonian authorities went public with charges that Mr. Hantsom, 47, was also working on behalf of Russia’s military intelligence service, the G.R.U. Mr. Hantsom, they revealed, was convicted of organizing several acts of vandalism in Estonia at the Russian spy agency’s behest, starting in October, 2023.
While the actions were mostly small-bore, they fit a pattern of sabotage operations — some more sinister than others — that Western officials say Russian operatives and their proxies have been carrying out with increasing frequency throughout Europe in recent years.
Last year, people recruited by Mr. Hantsom shattered the windows of cars belonging to Estonia’s interior minister and the editor of an Estonian news outlet, prosecutors said, and doused several World War II monuments with paint.
These acts appeared intended mainly to annoy and unnerve, while perhaps tying up the resources of Estonia’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Russian agents have also been linked to antisemitic graffiti that has appeared on walls in France. And in several countries across Europe, mysterious fires have broken out not just in factories manufacturing arms for Ukraine, but on buses and at shopping malls, incidents that some officials in those countries have attributed to Russian sabotage.
More serious were the incendiary devices that ignited in two DHL shipping plants over the summer, part of what officials said was a test run of a plot to put such devices aboard cargo planes. Russian officials have denied the country’s involvement in sabotage and acts of vandalism.
The episodes have unnerved Western officials, who fret that low-level acts of vandalism could be a preview of more damaging and perhaps deadly operations to come. When a Russian helicopter pilot who had defected to Ukraine was killed in Spain in February, many officials and experts took it as a clear indication that despite efforts to erode Russian intelligence capabilities in Europe, the Kremlin’s agents remain active and able.
“The scale of Russia’s attempts to sow discord across Europe and the use of untrained criminals mean that it is very probable that at some point there may be an attack where someone is killed or where a civilian is seriously harmed,” a spokesperson for Estonia’s domestic intelligence service said in a statement in October.
Russia’s actions have prompted law enforcement and intelligence services, after years of inaction, to aggressively pursue cases involving potential Russian espionage and sabotage, officials and experts said.
Mr. Hantsom was arrested a year ago, convicted this spring of organizing the vandalism, and sentenced to six and a half years in prison. The Estonian authorities did not announce the charges and conviction until Thursday, a delay they did not explain.
He was among 11 people identified by Estonian prosecutors as involved in G.R.U. sabotage operations. An Estonian court convicted seven of them. Two others are at large and believed to be in Russia, Estonia’s State prosecutor, Triinu Olev-Aasa, said in a statement.
The authorities did not say whether Mr. Hantsom had direct contact with the G.R.U. or how he communicated with them. Mr. Hantsom could not immediately be reached for comment.
Intelligence experts and officials say that the Russian intelligence services have increasingly chosen to rely on proxies, sometimes recruited through social media, to carry out operations. This gives the Kremlin a degree of deniability, but also reflects the limitations facing Russian spies these days. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European countries expelled dozens of suspected Russian intelligence officers and have prevented others from replacing them.
Estonian authorities said that Mr. Hantsom organized the vandalism attacks with the help of the two people who are believed to now be in Russia. Those who actually damaged the vehicles belonging to the minister and the editor did not seem to have been aware whom the vehicles belonged to or who had hired them to carry out the job, Ms. Olev-Aasa said in her statement. They were promised money in exchange for their efforts, but do not seem to have been paid, she said.
“The chain of people organizing and committing the attacks was long, and not all of the participants knew the actual purpose of the criminal offense,” she said.
Joakim Paasikivi, a retired lieutenant-colonel who served in Sweden’s military intelligence service, said in an interview that while much of the Russian intelligence activity in Europe amounts to what he called “nuisance sabotage,” it was important to take the threat seriously.
“We should recognize that Russia says that they are at war with NATO and the West, and we have to take them at their word,” he said.
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Publish date : 2024-12-05 15:11:00
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