US intelligence discovered earlier this year that the Russian government planned to assassinate the chief executive of a powerful German arms manufacturer that has been producing artillery shells and military vehicles for Ukraine, according to five US and western officials familiar with the episode.
The plot was one of a series of Russian plans to assassinate defense industry executives across Europe who were supporting Ukraine’s war effort, these sources said. The plan to kill Armin Papperger, a white-haired goliath who has led the German manufacturing charge in support of Kyiv, was the most mature.
When the Americans learned of the effort, they informed Germany, whose security services were then able to protect Papperger and foil the plot. A high-level German government official confirmed that Berlin was warned about the plot by the US.
For more than six months, Russia has been carrying out a sabotage campaign across Europe, largely by proxy. It has recruited local amateurs for everything from arson attacks on warehouses linked to arms for Ukraine to petty acts of vandalism — all designed to stymie the flow of weapons from the West to Ukraine and blunt public support for Kyiv.
But the intelligence suggesting that Russia was willing to assassinate private citizens underlined to Western officials just how far Moscow was willing to go in a parallel shadow war it is waging across the west.
Papperger was an obvious target: His company, Rheinmetall, is the largest and most successful German manufacturer of the vital 155mm artillery shells that have become the make-or-break weapon in Ukraine’s grinding war of attrition. The company is opening an armored vehicle plant inside of Ukraine in the coming weeks, an effort that one source familiar with the intelligence said was deeply concerning to Russia. After a series of gains earlier this year, Moscow’s war effort has once again stalled amid redoubled Ukrainian defenses and punishing losses in personnel.
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This very much seems like a tit for tat. We send money, arms, ammunition, (soldiers?), to Ukraine while claiming we're non-combatants not at war, and Russia acts in similar diabolical ways. This is the new way war is waged in the modern era between superpowers.
ReplyDeleteRussia has waged a deliberate, premeditated and ruthless war of aggression against Ukraine. In doing so, it has serially violated international law by attacking civilians, mass murder, mass sexual violence, mass abduction of Ukrainian children in occupied territory and deporting them to remote parts of Russia to be raised as Russians. They have plundered cultural treasures from museums and private property. The catalogue of Putin's criminal barbarism is mind boggling.
ReplyDeleteEnough.
One side is flouting international law and engaging in a level of war crimes and atrocities not seen in Europe since the Second World War.
Let's not pretend there is some kind of moral equivalence.