Russian espionage attacks in Northern Norway... and elsewhere in Europe
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Then, in early 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The conversations inside Roaldsnes’s office, in Kirkenes, took on an existential tone, because Vladimir Putin has shown himself to be willing to risk it all over relatively small, strategically important areas. The Article 5 policy of collective defense states that an attack on one nato member is an attack on all. But would the United States engage in thermonuclear war over a sparsely populated swath of Arctic Norway?
Countries throughout Europe now acknowledge that their people and infrastructure are under ceaseless attack. Yet each incident is, by itself, below the threshold that would require a military response or trigger Article 5. In recent months, agents of Russian intelligence are believed to have assassinated a defector in Spain, planted explosives near a pipeline in Germany, carried out arson attacks all over the Continent, and sabotaged subsea cables and rail lines. A Russian operative injured himself in Paris while preparing explosives for a terrorist attack on a hardware store, and U.S. intelligence discovered a Russian plot to assassinate the C.E.O. of one of Europe’s largest arms manufacturers. Poland’s interior minister said, “We are facing a foreign state that is conducting hostile and—in military parlance—kinetic action on Polish territory.” Every European country that borders Russia is preparing for a wider war in the event of a Russian victory in Ukraine. Poland and the Baltics are digging trenches at their borders and fortifying them, often with antitank obstacles known as “dragon’s teeth.” Finland cast aside seventy years of neutrality and nonalignment to join nato; Sweden cast aside two hundred.
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